Shloka 6
Virtuous Company — Chanakya Niti
न विश्वसेत्कुमित्रे च मित्रे चापि न विश्वसेत् ।
कदाचित्कुपितं मित्रं सर्वं गुह्यं प्रकाशयेत् ॥
na viśvaset kumitre ca mitre cāpi na viśvaset |
kadācit kupitaṃ mitraṃ sarvaṃ guhyaṃ prakāśayet ||
Trust not a bad friend, and even a friend trust not completely; for one day, angered, a friend may reveal every secret.
FAQs
Within the broader nītiśāstra milieu, the verse reflects a political-ethical preoccupation with secrecy (guhya) in environments where alliances and personal loyalties could be unstable. Such aphorisms are commonly situated in courtly and administrative settings of early Indian political thought, where information control and the risks of interpersonal rupture are treated as recurrent concerns.
Trust (viśvāsa) is presented as strategically precarious: the category of “friend” (mitra) is not treated as permanently reliable, and “false friend” (kumitra) functions as an explicit warning category. The underlying assumption described by the verse is that emotional change—specifically anger (kopa)—can convert a relationship into a channel for disclosure of confidential knowledge.
The rhetoric relies on parallel negation—“not trust the bad friend, and even not trust the friend”—to intensify the claim. The term kumitra is a compound that marks a deviation from the normative mitra, and the modal force of prakāśayet (“might reveal”) frames disclosure as a plausible contingency rather than a guaranteed outcome, aligning the verse with probabilistic caution typical of aphoristic political literature.