BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 3 Political Science 2 2025-26 - ATKT 75/25 Question Paper with Solutions

Power is the capacity to make others behave as one wishes, even against their will. Max Weber: power is the probability that an actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance.

Two characteristics:

1. It is relational, not a possession. Power exists only in a relationship between people. Nobody has power in the abstract; a person has power over somebody, in respect of something. It is therefore always specific to the parties, and A may have power over B while having none over C.
2. It is coercive, and rests on sanctions. Power carries the ability to impose consequences, whether by force, by withholding a benefit, or by threat. Obedience to power is given from fear of those consequences, which distinguishes it from authority, where obedience is given because the command is thought rightful.

Ethnic profiling is the practice, by police or other public authorities, of using race, ethnicity, religion, caste, language or national origin as the ground for suspecting a person of an offence, rather than the person's own conduct or specific intelligence about him.

In practice it means selecting people for stops, searches, questioning, surveillance, identity checks or detention because of the group they belong to. The person is treated not as an individual but as a representative of a category presumed to be criminal.

It is objectionable because it is a form of discrimination, it punishes the innocent members of a group, it destroys the community's trust in the police, and it is ineffective, since it fills police time with the wrong people while the actual offender, who does not fit the profile, is not looked at.

J.S. Mill, in On Liberty (1859), argued for 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.

Two ways this has influenced the Indian Constitution:

1. Freedom of speech and expression under Article 19(1)(a). Mill's defence of free discussion, that even a false opinion is useful because truth is confirmed by collision with error, and that silencing an opinion robs the human race, is the classical argument behind this guarantee. Crucially, the restrictions in Article 19(2) are permitted only on defined, harm-based grounds such as public order, defamation and incitement to an offence, which is Mill's principle written as a list.

The 73rd Amendment, 1992 (panchayats, Part IX, Articles 243 to 243-O) and the 74th Amendment, 1992 (municipalities, Part IX-A, Articles 243-P to 243-ZG) made reservation in local bodies compulsory, not optional.

The mandatory provisions, under Article 243D for panchayats and Article 243T for municipalities:

1. Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes: seats reserved in proportion to their population in that panchayat or municipal area, and the reserved seats are rotated by allotment among different constituencies.
2. Women: not less than one-third of the total seats reserved for women, and not less than one-third of the seats reserved for SCs and STs also reserved for women of those groups, again by rotation.

Indirect democracy, also called representative democracy, is the form in which the people do not make laws themselves but elect representatives who govern on their behalf.

Two main features:

1. Government through elected representatives. Sovereignty rests with the people, but it is exercised by a legislature chosen by them at periodic, free and fair elections held on universal adult franchise. The citizen's direct political act is the vote, not the decision.
2. Representatives are accountable and hold office for a fixed term. Power is delegated, not surrendered: the representative answers to the electorate at the next election, and in a parliamentary system to the legislature between elections, through questions, debates, committees and the no-confidence motion.

Other features that would earn the marks: the existence of political parties to organise choice, an opposition, rule by majority with protection for minorities, and a constitution limiting what the majority may do.

4. Expiation. Punishment wipes out the guilt; the offender, having paid, is restored to society with the account settled.
5. Channelling of indignation. It gives the community's moral outrage an orderly, legal outlet, and so displaces private vengeance.

Its philosophical support. Immanuel Kant is its greatest exponent. Punishment must be inflicted because the offender has committed a crime, never merely as a means to another good, for a man must never be treated merely as a means to the ends of another. Hegel argued that punishment is the criminal's own right, since it treats him as a rational being who willed a universal rule by his act. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen defended it as the expression of the healthy hatred of the criminal.

Merits:

1. It satisfies the sense of justice of the victim and of society.
2. It keeps punishment proportionate, and so limits the state, which cannot punish beyond desert however useful a heavier sentence might be.

In India the retributive strand survives in sentencing for grave offences and in the retention of the death penalty for the "rarest of rare" case laid down in Bachan Singh v State of Punjab (1980), while the reformative strand appears in the Probation of Offenders Act, 1958, and in juvenile justice.

Utilitarianism is the doctrine, founded by Jeremy Bentham and developed by J.S. Mill, that the rightness of an action or a law is measured by its consequences, and specifically by whether it produces the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Pleasure is the only good and pain the only evil, and Bentham proposed to measure them by the felicific calculus of intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity and extent.

Sarvodaya, from sarva (all) and udaya (rise), is Gandhi's doctrine of the "welfare of all", coined in 1908 as the title of his paraphrase of Ruskin's Unto This Last. It holds that the good of the individual is contained in the good of all, and that a social order must be judged by what it does for the weakest member.

Points of similarity, worth a short paragraph: both are social rather than individualist doctrines, both judge institutions by their effect on human welfare rather than by tradition or divine authority, both are reformist and this-worldly, and both attack privilege that serves no useful purpose.

2. Federalism and the strength of regional parties. Parties such as the DMK, TMC, BJD, TRS, SP, RJD, Shiv Sena and JD(U) hold power in States regardless of the national result, and State elections are fought on State issues.
3. The rise of identity and regional aspiration, the "son of the soil" sentiment, and demands for a fairer share of central resources.
4. Low entry barriers: registration is easy, and a party with a concentrated regional vote can win seats even with a small national share.
5. Coalition experience: three decades have shown that alliances can govern, so voters no longer treat a vote for a small party as wasted.

Factors pushing towards consolidation:

1. The first-past-the-post system rewards large parties and punishes those with dispersed support.
2. National issues, national media and a leader-centred campaign favour parties that can compete everywhere.
3. Anti-defection law (Tenth Schedule) and the cost of contesting favour organised, well-funded parties.
4. Frequent splits and mergers and the personalisation of parties around a single leader make small parties fragile.

Its features:

1. Authority is acquired by birth and hereditary succession, not by election or achievement.
2. Obedience is owed to the person of the ruler, not to an impersonal office or rule.
3. The ruler is bound by custom and precedent rather than by enacted law, and within custom his discretion is wide.
4. Administration is personal: officials are retainers chosen by loyalty and kinship, not a rule-bound bureaucracy recruited on merit.
5. It is conservative: since the reason for doing a thing is that it has always been done, innovation attacks the source of authority itself.

Weber's sub-types are patriarchalism, patrimonialism and feudalism. Other examples are hereditary monarchy, tribal chieftainship and the caste-sanctioned village elder.

(ii) Why legitimacy is necessary for the effective exercise of political power

1. It converts power into authority. Power is the capacity to compel; legitimacy is the belief that the compulsion is rightful. Without it a ruler has force and no title, and is obeyed only while the force is applied.

5. It limits power and prevents arbitrariness. Because legitimacy depends on the rules being followed, a ruler who breaks them forfeits it. Legitimacy is therefore a standing check as well as a support.
6. Its absence is fatal. A government that has lost legitimacy is driven back on coercion, and coercion is expensive, brittle and self-defeating, since repression itself becomes the grievance. This is why usurpers seek referendums, constitutions and elections: they are buying legitimacy because power alone is not enough.

Explanation. The reformative theory holds that the object of punishment is to change the offender so that he returns to society as a law-abiding member. The criminal is regarded not as an enemy to be crushed but as a patient to be treated: crime is a symptom of circumstance, upbringing, poverty, addiction or mental condition, and the state's task is to remove the cause.

Its features:

1. Punishment is individualised: the sentence is fitted to the offender, not merely to the offence.
2. It is corrective rather than punitive: education, vocational training, counselling, work and treatment.
3. It uses alternatives to imprisonment: community service, probation, parole, open prisons, admonition and release on good behaviour, because prison itself is criminogenic.
4. It treats the offender as capable of change, so it rejects permanently degrading punishments.
5. Its success is measured by recidivism: whether the offender comes back.

(ii) The Deterrent theory of punishment

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

Its basis is utilitarian. Jeremy Bentham held that man calculates between pain and pleasure, so punishment must add enough pain to outweigh the profit expected from the crime, and crime must never pay.

Its two forms: specific deterrence, aimed at the offender so that he does not repeat the offence, and general deterrence, aimed at the public who are meant to learn from his punishment.

Its features: punishment is exemplary, directed at the audience; it is severe, and historically often public; it is forward-looking, aimed at prevention; and it treats the criminal as a rational calculator.

Merits: it protects society by reducing crime; it works well against deliberate and calculated offences such as economic crime, tax evasion, smuggling and traffic violations; and it upholds the authority of the law.

(i) The ideology: UTILITARIANISM

The facts describe utilitarianism, an offshoot of liberalism founded by Jeremy Bentham (1748 to 1832). The markers are the rejection of tradition and custom as sources of authority, and the insistence that policies be judged solely on usefulness and outcomes.

Explanation. Utilitarianism holds that the rightness of any action, law or institution is determined only by its consequences, and specifically by whether it produces the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Nothing is good in itself; a custom, a law or a right is worth having only so far as it adds to human happiness.

Its main propositions:

1. The principle of utility, which Bentham took from Hutcheson and Beccaria: the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the measure of right and wrong.

On punishment, utilitarianism holds that punishment is itself an evil, justified only where it prevents a greater evil, and that its aim is deterrence with a punishment proportioned to the temptation.

Merits: it is rational, secular and measurable; it made the welfare of the people the test of government; and it produced immense practical reform in law, prisons, public health and the franchise.

Demerits: it reduces all value to pleasure; it cannot in fact measure or compare pleasures across persons; and, most seriously, it can sacrifice the minority, since a policy that raises aggregate happiness is justified whatever it does to a few.

(ii) The Harm Principle of J.S. Mill

J.S. Mill (1806 to 1873) stated the principle in On Liberty (1859):

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

Its content:

Its influence in India is visible in Article 19(1)(a) with restrictions confined to defined harm-based grounds under Article 19(2), and in the Article 21 jurisprudence: K.S. Puttaswamy v Union of India (2017) on privacy, Navtej Singh Johar v Union of India (2018) reading down Section 377, and Joseph Shine v Union of India (2018) striking down adultery.

Its features: it rests on a negotiated programme rather than a single manifesto; portfolios are distributed by bargaining; decisions are taken by consensus among the partners; the alliance is temporary and revocable, so a partner's withdrawal can bring the government down; and it usually requires a co-ordination committee to settle disputes between partners.

Merits:

1. It gives representation to more sections of a diverse society, including regional and minority interests.
2. It builds consensus and moderates policy, since extreme measures cannot pass the partners.
3. It prevents the concentration of power in one party and so checks authoritarian tendencies.
4. In a federal system it strengthens the States, since regional parties bargain for their regions inside the government.

Demerits:

1. Instability: the government lives at the mercy of its smallest partner.
2. Weak and slow decision-making, with hard choices deferred to keep the alliance together.

2. Self-government by the village itself, through the gram sabha and a panchayat, deciding its own affairs, running its own schools and settling its own disputes, ideally by consensus rather than by counting votes. The panchayat combines legislative, executive and judicial functions at that level.
3. Non-violence, and power flowing upward. Village life is to be organised on truth and ahimsa, and the wider units exist to serve the village, not to command it. Gandhi's image is not a pyramid but an oceanic circle, "an ever-widening, never-ascending circle" whose centre is the individual, so that the outermost circle does not crush the inner but gives strength to all.

Other characteristics that would earn the marks: dignity of labour and bread labour; trusteeship of property; equality and the removal of untouchability; and limitation of wants.

Its constitutional expression is Article 40, the organisation of village panchayats, given effect by the 73rd and 74th Amendments, 1992.

For full marks, cover: Mills on who the power elite are, the three institutional orders, the middle and mass levels, how the elite is unified, his criticism of American democracy, an evaluation with the pluralist reply; then Raphael's five grounds set out one by one with the objection to each, and his own combined position.

Part 1: C. Wright Mills and the Power Elite

C. Wright Mills (1916 to 1962) was an American sociologist whose The Power Elite (1956) argued that political power in the United States is not held by the electorate, nor spread among many competing groups, but concentrated in a small, interlocking elite.

The thesis. The power elite consists of those who occupy the command posts of the three great institutional hierarchies of modern society, and whose decisions have consequences for everyone else.

The three institutional orders:

The three-level model of power. Mills pictured American society as a pyramid:

1. At the top, the power elite, which takes the decisions of national consequence.
2. In the middle, the level of Congress, pressure groups, local politics and the professions, where a semblance of pluralist bargaining occurs but only over secondary questions.
3. At the bottom, the mass society, unorganised, fragmented, politically illiterate, shaped by mass media and reduced to spectators who ratify decisions already taken.

His conclusion. Democracy in America has become formal: elections continue, but the significant decisions, on war, on the economy, on foreign policy, are made outside the electoral process by people who are not accountable to it. Mills called the middle level "a drifting set of stalemated forces" and the public a mass rather than a public.

Evaluation of Mills.

Compared with Marx and with Pareto: Marx grounds the ruling class in ownership of the means of production, a single economic cause; Mills grounds his elite in the command of institutions, of which the economy is only one. Pareto grounds elite rule in psychology and ability and treats it as a permanent law of all societies; Mills treats the American power elite as a historical development of the twentieth century, which in principle could be reversed. Mills is therefore the least deterministic of the three.

Part 2: D.D. Raphael's five main views on political obligation

D.D. Raphael, in Problems of Political Philosophy, asks why the citizen ought to obey the state, and sets out five grounds that have been offered.

1. The state rests on a social contract. Men are taken to have agreed, at the founding of civil society, to obey in return for protection and order, so the duty to obey is the ordinary moral duty to keep a promise. Objection: no such contract was ever made; it is a historical fiction, and a promise nobody made cannot bind.

4. The state secures justice. The state exists to protect rights and to hold the balance between competing claims; because it secures the citizen's rights, the citizen owes the corresponding duty of obedience. Obligation is a matter of reciprocity, rights and duties being two sides of one relation. Objection: it explains obedience to a just state but says nothing about a state that is unjust in part, which is every actual state.
5. The state pursues the general interest, or the common good. The utilitarian ground: obedience is owed because the state promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and general disobedience would leave everybody worse off. Objection: it cannot explain why a minority should submit when the general interest is served by sacrificing it.

Raphael's own position. No single ground is sufficient. Political obligation is best explained by combining them, chiefly consent with justice and the general interest: the citizen ought to obey because the state secures rights and serves the common good, and because he participates in and benefits from that arrangement. It follows that the obligation is conditional, not absolute, and that a state which systematically defeats justice and the common good weakens the ground of its own claim, which is where the right to resistance enters.

The central proposition, from the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859): in the social production of their existence men enter into definite relations, independent of their will, which correspond to a given stage of the material forces of production. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness.

Base and superstructure.

1. The base, or infrastructure, is the mode of production: the forces of production (land, raw materials, tools, machinery, technology and labour power) together with the relations of production (the property relations, above all who owns the means of production).
2. The superstructure is everything else: law, the state, politics, religion, morality, art, philosophy and education. It arises from the base and, in the main, serves to justify and preserve it.

Evaluation. Merits: it established the economy as a central object of political analysis; it explained why law and morality so often favour the propertied; it is a genuine theory of change, where most political thought explains order. Criticisms: it is monocausal, and religion, nationalism, language, caste and race have moved history as powerfully as class, as the two world wars and Indian politics both show; the relation between base and superstructure is not one-way, since law and ideas react on the economy, a point Engels conceded late in life; the predicted revolutions came in agrarian Russia and China rather than in advanced industrial states, contradicting the theory's own logic; and there is no room in it for individual agency.

Part 2: The theory of surplus value

This is Marx's account of the precise mechanism of exploitation, set out in Das Kapital (1867).

1. The labour theory of value. The value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labour time required to produce it. Labour alone creates value; machinery and raw material only transfer to the product the value already in them.

Consequences Marx draws: the accumulation of capital in fewer hands; the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as machinery replaces labour, the only source of surplus; a growing reserve army of the unemployed which holds wages down; the increasing misery of the proletariat; and finally alienation, since the worker is estranged from the product, from the act of work, from his own nature and from other men.

Criticisms of surplus value: modern economics rejects the labour theory of value, holding that value depends on utility and scarcity as well as labour, so the entire derivation is disputed. Capital, enterprise, risk-bearing and management make a genuine contribution, which Marx treats as theft. Real wages rose in industrial countries instead of falling to subsistence, largely through the trade unions and legislation Marx's own analysis helped to inspire. And the theory cannot explain the prices of goods produced with little labour, the "transformation problem".

Part 3: Lobbying as a technique of pressure groups

Pressure groups, also called interest groups, are organised associations that seek to influence government policy in their members' interest without seeking to capture office themselves. That is the essential difference from a political party.

Its merits:

1. It supplies government with specialised information no minister or legislator could assemble alone.
2. It gives continuous representation between elections, and represents interests that cut across constituencies.
3. It articulates and aggregates interests, one of the functions of a healthy political system, and gives minorities a channel.
4. It improves the quality of legislation by exposing practical difficulties before enactment.

Its dangers:

1. Unequal access. Well-funded groups, chiefly business, can afford professional lobbyists; the poor, the unorganised and the diffuse public cannot. Influence follows money rather than numbers.
2. Corruption and the purchase of decisions, at the extreme cash for questions and bribery.
3. Regulatory capture: the agency comes to see the industry's interests as the public interest.

For full marks, cover: Mandela's position on obligation to an unjust state, his move from non-violence to armed struggle and the reasoning for it, the Rivonia trial statement, his return to negotiation and reconciliation, and a comparison with Gandhi; then socialism in the Preamble, the Directive Principles, the Fundamental Rights, the amendments and the case law, with concrete welfare examples.

Part 1: Nelson Mandela on resistance and political obligation

Nelson Mandela (1918 to 2013) led the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, spent 27 years in prison, and became the country's first democratically elected President in 1994.

2. The turn to armed struggle, 1961. The Sharpeville massacre of 1960, in which police killed 69 unarmed protestors, the banning of the ANC, and the closing of every lawful channel convinced him that non-violence had become futile. He co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe and chose sabotage first, because it destroyed property without loss of life and left the possibility of reconciliation open.
3. The Rivonia trial, 1964. Mandela's statement from the dock is the key text: he had fought against white domination and against black domination, and cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It was an ideal for which he hoped to live and to achieve, but if need be, an ideal for which he was prepared to die. He accepted the court's jurisdiction to punish him while denying the law's moral authority.

Part 2: Socialism and the welfare state in the Indian Constitution

India adopted democratic socialism: social and economic transformation pursued by law and by consent, within a parliamentary democracy, retaining private property in a mixed economy.

1. The Preamble. The word SOCIALIST was inserted by the 42nd Amendment, 1976, along with SECULAR and INTEGRITY. The Preamble also promises JUSTICE, social, economic and political, and EQUALITY of status and of opportunity. In Excel Wear v Union of India (1978) and later cases the Supreme Court read this as democratic socialism, a mixed economy aiming at social justice, not the abolition of private enterprise.

2. The Directive Principles, Part IV, are the core socialist content:

1. Article 38: the State shall secure a social order for the promotion of the welfare of the people, and shall minimise inequalities in income, status, facilities and opportunities.
2. Article 39(a): adequate means of livelihood for all citizens.

3. Fundamental Rights read in a welfare direction. Article 21 has been expanded to include the right to livelihood in Olga Tellis v Bombay Municipal Corporation (1985), to health and medical aid in Consumer Education and Research Centre v Union of India (1995) and Paschim Banga Khet Mazdoor Samity v State of West Bengal (1996), to shelter, to a clean environment and to food. Article 23 prohibits forced labour, applied to bonded labour and to the payment of less than the minimum wage in People's Union for Democratic Rights v Union of India (1982). Article 24 prohibits the employment of children below fourteen in factories and hazardous work. Article 14, 15(4), 16(4) and 46 authorise the reservations that redistribute opportunity.

4. Amendments carrying the socialist programme. The First Amendment, 1951, added Article 31A, 31B and the Ninth Schedule to protect land reform and the abolition of zamindari. The 25th Amendment, 1971, added Article 31C, giving primacy to Articles 39(b) and (c). The 44th Amendment, 1978, removed the right to property from the Fundamental Rights and made it a constitutional right under Article 300A, which is the clearest doctrinal mark of socialism in the text. The 86th Amendment, 2002, made education for children aged six to fourteen a fundamental right under Article 21A.

For full marks, cover: what the spirit of democracy means as distinct from its form, the ethical preconditions democracy requires, the specific symptoms of decay in India with examples, the argument that democracy survives it anyway, the institutional safeguards, and a reasoned conclusion.

The question stated precisely

Democracy has a form and a spirit. Its form is the machinery: a constitution, elections, legislatures, courts, a franchise. Its spirit is the set of conventions and dispositions that make the machinery work: tolerance, restraint in the use of power, respect for the opponent, truthfulness in public life, and the willingness to lose an election and go quietly.

5. Restraint by the majority, since a majority that uses its power to the constitutional limit at every opportunity destroys the confidence of the minority.
6. An informed and vigilant citizenry, and, in Mill's and Laski's phrase, an alert public opinion.

Evidence of ethical decay in Indian democracy

1. Criminalisation of politics. A large and rising share of Members of Parliament and of State legislatures face criminal cases, many of them serious. The Supreme Court has responded with disclosure of antecedents in Union of India v Association for Democratic Reforms (2002), immediate disqualification on conviction in Lily Thomas v Union of India (2013), and special courts for cases against legislators, but disqualification still requires conviction, and trials are slow.
2. Corruption, from petty bribery in the delivery of services to large scandals. Its cost is not only money: it converts a right into a favour, and a citizen who must pay for what is due to him has already lost the equality the Constitution promises.

7. Weakening of legislative deliberation. Falling numbers of sitting days, bills passed with little or no debate, growing use of the money bill route to bypass the Rajya Sabha, and the decline of committee scrutiny.
8. Pressure on institutions meant to be independent, including questions raised about appointments to and the functioning of the Election Commission, investigative agencies and, in some accounts, the higher judiciary.
9. Populism and the personalisation of politics, where parties become vehicles for individuals and families, and inner-party democracy is largely absent.

The counter-argument: democracy in India has proved resilient

A critical analysis must state the other side.

1. Power has changed hands peacefully many times, at the Centre and repeatedly in the States, including after the Emergency of 1975 to 1977, which the electorate reversed at the first opportunity.
2. Turnout is high, and is highest among the poor and among women, which is the reverse of the pattern in most Western democracies. Indian voters are demanding, and anti-incumbency is strong.

Ethical decay does not usually destroy democracy by abolishing it. It hollows it out, leaving the form while draining the substance: elections that are contests of money and identity rather than of policy; legislatures that pass laws without debating them; a citizen who votes but cannot get a service without paying for it. That condition has a name in the literature, electoral authoritarianism or democratic backsliding, and its distinguishing feature is that every step is formally lawful.

But the relationship runs both ways, which is what makes the analysis critical rather than a lament. Weak institutions permit ethical decay, and strong ones constrain it. Money entered politics on the present scale because there was no effective regulation of political finance; defection flourished until the Tenth Schedule; disclosure of candidates' criminal records came from a court order and not from a change of heart. Ethics and institutions are not alternatives: institutions are how a society makes ethical conduct the path of least resistance for people who are not saints.

For full marks, cover: Locke's state of nature and natural rights, the inconveniences that make government necessary, the two contracts, the limited nature of the surrender, government as trust, the right of resistance, an assessment and his influence; then the features of Indian parties with examples, and a short note on their weaknesses.

Part 1: Locke's social contract theory of political obligation

John Locke (1632 to 1704) set out his theory in the Two Treatises of Government (1689), written to refute Filmer's divine right theory and to justify the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He is called the father of liberalism.

The state of nature. Unlike Hobbes, Locke's state of nature is not a war of all against all. It is a state of:

1. Perfect freedom to order one's actions and dispose of one's possessions as one thinks fit, within the law of nature.

2. A known and indifferent judge, with authority to determine disputes, since in the state of nature every man is judge in his own cause.
3. A power to back and support the sentence and give it due execution.

The two contracts. Locke's contract has two stages, and this is a favourite examination point:

1. The social contract, or pactum unionis, by which individuals agree with one another to leave the state of nature and form a civil society, whose decisions are taken by the majority.
2. The contract of government, or pactum subjectionis, by which the community entrusts political power to a government. This is not a contract of surrender but a trust.

The nature of the surrender. The surrender is partial and conditional. Men give up only the executive power they held in the state of nature, that is, the right to punish breaches of the law of nature and to judge in their own cause. They retain their natural rights to life, liberty and property, which the government exists to protect and may not destroy.

Assessment. Merits: it founded limited constitutional government, consent, the rule of law, the separation of powers and the right of revolution; it is the intellectual source of the American Declaration of Independence, of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and through them of most modern bills of rights. Criticisms: the state of nature and the contract are historically fictitious; tacit consent inferred from residence is not real consent, as Hume objected, since a poor man cannot simply leave; his account of property justified unequal accumulation and was congenial to the propertied class of his day, which is Macpherson's charge of "possessive individualism"; and it is unclear who decides that the trust has been broken.

Influence on India: natural rights appear as the Fundamental Rights in Part III; limited government appears as judicial review and the basic structure doctrine; the right to property, once a fundamental right, is now a constitutional right under Article 300A; and the constitutional substitutes for the right of resistance are Articles 32 and 226.

3. A period of one-party dominance followed by coalition and then re-consolidation. Congress dominance from 1952 to 1967; the "Congress system" of Rajni Kothari; the coalition era from 1989 to 2014; and a dominant party at the Centre since 2014 with strong regional parties in the States.
4. Parties organised around personality, caste, region, religion and language rather than around clear ideological programmes, so that manifestos across parties often differ less than their social bases do.
5. Absence of inner-party democracy, with organisational elections rarely held and leadership decided at the top.
6. Dynastic leadership, with families controlling many national and regional parties.
7. Weak ideological commitment and frequent splits, mergers and defections, which produced the Tenth Schedule in 1985.
8. Money and muscle power, with high and largely undisclosed campaign expenditure and a significant proportion of legislators facing criminal cases.