BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 3 Political Science 2 2017-18 Question Paper with Solutions

Most writers treat the two terms as interchangeable, and it is worth saying so in one line before drawing the distinction, because that is the accurate position. Where a distinction is drawn, it is this:

1. Existence and purpose. An interest group is any organised association formed to promote or protect a shared interest of its members, whether or not it is at present engaged with government: a professional body, a trade association, a caste association. A pressure group is an interest group actively bringing pressure to bear on government to influence a decision. Every pressure group is an interest group in action; not every interest group is at every moment a pressure group.
2. Method and posture. An interest group's activities may be largely internal, serving its members through information, welfare and professional standards. A pressure group's activity is outward-facing: lobbying, representation, memoranda, campaigning, agitation and litigation directed at the state.

A coup d'état, French for "a stroke of the state", is the sudden, illegal and usually violent seizure of state power by a small group from within the existing establishment, most often the armed forces or a faction of the ruling elite. It displaces the persons in power without necessarily changing the political, social or economic system.

One difference from a revolution: a coup changes only the rulers, while a revolution changes the system. A coup is carried out by a small group from inside the state apparatus and leaves the social and economic order intact; a revolution is a mass movement from below which overturns the political, social and economic structure, as the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 did.

Other differences available: a coup is quick, often over in days, while a revolution is a prolonged process; a coup usually has no ideology, while a revolution is driven by one; and a coup involves limited violence among elites, while a revolution involves mass participation.

Other differences available: utilitarianism works through legislation and state action, Sarvodaya through self-change and persuasion; utilitarianism treats man as a calculator of pleasure and pain, Sarvodaya as a moral and spiritual being; and utilitarianism accepts the satisfaction of wants as the measure of welfare, while Sarvodaya requires the limitation of wants.

One reason: linguistic and cultural identity, given political form by the linguistic reorganisation of States under the States Reorganisation Act, 1956. Once State boundaries were drawn on language, language became the basis of political identity, and resistance to the imposition of a national language gave regional identity a vehicle. The anti-Hindi agitations in Tamil Nadu of 1937 and 1965 are the classic instance and the direct cause of the DMK's rise to power in 1967.

Other reasons that would earn the mark: uneven development and the grievance that a region receives less than its fair share of central resources; the decline of Congress dominance after 1967 and 1989; caste mobilisation after the Mandal Commission; charismatic regional leadership; and federalism itself, since State governments hold real power worth winning.

One regional political party from Tamil Nadu: the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). The All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK) and the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) would answer equally.

Two Fundamental Rights available to all persons, citizens and non-citizens alike:

1. Article 14: equality before the law and the equal protection of the laws. Its words are "the State shall not deny to any person", so it extends to foreigners, and indeed to legal persons such as companies.
2. Article 21: protection of life and personal liberty. Its words are "no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law". The Supreme Court confirmed its application to a foreign national in Chairman, Railway Board v Chandrima Das (2000).

Others available equally: Article 20 (protection in respect of conviction for offences); Article 21A (education); Article 22 (protection against arrest and detention in certain cases); Articles 23 and 24 (prohibition of traffic in human beings, forced labour and child labour); and Articles 25 to 28 (freedom of conscience and religion).

The right to education is contained in Article 21A, in Part III, inserted by the 86th Constitutional Amendment Act, 2002:

The State shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of six to fourteen years in such manner as the State may, by law, determine.

It is implemented by the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, in force from 1 April 2010, which provides for free and compulsory elementary education, a 25 per cent reservation for children from disadvantaged and weaker sections in private unaided schools, a bar on capitation fees, screening and expulsion, and norms for schools and teachers.

The same amendment substituted Article 45, which now directs the State to provide early childhood care and education for children below six, and added Article 51A(k), a Fundamental Duty on parents.

The theory. Punishment is an end in itself, deserved by the offender because he has committed the crime, and not because any future good will follow. Its principle is just deserts: the wrongdoer has taken an unfair advantage and upset the moral balance of society, and punishment restores it. It is the oldest theory of punishment, expressed in the ancient rule of lex talionis, an eye for an eye.

Its features:

1. Backward-looking: it asks what the offender deserves for what he has already done, not what will reduce crime.
2. Proportionality: the punishment must fit the gravity of the offence, neither more nor less. This is its central discipline.
3. Moral responsibility: the offender is a free, rational agent who chose to do wrong. Kant defended the theory on exactly this ground, that punishment must never be inflicted merely as a means to another good, since a man must never be treated merely as a means.

3. It cannot be applied literally. The state cannot defraud the fraudster, forge against the forger or defame the defamer, so lex talionis breaks down at once for most offences.
4. There is no common measure of crime and pain. The theory insists on proportion but supplies no way of deciding how many years are proportionate to a given offence, so the quantum is fixed by convention or by public feeling, which is exactly what the theory claims to displace.
5. It assumes free will and full responsibility, which is doubtful in the very young, the mentally ill, the addicted or the desperately poor.
6. It tends towards harshness, and severity can be counter-productive, brutalising offenders and making courts reluctant to convict.
7. It ignores the victim, who gets the satisfaction of seeing the offender punished but no restitution, which is the gap restorative justice developed to fill.

Vilfredo Pareto (1848 to 1923), in The Mind and Society (1916), held that every society is ruled by an elite, but that no elite lasts: elites decay and are replaced by new elites rising from below. "History is a graveyard of aristocracies." The mechanism of that replacement is the circulation of elites, and the two types that circulate are the lions and the foxes, an imagery Pareto took from Machiavelli.

The psychological foundation: residues. Pareto grounded the types in residues, the constant non-logical sentiments underlying human conduct, as opposed to derivations, the rationalisations people offer for what those sentiments actually drive. Two classes of residue matter:

1. Class I, the instinct for combinations: inventiveness, imagination, calculation, scepticism, a readiness to innovate and to manipulate.
2. Class II, the persistence of aggregates: conservatism, loyalty, patriotism, religion, attachment to family, tradition and property, and a willingness to use force.

The two types:

The cycle. Neither type can govern indefinitely. A regime of foxes accumulates debt, cynicism and clever expedients, and loses the will to defend itself; it falls to a rising group of lions prepared to use force. A regime of lions becomes rigid and brutal, cannot adapt to changed conditions, and lets in the foxes. Government therefore oscillates between the two, and that oscillation is the circulation of elites.

Two modes of circulation: gradual and peaceful, where the elite is open and absorbs able individuals from below, which renews it and preserves stability; and sudden and violent, where the elite is closed, so that talent is denied entry, resentment accumulates, and a counter-elite organises the masses behind it in a revolution.

Pareto's conclusion: revolutions do not abolish elite rule, they merely change the elite. The masses are the instrument, never the beneficiary.

3. Supremacy of the Constitution, binding on Union and States alike.
4. An independent judiciary, with the Supreme Court exercising original jurisdiction under Article 131 in Union-State disputes.
5. Bicameralism, with the Rajya Sabha representing the States.

Unitary features:

1. A strong Centre: the Union List is the longest and most important, and Article 254 gives Union law primacy in the Concurrent List.
2. Residuary powers with the Union under Article 248.
3. States are not indestructible: under Article 3 Parliament may by ordinary law alter any State's area, boundaries or name. India is an indestructible Union of destructible States.
4. Single citizenship and a single integrated judiciary.
5. Governors appointed by the President under Article 155, holding office during his pleasure.
6. Emergency provisions: Article 352, under which Parliament may legislate on State subjects; Article 356, President's Rule; Article 360, Financial Emergency.

Satyagraha is a Sanskrit compound of satya (truth) and agraha (firmness), meaning "holding firmly to truth" or truth-force. It is Gandhi's technique of non-violent resistance to injustice, coined in South Africa in 1908 to replace "passive resistance", which he thought suggested a weapon of the weak. Satyagraha is a weapon of the strong.

Satya, truth, the first pillar

1. Truth is the end. Gandhi began from "God is Truth" and later deliberately reversed it to "Truth is God", because the second formulation includes the atheist and the agnostic and does not require belief in God. Truth is therefore the ultimate reality and the purpose of life, and he called his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth.
2. Truth must be practised in thought, word and deed, and it requires fearlessness, since a frightened man cannot be truthful.

How the two pillars relate

Truth is the end and non-violence the means, and the relation between them is Gandhi's central doctrine of the purity of means: the means are the seed and the end the tree, so an immoral means can never produce a moral end. His reason is practical as well as moral: a movement that wins by violence produces a state that keeps power by violence, having trained its people in nothing else.

In practice satyagraha therefore requires that resistance be open and public, that the resister accept the legal penalty, that lawful means be exhausted first, and that only a specific unjust law be disobeyed. Its techniques are non-cooperation, civil disobedience, fasting, hartal, picketing and hijrat, with the constructive programme building the alternative society meanwhile.

The conflict is irreconcilable because the profit of the owner is by definition the unpaid surplus labour of the worker. Marx's theory of surplus value supplies the mechanism: labour power is bought at the cost of the worker's subsistence, but the worker produces more value than that, and the difference is appropriated as profit, interest and rent. Since no wage rate abolishes the surplus, the conflict cannot be settled by bargaining inside the system, and exploitation is structural rather than a matter of individual employers being unkind.

Class in itself and class for itself. A group sharing an economic 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 produces that consciousness itself, by gathering workers into factories and cities and reducing them to a common condition. Against it stands false consciousness, the ruling ideology transmitted through law, religion, education and the press.

The establishment of communism

1. Crisis and polarisation. Capital concentrates in fewer hands, the petty bourgeoisie is proletarianised, and the proletariat becomes the vast majority, its misery increasing.

(a) The type of authority: LEGAL-RATIONAL AUTHORITY

The facts describe legal-rational authority, the third of Max Weber's three types. Every element points to it: TRAI is a statutory body created by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India Act, 1997; it acts within a defined competence, recommending on telecom licensing; the subject matter is impersonal and procedural, a timeline for approving transfers and mergers; and it operates inside a chain of legally constituted institutions, TRAI, the Department of Telecommunications and the NCLT, each with powers conferred by statute. Nobody obeys TRAI out of devotion to an individual or out of respect for ancient custom.

Weber's definition: legal-rational authority rests on "belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands".

Three features:

1. Authority attaches to the office, not to the person. Obedience is owed to the rules and the office, and the individual commands only while and so far as he holds it. The Chairman of TRAI has authority as Chairman and takes none of it with him when he leaves.

Three further differences if more are wanted: power is often personal while authority is institutional; power needs continuing coercion and is therefore expensive, while authority is cheap; and authority is transferred by lawful procedure, election or appointment, while power is tied to its source.

2. Correction rather than infliction, using 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, placing the first offender among the hardened.
3. Belief in the offender's capacity to change, with recidivism as the measure of success. The theory rules out permanently degrading punishment, and it judges itself not by the severity of sentences but by whether the offender comes back.

In Indian law: the Probation of Offenders Act, 1958; release on probation of good conduct under Section 401 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, formerly Section 360 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973; and the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015. The judicial statement of the theory is Mohammad Giasuddin v State of Andhra Pradesh (1977), where the Supreme Court described the offender as a patient and the therapeutic approach as the correct one.

(b) Jeremy Bentham's view on punishment

Jeremy Bentham (1748 to 1832) treated punishment as an application of the principle of utility.

4. Rules of proportion: the punishment must not be less than what is sufficient to outweigh the profit of the offence; the greater the mischief of the offence, the greater the punishment worth inflicting; and the punishment ought in no case to be more than is necessary.
5. On the death penalty he argued that it is irremediable and cannot be graduated, and favoured its restriction; and he designed the Panopticon, a prison in which the certainty of being observed would produce good conduct more cheaply than punishment.

1. Article 17: abolition of untouchability. "'Untouchability' is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden", and the enforcement of any resulting disability is a punishable offence. This is the most direct constitutional attack on a practice whose whole content was the denial of dignity, and it is one of the very few Articles that admits of no exception, operating against private individuals as well as the State. It is implemented by the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955, and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989.
2. Article 21: protection of life and personal liberty. In Francis Coralie Mullin v Administrator, Union Territory of Delhi (1981) the Supreme Court held that "life" means more than mere animal existence and includes the right to live with human dignity, and on that foundation the Court has read in the rights to livelihood, health, shelter, a clean environment, privacy and death with dignity.
3. Article 23: prohibition of traffic in human beings and forced labour, which forbids begar and similar practices. In People's Union for Democratic Rights v Union of India (1982) the Court held that paying less than the minimum wage amounts to forced labour, because a person who works for less has not truly consented but has been driven by want.

4. Equality of citizens regardless of religion, and the removal of religious disabilities in law, employment and education.
5. The private character of religion: belief is a matter between a person and his conscience, and the state's concern is confined to conduct that affects others, which is Mill's harm principle applied to belief.

In India this appears as Articles 25 to 28 and the word secular in the Preamble, though Indian secularism is distinctive: it means equal respect for all religions and permits the state to intervene in religious practice for social reform, as Article 25(2) expressly provides, rather than the strict wall of separation of the American model.

One factor responsible for the shift from Negative to Positive Liberalism: the Industrial Revolution and the social conditions it produced, namely child labour, sixteen-hour working days, industrial disease, slums and unemployment, which demonstrated that formal freedom is not real freedom where people are too poor, too ill or too ignorant to use it, and that freedom of contract between grossly unequal parties is freedom for only one of them.

The Harm Principle

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.

And: "Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."

Its content:

1. The division of conduct into self-regarding acts, affecting only the actor, and other-regarding acts, affecting others. Only the second is the law's business.
2. Paternalism is excluded: the state may not coerce a person for his own good.
3. Legal moralism is excluded: society may not coerce a person because the majority finds his conduct immoral. Mere offence is not harm.
4. Persuasion remains permissible: remonstrance, reasoning and entreaty, but never compulsion or penalty.

Liberty of tastes and individuality

Mill's third department of liberty is "liberty of tastes and pursuits, of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character", and his positive argument for it is individuality: human nature is "not a machine to be built after a model" but "a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides". Experiments in living are valuable because nobody knows in advance which way of life is best.

Limits and criticisms

1. The meaning of "harm" is unclear. Almost no act is purely self-regarding: a person who ruins his health imposes costs on his family and on the public purse. James Fitzjames Stephen, in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873), pressed this hard, arguing that society is entitled to enforce a shared morality.
2. The self-regarding and other-regarding distinction is difficult to apply in an interdependent society.
3. Mill's own exceptions are inconsistent with his principle.

3. The speech cases apply the principle precisely. S. Rangarajan v P. Jagjivan Ram (1989): the connection between expression and public order must be like "a spark in a powder keg". Shreya Singhal v Union of India (2015): Section 66A of the Information Technology Act struck down, distinguishing discussion and advocacy, which are protected, from incitement, which alone may be restricted, and rejecting "annoyance" and "inconvenience" as grounds.
4. Article 21 and the protected private sphere. After Maneka Gandhi v Union of India (1978), Article 21 requires a fair, just and reasonable procedure, and on that foundation the Court has built a sphere of personal autonomy: K.S. Puttaswamy (2017) on privacy; Navtej Singh Johar (2018), reading down Section 377 for consensual same-sex relations between adults; Joseph Shine (2018), striking down adultery; Common Cause (2018), on passive euthanasia and the living will; and Shafin Jahan (2018) on the choice of a partner.
5. Constitutional morality over popular morality, held expressly in Navtej and Puttaswamy, is Mill's rejection of legal moralism adopted as doctrine.
6. Articles 25 to 28 and the secular character of the state reflect the liberal position on religious toleration that Mill inherited from Locke.

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, the consequences Marx draws; then the defects of Marxism grouped by doctrine, including the Indian critique, and a verdict.

Part 1: The theory of 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.

Step 1: the labour theory of value. The value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labour time required to produce it under normal conditions with average skill and intensity. Marx took this from Adam Smith and Ricardo and pressed it further: labour alone creates value. Machinery, buildings and raw materials transfer to the product only the value already contained in them; they add nothing new.

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

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

Consequences Marx draws: the accumulation and concentration of capital in fewer hands; a reserve army of the unemployed keeping wages at subsistence; the falling rate of profit, as machinery displaces the labour that is the only source of surplus; the increasing misery of the proletariat; and alienation, the estrangement of the worker from the product, from the activity of work, from his own human nature and from other people.

The crucial subtlety: the transaction is formally fair. The worker is paid the full value of the commodity he sold, namely his labour power. Exploitation is therefore not cheating by a dishonest employer but a feature of the system itself, which is exactly why Marx thought moral appeals to employers were useless and why he called his socialism scientific.

2. The immiseration thesis failed. Real wages, life expectancy and living standards rose in industrial countries rather than falling to subsistence, partly through the trade unions and legislation Marx's own analysis inspired.
3. Class consciousness did not develop as predicted; workers in industrial democracies proved more interested in improving their position within capitalism than in overthrowing it.

Defects of the economics, that is of surplus value itself:

1. The labour theory of value is rejected by modern economics, which holds that value depends on utility and scarcity as well as labour. If the premise fails, the derivation of surplus value fails with it.
2. It denies any productive contribution to capital, enterprise, risk-bearing and management, treating all return to them as theft, which cannot explain why firms with the same labour succeed or fail.
3. The transformation problem: deriving prices from labour values has never been satisfactorily accomplished, and the theory cannot explain the value of goods embodying little labour, such as land or a work of art.

Defects of the politics:

Verdict

Marxism's diagnosis has outlived its prognosis. As an account of inequality, of the relation between economic power and political power, and of the experience of work, it remains indispensable, and the concentration of wealth over the last four decades has given it renewed force. As a prediction it has been falsified. India's own response was neither revolution nor laissez faire but democratic socialism: the Directive Principles of Articles 38 and 39, land reform, the word socialist in the Preamble by the 42nd Amendment, 1976, and the removal of property from the Fundamental Rights by the 44th Amendment, 1978, all pursued by law and consent.

1. Social or public ownership of the means of production, through the state, cooperatives or the workers, replacing private ownership that allows some to live on the labour of others.
2. Abolition of exploitation, which is the central charge against capitalism.
3. Economic equality: not identical incomes, but the removal of gross disparities and the prevention of the concentration of wealth.
4. Production for use, not for profit: economic activity directed to human need decided by social priority.
5. Planning in place of the unregulated market, which is held to produce monopoly, waste, trade cycles and unemployment.
6. Distribution according to work, and ultimately to need: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his work", and in the final stage "to each according to his needs".
7. A classless and cooperative society, replacing competition with cooperation as the organising principle.
8. Social justice and welfare: state responsibility for education, health, housing, employment and social security.

1. Article 38: a social order for the welfare of the people, minimising inequalities in income, status, facilities and opportunities.
2. Article 39(a): adequate means of livelihood for all citizens.
3. Article 39(b): material resources distributed to subserve the common good.
4. Article 39(c): the economic system shall not result in the concentration of wealth to the common detriment.
5. Article 39(d): equal pay for equal work.
6. Article 41: right to work, education and public assistance in old age, sickness, disablement and unemployment.
7. Article 42: just and humane conditions of work, and maternity relief.
8. Article 43: a living wage, decent conditions, and cottage industries in rural areas.
9. Article 43A: workers' participation in the management of undertakings.
10. Article 47: nutrition and public health.

6. Legislation and programmes. Land reform and abolition of zamindari; the Minimum Wages Act, 1948; nationalisation of banks in 1969 and coal in 1973; MGNREGA, 2005; the Right to Education Act, 2009; and the National Food Security Act, 2013.

Assessment

The Constitution is not socialist in the Marxist sense: private property survives, the market allocates most resources, and the liberalisation of 1991 required no amendment. What it establishes is a welfare state committed to social justice, in which the Directive Principles are non-justiciable but under Article 37 "nevertheless fundamental in the governance of the country". The gap between promise and delivery is real, and inequality has widened since liberalisation, but the constitutional direction is unambiguous.

2. Religion and divine sanction. Where the ruler is believed to hold authority from God, disobedience is a sin. The divine right theory, with Filmer, James I and Bossuet, and its sanction is the fear of divine punishment.
3. Custom, tradition and prescription. Men obey because they and their ancestors have always obeyed. The prescriptive theory, defended by Burke: long usage confers a title, and habit is the strongest single support of any settled government.
4. Consent and contract. Men have agreed, expressly or tacitly, to obey in return for protection, so the obligation is the moral duty to keep a promise. Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau.
5. The general will. Following Rousseau, the law expresses the community's will directed at the common good, so in obeying the law the citizen obeys his own better self and remains free.
6. Utility and the general interest. The state promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and general disobedience would leave everyone worse off. Bentham and Mill.

Human nature. Man is selfish, appetitive and fearful, moved by "a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death". Men are roughly equal in body and mind, since "the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy", and equality of ability produces equality of hope, and therefore competition.

The three causes of quarrel: competition, for gain; diffidence, that is mistrust, for safety; and glory, for reputation.

The condition. Without a common power to keep men in awe there is a war of every man against every man, in which there is:

1. No industry, because the fruit of it is uncertain, and therefore no agriculture, navigation, building, arts or letters.
2. No notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice. "Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice."

The peculiarities of the contract: it is a covenant among the subjects, not between subjects and sovereign, so the sovereign is not a party and is bound by nothing; it is made once and for all and is irrevocable; the sovereign's power is absolute, undivided and indivisible; and Hobbes prefers a monarch as least liable to internal faction.

Political obligation is absolute, unconditional and unlimited, because:

1. The subject has covenanted, and covenants must be kept.
2. The sovereign, not being a party, can commit no breach and can do the subject no injury.
3. Resistance would return society to the state of nature, and the worst government is better than anarchy.
4. The sovereign is the author of justice, law, property and morality, so nothing he does can be unjust.
5. There is no right of rebellion, no right of revolution and no separation of powers.

5. Reducing justice to the sovereign's command collapses might into right.
6. The exception is inconsistent with the rest: if obligation lapses where life is threatened, it is conditional after all, and Locke had only to widen that opening.

Influence

Hobbes founded modern political theory by deriving the state from individuals and their interests rather than from God, nature or history. His undivided sovereign is the ancestor of Austin's command theory of law, and his account of relations between states remains the classical statement of international anarchy.

What he was reacting against explains everything he did. He was dissatisfied with the common law, which he called "dog law" because it punished a man after the event for something no one had told him was forbidden; with natural rights, which he regarded as personal opinion dressed as fact; and with appeals to custom, moral sense or the law of nature, all of which he thought were ways of ending an argument rather than settling one. He wanted a single, measurable, public standard by which any law or institution could be judged.

His contributions

1. The principle of utility. An action is right in proportion as it tends to promote happiness, and wrong as it tends to produce the reverse. The measure is the greatest happiness of the greatest number, a phrase he took from Hutcheson and Beccaria and made the foundation of a system.

2. The two sovereign masters. "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 passage combines a descriptive claim, psychological hedonism, with a normative one, ethical hedonism.

8. A theory of punishment. All punishment is itself a mischief, admissible only to exclude a greater one; its purpose is deterrence; and he set out the four cases where punishment ought not to be inflicted, as groundless, inefficacious, unprofitable or needless, together with rules of proportion. He designed the Panopticon prison, and opposed the death penalty in most cases as irremediable and ungraduated.

9. Law reform and codification. This is his largest practical contribution. He demanded a written, systematic code in place of accumulated judicial precedent, coined the word "codification", and produced detailed schemes for the reform of the criminal law, the poor law, the prisons, evidence, procedure and judicial organisation.

10. Political reform. Universal suffrage, annual parliaments and the secret ballot, all derived from equal counting.

5. It ignores motive and the nature of the act.
6. It ignores the quality of pleasures, which is the objection J.S. Mill conceded.

Mill's revision

J.S. Mill accepted the framework and amended it: pleasures differ in quality as well as quantity, "better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied"; liberty has intrinsic value, protected by the harm principle; and the majority Bentham trusted is to be feared, hence Mill's anxiety about the tyranny of the majority. The amendments saved the doctrine from the charge of being fit only for swine, at the cost of introducing a standard other than pleasure.

1. The size and diversity of the country. India had to accommodate enormous religious, linguistic, caste, tribal and regional diversity, and such provisions cannot be brief. Special provisions were required for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Articles 330 to 342), for linguistic minorities (Articles 29, 30, 350A and 350B), for Anglo-Indians, and for particular States under Articles 371 to 371J.
2. The Government of India Act, 1935, was borrowed from extensively. That Act ran to 321 sections and 10 schedules, the longest statute the British Parliament had then passed, and its provisions on federalism, the division of powers, the judiciary, the services and emergency powers were carried over largely intact, taking much of its bulk with them.
3. A single constitution for both the Union and the States. In the United States, Australia and Switzerland each unit frames its own constitution; in India one document governs both levels, so the structure, powers, legislature, executive and judiciary of the States are all set out here.

8. Emergency provisions, set out exhaustively in Articles 352 to 360, with the conditions, procedure, duration and consequences of each of the three kinds of emergency.
9. Distrust of ordinary legislation. The framers deliberately put into the Constitution matters that could have been left to statute, so that they would enjoy constitutional protection and could not be altered by a simple majority. Reservation, the machinery for elections and the safeguards for minorities are examples.
10. Borrowing from many constitutions. The framers drew consciously on the United Kingdom (parliamentary government, rule of law), the United States (Fundamental Rights, judicial review), Ireland (Directive Principles), Canada (a strong Centre, residuary powers), Australia (the Concurrent List), Germany (emergency provisions) and the Soviet Union (Fundamental Duties). Assembling features from many systems necessarily produced a long document.
11. The Constituent Assembly's composition and method. It sat for 2 years, 11 months and 18 days, was dominated by lawyers, and worked through detailed committee drafts and clause-by-clause debate, a process that favours precision over brevity.

The reply, which most writers accept, is that in Indian conditions the length was necessary and prudent. A short and general constitution leaves gaps to be filled by convention, and conventions take generations to form and rest on a homogeneous political culture; India in 1950 had neither. Detail also gave protection: entrenching reservation, minority rights, the Election Commission and the Public Service Commissions placed them beyond the reach of an ordinary majority. Ambedkar made the point directly: a Constitution must provide for the conditions of the country it governs, and India's conditions required provision rather than silence.