BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 3 Political Science 2 2025-26 - ATKT 60/40 Question Paper with Solutions

Legitimacy is the quality that makes power rightful, so that those subject to it accept the right to command and obey willingly rather than from fear. It converts naked power into authority. Max Weber defined it as the belief of the governed in the rightfulness of the rule.

Two sources of legitimacy, following Weber's three grounds:

1. Tradition: authority is accepted because it rests on immemorial custom and hereditary succession, as with a monarchy.
2. Legal-rational rules: authority is accepted because it was acquired and is exercised according to a constitution and law, which in a modern democracy means a free and fair election.

The third of Weber's grounds is charisma, the extraordinary personal qualities of a leader.

Utilitarianism is the doctrine, founded by Jeremy Bentham (1748 to 1832) and developed by J.S. Mill, that the rightness of any action, law or institution is measured solely by its consequences, and specifically by whether it produces the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Its propositions are that pleasure is the only good and pain the only evil; that "nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure"; that pleasures can be measured by the felicific calculus of intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity and extent; and that in the reckoning each is to count for one and nobody for more than one.

Bentham rejected natural rights as "nonsense upon stilts": rights are created by law, and law is justified by utility alone.

An unjust law is a law that is formally valid, having been made by the competent authority in the prescribed manner, but which violates morality, natural justice, human dignity or fundamental rights, and therefore has no claim on the conscience of those subject to it.

St Augustine said that an unjust law is no law at all, and Aquinas developed this into the position that a law contrary to the divine or natural law does not bind in conscience.

Martin Luther King Jr, in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, gave the most usable test: a just law uplifts human personality, an unjust law degrades it; and a law is unjust when a majority imposes on a minority a rule that it does not make binding on itself.

The preventive theory, also called the theory of incapacitation or disablement, holds that the object of punishment is to prevent the offender from repeating the offence by physically disabling him from committing it again. Its aim is not to frighten others, nor to reform the criminal, but simply to put him out of circulation.

Two features:

1. It disables rather than deters or reforms. The offender is removed from the situation in which he can offend, by imprisonment, and in the extreme by capital punishment, which prevents repetition absolutely.
2. It looks to the offender's future conduct alone, and is preventive rather than punitive in spirit. It is applied through measures such as imprisonment, cancellation of a driving licence, disqualification from holding office or practising a profession, externment, forfeiture of a trade licence, and preventive detention.

Two features:

1. The word SOCIALIST in the Preamble, inserted by the 42nd Amendment, 1976, declaring India a "Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic", together with the Preamble's promise of social and economic justice and equality of status and opportunity.
2. The socialist Directive Principles in Part IV, particularly Article 39(b) and (c), which require that the ownership and control of material resources be distributed to subserve the common good and that the economic system shall not result in the concentration of wealth to the common detriment.

Other features that would earn the marks equally: Article 38 (a social order for the welfare of the people, minimising inequalities in income and status); Article 41 (right to work, education and public assistance); Article 43 (living wage); Article 43A (workers' participation in management); the abolition of untouchability under Article 17; and the 44th Amendment, 1978, which removed the right to property from the Fundamental Rights and made it a constitutional right under Article 300A.

Indian examples: FICCI, CII and ASSOCHAM (business); INTUC, AITUC and BMS (labour); the Bar Council of India and the Indian Medical Association (professional); and farmers' organisations.

For this to work the opinion must be enlightened and informed, which requires education, a free press and freedom of speech under Article 19(1)(a).

The theory. The deterrent theory holds that the purpose of punishment is to prevent future crime by creating fear. The offender is punished not so much for what he has done as to make an example of him, so that he and others are frightened out of committing the offence. Its motto is that men are punished not because they have sinned, but so that others may not sin.

Its philosophical basis is utilitarian. Jeremy Bentham held that man is governed by pain and pleasure and calculates before he acts, so punishment must add enough pain to outweigh the profit expected from the crime. Crime must never pay. Beccaria, in On Crimes and Punishments (1764), argued that it is the certainty rather than the severity of punishment that deters.

Its two forms:

1. Specific or individual deterrence, aimed at the offender himself so that he does not repeat the offence.
2. General deterrence, aimed at the public at large, who are meant to learn from his punishment.

Its features:

Demerits:

1. It uses the offender as a means to the good of others, punishing him for the benefit of the audience, which offends human dignity. This is Kant's objection.
2. It tends towards excessive severity, and severity does not deter in proportion; savage penalties can make juries reluctant to convict at all.
3. It fails against crimes of passion, committed without calculation, and against hardened and habitual criminals, who are brutalised rather than frightened.
4. It ignores the causes of crime, poverty, upbringing, addiction and circumstance, and makes no attempt to reform, so the released prisoner re-offends.
5. Taken to its logical end it could justify punishing an innocent person, if the public believed him guilty and the example served.

In India the deterrent element appears in the sentencing policy for grave offences, in the retention of the death penalty for the "rarest of rare" case under Bachan Singh v State of Punjab (1980), and in the enhanced punishments introduced for serious sexual offences after 2013 and 2018.

3. Satyagraha, holding firmly to truth. Gandhi's technique of resistance: non-violent, open, and accepting the legal penalty, because the aim is to convert the opponent, not to defeat him. Its forms are non-cooperation, civil disobedience, fasting, hartal, picketing and hijrat. Distinguish it from passive resistance, which Gandhi said is a weapon of the weak; satyagraha is a weapon of the strong.
4. Purity of means. Means and ends are inseparable: the means are the seed and the end the tree. An immoral means can never produce a moral end, which is a direct denial of Machiavelli's maxim.
5. Sarvodaya, the welfare of all. The good of the individual is contained in the good of all, and the test of any policy is Gandhi's talisman: will it help the poorest and weakest person you have seen?
6. Trusteeship. The rich are not to be dispossessed but persuaded to hold their wealth as trustees for society, taking what they reasonably need and administering the rest for the common good. It is Gandhi's alternative both to capitalism and to class war.

Its influence on the Indian Constitution: Article 40 (village panchayats), given effect by the 73rd and 74th Amendments, 1992; Article 17 (abolition of untouchability); Article 43 (cottage industries); Article 46 (weaker sections); and Article 47 (nutrition, public health and prohibition).

3. Influence and persuasion. Shaping conduct by argument, advice, example and appeal, without sanctions. Government uses it through public campaigns, official information and appeals to patriotism or civic duty; it is the method of religious leaders, journalists and teachers.
4. Manipulation. Securing compliance by controlling what people know and believe, without their being aware that they are being directed: propaganda, censorship, selective release of information, and management of the media. It is distinguished from persuasion because the person acted upon does not know the real ground of his decision.
5. Reward and inducement. Offering benefits for compliance: subsidies, contracts, licences, jobs, honours and welfare payments. This is sometimes called utilitarian power in Etzioni's classification, and it is the ordinary method of economic policy.
6. Manufacture of consent through ideology. Securing acceptance by spreading a set of beliefs that makes the existing order appear natural and just. Gramsci called this hegemony, and Marx described it as ideology or false consciousness, the superstructure that justifies the base.

Political obligation is the duty of the citizen to obey the state and its laws. The social contract theory grounds that duty in an agreement: men in a pre-political condition, the state of nature, agreed to leave it and to set up political authority, and the obligation to obey is the ordinary moral obligation to keep a promise.

The theory replaced the divine right explanation and made the state a human, artificial institution created by consent for human purposes. Its three great exponents differ on the state of nature, and therefore on how much obedience is owed.

Thomas Hobbes (1588 to 1679), Leviathan, 1651

1. State of nature: a war of every man against every man, with no law, no justice, no property and no industry, in which the life of man is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". Man is selfish, competitive, mistrustful and driven by the fear of violent death.
2. The contract: a covenant among the subjects themselves, each surrendering his right of self-government to a common power on condition that all others do the same. The sovereign is not a party to it.

3. The contract: in two stages, a pactum unionis forming civil society and a pactum subjectionis by which the community entrusts power to a government.
4. Nature of the surrender: partial and conditional. Only the executive power of the law of nature, that is the right to punish and to judge in one's own cause, is given up. Natural rights are retained.
5. Political obligation: limited and conditional, resting on consent, express for the founders and tacit for those who remain and enjoy the benefits. Government holds power on trust.
6. Right of resistance: if the government breaks the trust, power reverts to the people, who may resist and set up a new government.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 to 1778), The Social Contract, 1762

1. State of nature: man is a noble savage, innocent, free, self-sufficient and happy. It is society, and particularly private property, that corrupts him. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."
2. The contract: each individual surrenders himself wholly and equally to the whole community, so that "each, giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody". What emerges is the general will.

4. It cannot bind later generations, who made no agreement.
5. The three writers derive contradictory conclusions, absolutism, limited government and popular sovereignty, from the same device, which suggests the conclusion is doing the work and the contract is decoration.

Its value

Despite the criticism, the theory produced the modern political vocabulary: consent, popular sovereignty, natural rights, limited government and the right of revolution. Its practical monuments are the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and through them the Fundamental Rights in Part III of the Indian Constitution and the opening words of its Preamble, "We, the people of India".

(1) The concept: LIBERALISM

The facts describe liberalism. The markers are decisive: an emphasis on individual freedom, limited government intervention, and an evolution from that starting point to include state welfare measures, which is precisely the movement from classical to modern liberalism.

Liberalism, from the Latin liber meaning free, is the doctrine that the individual is the central fact of political life, that he possesses rights the state did not confer, and that government exists to serve him and must be limited accordingly. Its founders are John Locke and Adam Smith, and its later developers J.S. Mill, T.H. Green and Harold Laski.

Two of its features, explained:

At the age of 73, he became the oldest person to accede to the British throne, UK's King Charles could be giving up the throne early in favour of his eldest son Prince William, while William and his wife, Kate Middleton, are still young. (1) Name the type of authority the king has as prescribed by Max Weber.

(2) Write any three features of this type of authority.

2. Obedience is owed to the person, not to an office defined by rules. Loyalty attaches to the ruler himself, and the relationship is personal rather than contractual. Officials are personal retainers, chosen for loyalty and kinship rather than recruited on merit through examination, and there is no separation between the ruler's private household and the public administration.
3. The ruler is bound by custom and precedent rather than by enacted law. There is no written constitution defining his competence; what limits him is the body of tradition, which he may interpret but may not openly defy. Within that framework his discretion is wide, but an innovation that contradicts custom attacks the very source of his authority.

Two further features that would earn the marks equally: it is inherently conservative, since the reason for doing anything is that it has always been done; and it is legitimated by the sanctity of the past, so that age itself is the argument.

Weber's sub-types are patriarchalism, patrimonialism and feudalism. Other examples are tribal chieftainship, the caste-sanctioned village elder, and the Pope's authority within the Church.

1. Punishment is individualised, and fitted to the offender rather than to the offence. Two people convicted of the same act may receive quite different responses, because the question asked is not "what does this crime deserve?" but "what does this person need in order not to do it again?" This requires a pre-sentence report on the offender's background, character and circumstances, and it explains why probation officers and social workers are part of a reformative system.
2. It is corrective rather than punitive, and prefers alternatives to imprisonment. The methods are education, vocational training, work, counselling and treatment, delivered through probation, parole, community service, open prisons, admonition and release on good behaviour. Prison is avoided where possible because it is itself criminogenic: it removes the offender from lawful society and places him among hardened criminals, so a first offender may emerge worse than he entered.

A third feature worth naming: the theory's measure of success is recidivism, whether the offender returns, and not the severity of the sentence.

(2) Two merits of the theory

Two further merits available: it is particularly effective for juveniles and first offenders, where the chance of reform is highest; and it is cheaper over time, since a reformed offender stops consuming police, court and prison resources.

1. A three-tier structure of panchayats, at village, intermediate and district level, compulsory for every State with a population above twenty lakhs (Article 243B). Municipalities are of three kinds: the Nagar Panchayat for a transitional area, the Municipal Council for a smaller urban area, and the Municipal Corporation for a larger one (Article 243Q).
2. The Gram Sabha (Article 243A): a body consisting of all the registered voters of a village, which is the foundation of the system and the nearest thing in India to direct democracy.
3. Compulsory direct elections every five years (Articles 243C, 243E, 243R and 243U). A body may be dissolved earlier, but a fresh election must be completed within six months, which removed the power of a State to keep local bodies suspended indefinitely.
4. Mandatory reservation (Articles 243D and 243T): seats reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in proportion to their population, and not less than one-third of all seats for women, including one-third of the seats reserved for SCs and STs. Reservation applies to the offices of chairperson as well, and reserved seats are rotated. States may also reserve seats for backward classes.

(2) Participatory Democracy

Participatory democracy is a form of democracy in which citizens take a direct and continuing part in the making of decisions that affect them, rather than confining their role to choosing representatives once every few years. It lies between direct democracy, where the people decide everything themselves, and representative democracy, where they merely elect those who decide.

Its features:

1. Continuous involvement, not participation limited to election day.
2. Decision-making at the level closest to the people, which requires decentralisation.
3. Deliberation: decisions are reached through public discussion in which citizens take part.
4. Transparency and accountability, since a citizen cannot participate in what he is not permitted to know.
5. It treats participation as educative: taking part in public decisions develops civic capacity, a claim made by Rousseau, J.S. Mill and, in the twentieth century, Carole Pateman.

3. Harold Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan: power is participation in the making of decisions.
4. Bertrand Russell: power is the production of intended effects, and it is to political science what energy is to physics.

Why power is a central concept in political science

1. It is the subject matter of the discipline. The realist school, led by Hans Morgenthau and Harold Lasswell, argued that political science is the study of power: Lasswell defined politics as "who gets what, when, how", and Morgenthau held that international politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. On this view power is to political science what value is to economics.
2. It explains the state itself. What distinguishes the state from every other association is its monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a territory, which is Weber's definition. Sovereignty, the state's defining attribute, is a statement about power.
3. It explains political behaviour. Parties, elections, pressure groups, lobbying, coalitions, revolutions and coups are all attempts to acquire, retain, share or resist power. Remove the concept and none of these has an explanation.

Forms and bases of power

Forms: political, economic, military, ideological and social power.

Bases, following French and Raven: coercive (the threat of penalty), reward, legitimate (the recognised right, which is authority), expert (specialised knowledge) and referent (personal admiration). Etzioni's simpler grouping is coercive, remunerative and normative.

Power and Authority compared

The relation between them

1. Authority is a species of power, namely legitimate power. All authority is power; not all power is authority.
2. Authority without power is empty: a government in exile has the right to be obeyed and no ability to secure it.
3. Power without authority is unstable: it must keep paying the cost of coercion and can never rely on obedience unobserved. That is why usurpers seek referendums, constitutions and elections; they are buying legitimacy.
4. The process converting the second into the first is legitimation; the reverse process is a crisis of legitimacy.

For full marks, cover: the labour theory of value, labour power as a commodity, necessary and surplus labour with a worked illustration, the rate of exploitation, constant and variable capital, absolute and relative surplus value, and the consequences Marx draws; then class, the criterion of class division, the classes at each historical stage, the mechanism of class struggle, class consciousness, and the revolution; then a critical evaluation of both.

Part 1: Surplus Value

Surplus value is Marx's account of the precise mechanism by which the worker is exploited under capitalism, set out in Das Kapital (1867). It is the difference between the value a worker creates and the value he is paid.

2. The remaining four hours are surplus labour, and the value created in them is surplus value, appropriated by the capitalist and distributed as profit, interest and rent.

The transaction is formally fair, since the worker is paid the full value of the commodity he sold, his labour power. Exploitation is therefore not cheating but a feature of the system, which is why Marx thought moral appeals to employers were useless.

Step 4: the rate of exploitation is the ratio of surplus labour to necessary labour: in the example four to four, a rate of 100 per cent.

Step 5: constant and variable capital. Capital laid out on machinery and materials is constant capital, because it creates no new value. Capital laid out on wages is variable capital, because it alone produces a surplus.

Step 6: absolute and relative surplus value. The capitalist increases the surplus in two ways: by lengthening the working day or intensifying work, which yields absolute surplus value, and by raising productivity so that necessary labour occupies a smaller part of the day, which yields relative surplus value.

4. Capitalism: bourgeoisie and proletariat.
5. Socialism and communism: classes progressively disappear.

Marx also recognised intermediate groups: the petty bourgeoisie of small traders and artisans, who are squeezed out and driven into the proletariat, and the lumpenproletariat, the unorganised poor, whom he regarded as politically unreliable.

Why the struggle is inevitable. The interests of the two classes are irreconcilable, because the profit of the one is by definition the unpaid labour of the other. There is no rate of wages that abolishes the surplus, so the conflict cannot be settled by negotiation within the system.

From class in itself to class for itself. A class that merely shares a position is a "class in itself". It becomes a "class for itself" when it acquires class consciousness, the recognition of a common interest and a common enemy. Capitalism, Marx argued, produces that consciousness itself, by gathering workers into factories and cities where they can organise, and by reducing them to a common condition. Against it stands the ruling ideology, the false consciousness propagated through law, religion, education and the press.

1. The labour theory of value is not accepted by modern economics, which holds that value depends on utility and scarcity as well as labour. If the premise fails, the derivation fails with it.
2. It denies any productive contribution to capital, enterprise, risk-bearing and management, treating all return to them as theft, which will not explain why some firms prosper and others fail with the same labour.
3. It cannot explain the price of goods embodying little labour, such as land, antiques or a work of art. This is the "transformation problem", the difficulty of deriving prices from values, which Marxist economists have debated ever since.
4. Real wages rose in industrial countries instead of falling to subsistence, so the prediction of increasing misery failed, in part because of the unions and legislation Marx's own analysis inspired.

Criticisms of class struggle.

1. It is monocausal. Religion, nationalism, language, race and, in India, caste have moved history at least as powerfully as class. The two world wars were not class wars, and Indian politics is not primarily class politics.

Conclusion. Marxism has survived better as a method of criticism than as a programme of government. Its questions, who owns what, in whose interest does the law operate, who bears the cost of a given arrangement, remain indispensable even where its answers have been abandoned. India's own response was neither revolution nor laissez faire but democratic socialism: the word socialist in the Preamble by the 42nd Amendment, 1976, the Directive Principles in Articles 38 and 39 aimed at preventing the concentration of wealth, land reform legislation, and the removal of property from the Fundamental Rights by the 44th Amendment, 1978, all pursued by law and consent rather than by class war.

1. Democratic backsliding and elected authoritarianism. The characteristic danger of this century is not the coup but the incremental erosion of democracy by elected governments: weakening the courts, capturing the electoral machinery, pressuring the media and marginalising the opposition, each step formally lawful. Democracies now decay from within rather than being overthrown from outside.
2. Money in politics. The rising cost of elections makes politics dependent on those who can finance it, and opaque funding hides who has bought influence. In India the electoral bonds scheme was struck down as unconstitutional in Association for Democratic Reforms v Union of India (2024) for violating the voter's right to information under Article 19(1)(a).
3. Criminalisation of politics. A large share of legislators facing serious criminal charges, addressed by the courts through disclosure in Union of India v Association for Democratic Reforms (2002) and disqualification on conviction in Lily Thomas v Union of India (2013), but limited by the slowness of trials.

8. Weakening of legislatures. Fewer sitting days, bills passed with little debate, the use of the money bill route to bypass a second chamber, growing reliance on delegated legislation and ordinances, and the decline of committee scrutiny.
9. Technology and surveillance. State capacity to monitor citizens has grown faster than the law regulating it, which chills dissent. India's answer has been the recognition of privacy as a fundamental right in K.S. Puttaswamy v Union of India (2017) and, subsequently, data protection legislation.
10. Global pressures: transnational corporations and capital flows that no single electorate controls, climate change, pandemics and migration, all of which require decisions at a level where democratic accountability is weakest.
11. Declining trust and civic disengagement, especially among the young in older democracies, and the perception that voting changes little.

6. Charismatic regional leadership, and in Tamil Nadu the distinctive role of cinema.
7. Federalism itself, since State governments hold real power and are worth winning.

Their positive role:

1. They give voice to regional aspirations that national parties, organised around national issues, tend to overlook.
2. They strengthen federalism, resisting centralisation and bargaining for State autonomy, resources and a fair share of central taxes.
3. They have deepened democracy socially, bringing previously excluded castes and communities into power, which is one of the most significant democratic developments in independent India.
4. They check the concentration of power at the Centre, particularly during the coalition era from 1989 to 2014, when national policy required their consent.
5. They provide accountability and an alternative in States where one national party would otherwise be unopposed.
6. They raise local issues, agriculture, irrigation, language, employment, which national campaigns neglect.

Conclusion

Regional parties are best judged as a consequence of India's diversity rather than a defect in its politics. A country of this size, with many languages, religions and castes and a federal structure, could not be represented adequately by two or three national parties, and the growth of regional parties has made Indian democracy more representative, more federal and more socially inclusive than it was in 1950. The cost is instability, parochialism and bargaining power out of proportion to numbers. The likely settlement is a bipolar multi-party system: many parties organised around two broad national alliances, with genuinely competitive regional party systems in the States.

1. The principle of utility. "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do." The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the measure of right and wrong. This is Bentham's sovereignty of two masters.
2. Quantitative hedonism. All pleasures differ only in quantity, never in kind or worth. "Quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry", pushpin being a trivial pub game. There is no higher and lower pleasure.
3. The felicific or hedonistic calculus, by which pleasures and pains are measured on seven dimensions: intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity and extent. Bentham believed moral and legislative questions could in principle be settled by computation.
4. Egalitarian counting. "Each is to count for one, and nobody for more than one." Everyone's happiness weighs equally, from which Bentham derived universal suffrage, annual parliaments and the secret ballot.
5. Rejection of natural rights. Natural rights are "nonsense upon stilts"; rights are the creation of law, and law is justified by utility alone. There is no right prior to and independent of the state.

1. Qualitative hedonism. Pleasures differ in quality as well as quantity, and some are intrinsically higher. "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." The test is the preference of those competently acquainted with both kinds of pleasure.
2. A richer view of human nature. Man is not merely a calculator of pleasure but a being capable of self-development, nobility, altruism and a sense of dignity. Happiness includes the exercise of the higher faculties.
3. Liberty as an end, not merely a means. On Liberty (1859) and the harm principle: the only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. Bentham had no comparable doctrine.
4. Fear of the tyranny of the majority. Where Bentham trusted the majority, Mill feared it, and feared social pressure more than law. He therefore proposed plural voting for the educated and supported minority representation, which are qualifications of democracy Bentham would not have accepted.

But Mill's amendments strain the doctrine. If pleasures differ in quality, then something other than pleasure is doing the evaluating, and the utilitarian standard is no longer self-sufficient. If liberty must be protected even where restricting it would raise total happiness, then utility has ceased to be the supreme criterion. Sidgwick and later critics pressed both objections hard. Mill is therefore best read as a utilitarian who cared more about human beings than about the consistency of his system.