BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 3 Political Science 2 2018-19 Question Paper with Solutions

The instruments of authority are the means through which authority is actually exercised and made effective.

Two instruments:

1. Law, including the constitution, statutes, delegated legislation, executive orders and judicial decisions. Law is the primary instrument because it both confers authority on an office and defines its limits, so that a command within the rule is binding and one outside it is void.
2. The administrative machinery, that is bureaucracy, through which commands are transmitted and carried out. Weber treated a rule-bound, hierarchical, merit-recruited bureaucracy as the characteristic instrument of legal-rational authority, and regarded it as technically superior to every other form of administration.

Other instruments that would answer equally: force and sanctions, held in reserve for those who do not comply voluntarily; persuasion and propaganda, including official information and appeals to civic duty; rewards and inducements, such as subsidies, licences and honours; and custom, ceremony and symbols, which sustain traditional authority.

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, resting on tradition, charisma or legal-rational rules.

How power is legalized in a modern democracy:

1. A constitution, which creates the offices, confers the powers and fixes their limits.
2. Free and fair periodic elections on universal adult franchise, which decide who occupies those offices and confer a popular mandate. In India, Article 326 and the Election Commission under Article 324.
3. Law and due process, so that power is exercised through general rules rather than personal command, and is subject to judicial review.
4. Accountability: to the legislature, to a free press and to public opinion.

One Fundamental Right available to citizens and non-citizens alike: Article 21, protection of life and personal liberty, whose words are "no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law". Its application to a foreign national was confirmed in Chairman, Railway Board v Chandrima Das (2000). Article 14 would answer equally, as would Articles 20, 22, 23, 24 and 25 to 28.

The limitation on Parliament's amending power is the basic structure doctrine, laid down by a thirteen-judge bench in Kesavananda Bharati v State of Kerala (1973): Parliament may amend any provision of the Constitution under Article 368, including the Fundamental Rights, but it may not alter or destroy the basic structure or essential features. Features held to be basic include the supremacy of the Constitution, the rule of law, judicial review, separation of powers, federalism, secularism, the democratic and republican form of government, free and fair elections and the independence of the judiciary.

An interest group, also called a pressure group, is an organised association of people with a shared interest or concern which seeks to influence government policy in that interest without seeking to capture political office itself. That last element is what distinguishes it from a political party.

Its methods are lobbying, representation and memoranda, appearing before committees, supplying information and expertise, shaping public opinion through the media, litigation, and in some cases agitation.

One interest group from India: FICCI, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, founded 1927. CII, ASSOCHAM, INTUC, AITUC, BMS, the Bar Council of India and the Indian Medical Association would answer equally.

Because democracy is government by consent, and consent is meaningless unless the people have informed views and can express them.

1. It is the basis of the government's mandate, and the means by which the people's will is known between elections as well as at them.
2. It is a continuous check on government, since a government that ignores it loses the next election, and fear of adverse opinion restrains it meanwhile.
3. It guides policy by telling government which problems matter.
4. It protects rights and liberties, an alert public being the first defence against encroachment.
5. It gives legitimacy to laws, which are obeyed more readily when they command general assent.

The word sound is doing the work: opinion is valuable only if informed and enlightened, which requires education, a free press and freedom of speech under Article 19(1)(a).

4. Measurability, through the felicific calculus. Pleasures and pains can be compared on seven dimensions: intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity and, for a community, extent. Legislation therefore becomes computation.
5. Quantitative hedonism in Bentham. Pleasures differ only in quantity, never in worth: "Quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry." J.S. Mill amended this, holding that pleasures differ in quality, "better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied".
6. Egalitarian counting. "Each is to count for one, and nobody for more than one." Nobody's happiness weighs more because of birth or rank, which makes the doctrine democratic in its consequences and led Bentham to universal suffrage.
7. Individualism. The community is "a fictitious body" composed of individuals, and its interest is nothing more than the sum of the interests of its members.
8. Rejection of natural rights and of tradition. Natural rights are "nonsense upon stilts". Rights are created by law and law is justified by utility, and no custom carries authority merely from age.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 to 1778) developed the concept in The Social Contract (1762). It is the central idea of his political philosophy and one of the most influential and most criticised in the subject.

The problem it solves. Rousseau opens with "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains", and sets himself the task of finding "a form of association in which each, uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before". The general will is his answer to the problem of reconciling liberty with authority.

What it is. The general will (volonté générale) is the will of the community as a whole directed at the common good, as distinct from the private wills of its members. It is not a mere aggregate: Rousseau distinguishes it sharply from the will of all (volonté de tous), which is the sum of private wills, each aiming at its own interest. The general will is what remains when the pluses and minuses of particular interest cancel out.

Its consequence for liberty. Because the citizen is a part-author of the law, in obeying the general will he obeys himself and remains free. Law is therefore not an external constraint but collective self-government. And the notorious corollary: whoever refuses to obey the general will "shall be forced to be free".

Criticisms:

1. It is vague: Rousseau never says how the general will is to be identified in practice, and voting yields only the will of all.
2. Somebody must declare it, and whoever does so acquires the right to overrule what people actually say they want.
3. "Forced to be free" is a formula for coercion in the name of liberty. Isaiah Berlin treated it as the paradigm case of positive liberty turning into tyranny, and both the Jacobin Terror and later totalitarian movements have been traced, fairly or not, to it.
4. It is incompatible with representative government and with the separation of powers, and so with almost every working modern democracy.
5. It presupposes a small, homogeneous community; Rousseau himself thought it workable only in a city state.

2. Article 21: 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 read in the rights to livelihood (Olga Tellis, 1985), health (Paschim Banga, 1996), shelter, a clean environment, privacy (K.S. Puttaswamy, 2017) and death with dignity (Common Cause, 2018).
3. Article 23: prohibition of traffic in human beings and forced labour, forbidding begar. 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. Article 24: prohibition of child labour below fourteen in factories, mines and hazardous employment, and Article 21A, the right to education, added in 2002.
5. Articles 14, 15 and 16: equality before the law, prohibition of discrimination and equality of opportunity, which remove the legal disabilities attached to birth. Article 18 abolishes titles.
6. Articles 25 to 28: freedom of conscience and religion, which protect the individual's inner life from state direction.

A political party is an organised body of citizens holding broadly common views on public questions who act as a unit to capture political power through constitutional means. India has more than 2,800 registered parties, of which a handful are recognised by the Election Commission as national parties and several dozen as State parties.

Main features:

1. A multi-party system, reflecting India's religious, linguistic, caste, tribal and regional diversity. No other democracy has anything approaching the number of parties.
2. A large number of strong regional parties, often dominant in their States regardless of the national result: the DMK and AIADMK in Tamil Nadu, the TMC in West Bengal, the BJD in Odisha, the SP and BSP in Uttar Pradesh, the RJD and JD(U) in Bihar, the Shiv Sena and NCP in Maharashtra, the TDP in Andhra Pradesh, the Akali Dal in Punjab.

9. Populism and competitive welfare promises, and increasingly professional campaign management and use of social media.
10. Regulation by the Election Commission under the Representation of the People Act, 1951, and the Model Code of Conduct, but with no comprehensive law governing the internal working of parties.

Why the shift happened

The Industrial Revolution produced conditions the doctrine could not explain away: child labour, sixteen-hour days, industrial disease, slums, and unemployment in the trade cycle. Three propositions became undeniable:

1. Formal freedom is not real freedom. A man too poor, too ill or too ignorant to use his liberty is not in fact free. The law permitted a labourer to buy a house and educate his children; his wages did not.
2. The parties to a contract are not equal. Freedom of contract between a mill owner and a child is freedom for one side only.
3. Restraint is not only legal. Poverty, disease and ignorance restrict people as effectively as any statute, and only collective action can remove them.

Two further forces pushed the same way: the extension of the franchise to the working class from 1867, which made answering their demands politically necessary; and utilitarianism itself, since if the test is the greatest happiness then state action that increases happiness is justified.

In India the Constitution contains both phases at once: Part III is negative-liberal restraint, Part IV is positive-liberal direction, and the settled position from Minerva Mills (1980) is that the harmony and balance between them is itself part of the basic structure.

4. Propinquity or remoteness: how soon it will come.
5. Fecundity: the chance it has of being followed by more of the same kind, pleasure after pleasure.
6. Purity: the chance it has of not being followed by sensations of the opposite kind, pleasure without subsequent pain.
7. Extent: the number of persons affected. This last applies when a community rather than an individual is considered, and it is what turns a personal calculation into a legislative one.

The method. Sum the values of all the pleasures on one side and all the pains on the other; the balance shows whether the act tends to good or evil. Repeat the process for every person affected, and the general balance determines the tendency of the act with respect to the community. On this "each is to count for one, and nobody for more than one".

The types of pleasure

Bentham insisted that pleasures differ only in quantity and never in worth: "Quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry", pushpin being a trivial pub game. There are therefore no higher and lower pleasures, only larger and smaller quantities.

3. Quality is ignored, which is J.S. Mill's famous objection: "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." The test, Mill said, is the preference of those competently acquainted with both kinds.
4. Including malevolence as a pleasure is a serious embarrassment: on a strict count, the satisfaction a mob takes in persecution enters the total on the credit side.
5. The calculation can never be completed, since consequences run on indefinitely.

During the king's reign, there have been close to 20 attempted or successful coups, the last one in May 2014, when a military junta seized power from the democratically elected government. But the Monarchy has remained revered.

Critics of the military junta say it used it's support for the Monarchy as a pretext for grabbing power from the elected government. (a) On the basis of Weber's classification of Authority identify the type of Authority exercised by the Thai Monarch.

Name two features of this type of authority. (b) Name three differences between Power & Authority.

2. Obedience is owed to the person, not to an office defined by rules. The relationship is personal and emotional rather than contractual, which is exactly what the crowd outside the hospital demonstrates. There is no written charter of competence; the ruler is bound by custom and precedent rather than by enacted law, and administration is personal rather than bureaucratic.

A third feature worth naming: it is conservative, since the reason for doing anything is that it has always been done, so innovation attacks the source of the authority itself.

(b) Three differences between Power and Authority

The main purpose is to provide deterrence and punishment for the offender, in attempts to prevent them from committing repeat offenses. (a) Identify and explain the type of punishment as reflected in the given facts.

(b) Name three features of Jeremy Bentham's view on punishment.

(a) The type of punishment: DETERRENT

The facts identify the deterrent theory in terms: the stated "main purpose is to provide deterrence ... in attempts to prevent them from committing repeat offenses". A fine is the classic deterrent penalty, since it is calculated to make the offence unprofitable.

3. It is reversible if the conviction is set aside, unlike imprisonment.
4. It avoids the criminogenic effect of prison, which is why the facts note that fines are reserved mainly for less serious and non-violent crime.

Merits of the deterrent theory: it protects society by reducing crime; it works well against calculated offences; and it upholds the authority of the law.

Demerits: it uses the offender as a means to the good of others, which is Kant's objection; it tends towards excessive severity; it fails against crimes of passion and against hardened offenders; it ignores the causes of crime and makes no attempt at reform; and, as applied to fines specifically, it bears unequally on rich and poor, since the same sum is a trivial penalty for one and a catastrophe for another, which is why some systems use day fines calculated on income.

(b) Three features of Bentham's view on punishment

Further features available: punishment should possess variability, equability, commensurability, characteristicalness, exemplarity, frugality and subserviency to reformation; and Bentham opposed the death penalty in most cases as irremediable and incapable of gradation.

Socialism is the doctrine that the means of production, distribution and exchange should be owned or controlled by the community as a whole, so that wealth is produced for use rather than for private profit and distributed on a footing of rough equality. Its types are utopian (Owen, Saint-Simon, Fourier), scientific or Marxist, and democratic or Fabian (the Webbs, Shaw, Laski), the last being the strand India followed.

Two main merits:

1. It ends exploitation and reduces economic inequality. Where the means of production are privately owned, those who own appropriate value created by those who do not, which is Marx's theory of surplus value. Public ownership removes the mechanism rather than mitigating its effects, and the wider aim, preventing the concentration of wealth, addresses the cumulative inequality that a market produces because wealth generates further wealth and is inherited.

2. Article 39(b) and (c), Directive Principles requiring that the ownership and control of material resources be so distributed as best to subserve the common good, and that the operation of the economic system shall not result in the concentration of wealth and means of production to the common detriment. These two clauses are the closest the Constitution comes to the passage's own language.
3. Article 38, requiring the State to secure a social order for the welfare of the people and to minimise inequalities in income, status, facilities and opportunities.

Others that would earn the marks equally: Article 41 (right to work, education and public assistance); Article 42 (humane conditions of work and maternity relief); Article 43 (a living wage and cottage industries); Article 43A (workers' participation in management); Article 47 (nutrition and public health); Article 23 (prohibition of forced labour); Article 24 (prohibition of child labour); and the 44th Amendment, 1978, which removed the right to property from the Fundamental Rights, leaving it as a constitutional right under Article 300A.

For full marks, cover: Pareto's elite, residues, lions and foxes, why elites decay, the two modes of circulation, his conclusion, an evaluation; then the Marxian theory of power with its features, and a comparison of the two.

Part 1: The Circulation of Elites

Vilfredo Pareto (1848 to 1923) set out the theory in The Mind and Society (1916).

The elite defined. An elite is the class of people with the highest indices in their branch of activity. Pareto divides it into the governing elite, those who play a considerable part in government, and the non-governing elite. Below both is the non-elite, the mass. Every society, at every period and under every form of government, is ruled by a minority, and democracy changes only the manner of recruitment.

The cycle. A regime of foxes accumulates debt, cynicism and expedients and loses the will to defend itself, and falls to rising lions. A regime of lions becomes rigid and brutal, cannot adapt, and lets in the foxes. Government therefore oscillates, and history is "a graveyard of aristocracies".

Two modes of circulation: gradual and peaceful, where the elite is open and absorbs talent from below, which Pareto regarded as the healthier route; and sudden and violent, where the elite is closed, so that resentment accumulates and a counter-elite organises the masses behind it in a revolution.

His conclusion. Revolutions do not abolish elite rule; they change the elite. The masses are the instrument, never the beneficiary.

3. The state is an instrument of class domination, not a neutral umpire: "the executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie". Its essential content is coercive machinery, the army, police, courts and prisons.
4. Law, religion, morality and education form the superstructure, arising from the economic base and functioning to legitimise it. The resulting state of mind is false consciousness, and religion is "the opium of the people".
5. Power is exercised through class struggle, and history is the record of it: master and slave, lord and serf, bourgeoisie and proletariat.
6. Power is a temporary and historical phenomenon, not a permanent feature of society. It exists because society is divided into classes; abolish classes and the basis of power disappears.
7. It is to be captured by revolution, followed by a transitional dictatorship of the proletariat.
8. The state withers away once classes have disappeared, since there is no class left to hold down. Administration continues; coercion ends.
9. Democracy under capitalism is a facade, formal political equality concealing substantive economic domination.

For full marks, cover: the six freedoms with their respective restriction clauses, the tests of reasonableness, the omitted seventh freedom and the leading cases; then the Fundamental Duties, their origin, the full list, their legal character, their utility and the criticisms.

Part 1: The freedoms under Article 19

Article 19(1) guarantees to all citizens six freedoms, each subject to reasonable restrictions on specified grounds.

1. Article 19(1)(a): freedom of speech and expression. It includes freedom of the press, the right to information, the right to broadcast, commercial speech, the right to silence and the right to fly the national flag. Restrictions under Article 19(2) may be imposed in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.

The missing sub-clause. Article 19(1)(f), the right to acquire, hold and dispose of property, was omitted by the 44th Amendment, 1978, which is why the list runs (a) to (e) and then (g). Property survives as a constitutional right under Article 300A.

The tests applied. A restriction must (i) fall within one of the enumerated grounds, which are exhaustive; (ii) be imposed by a valid law, not by executive action; and (iii) be reasonable, which is for the court and not the legislature to determine, judged by whether it is proportionate, whether it goes further than necessary, and whether the procedure is fair.

Leading cases: 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), striking down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act and distinguishing discussion and advocacy, which are protected, from incitement, which alone may be restricted; and Maneka Gandhi v Union of India (1978), holding that Articles 14, 19 and 21 form a single scheme.

6. (f) to value and preserve the rich heritage of the composite culture;
7. (g) to protect and improve the natural environment, including forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife, and to have compassion for living creatures;
8. (h) to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of enquiry and reform;
9. (i) to safeguard public property and to abjure violence;
10. (j) to strive towards excellence in all spheres of individual and collective activity;
11. (k) for a parent or guardian, to provide opportunities for education to his child or ward between the ages of six and fourteen. Added in 2002.

Their legal character. The duties are not enforceable by any court, and no penalty attaches to their breach, exactly like the Directive Principles. They apply only to citizens, not to all persons.

Their utility, despite being unenforceable:

1. They serve as a constant reminder of the citizen's obligations, and as a standard of civic conduct.
2. They act as a warning against anti-national and anti-social activity.

4. Their placement after Part IV rather than after Part III is said to reduce their significance.
5. They were the product of the Emergency, and were criticised at the time as an attempt to counterbalance rights with obligations to the state.

1. Satya (Truth) is the end. Gandhi began from "God is Truth" and reversed it to "Truth is God", so that the proposition includes those who do not believe in God. Truth is the ultimate reality and the purpose of life.
2. Ahimsa (Non-violence) is the means. It is not merely the absence of physical harm but active goodwill towards all, including the opponent.

The connection between them is an argument, not a sentiment. Since man's grasp of truth is always partial, anyone may be wrong; and a person who may be wrong must not use a weapon whose effects cannot be undone. Hence self-suffering (tapasya): the cost falls on the resister, who may be mistaken, rather than on the opponent, who may be right.

From this follows the doctrine of the purity of means: means and ends are inseparable, the means are the seed and the end the tree, so an immoral means can never produce a moral end. Gandhi's practical reason is that a movement winning by violence produces a state that keeps power by violence, having trained its people in nothing else.

Essential conditions

1. Non-violence in thought, word and deed.

1. Non-cooperation. Withdrawing all voluntary support from the government: surrendering titles and honours, boycotting its courts, schools, legislatures and services, so that an administration which depends on the cooperation of the governed ceases to function. The Non-Cooperation Movement, 1920 to 1922.
2. Civil disobedience. Openly and deliberately breaking a specific unjust law and accepting the penalty. Gandhi distinguished defensive civil disobedience, refusing an unjust command, from aggressive civil disobedience, actively breaking a law to challenge it. The Salt Satyagraha and Dandi March, 1930, is the classic instance, chosen because the salt tax touched the poorest and the law could be broken by anyone at the shoreline.
3. Fasting. Self-suffering to awaken the conscience of the opponent or of one's own followers. Gandhi insisted it must never be used to coerce someone with no moral connection to the faster, or it becomes blackmail, and he fasted more often against his own side than against the British.
4. Hartal and strike. Voluntary suspension of work and business as a mark of protest and mourning.
5. Picketing and boycott. Peaceful persuasion outside shops selling foreign cloth or liquor, combined with swadeshi, the positive use of Indian goods.

1. It is slow, and demands enormous discipline from very large numbers.
2. It presupposes an opponent with a conscience and a press free to report the suffering; against a wholly ruthless regime it would have been useless.
3. Mass movements are hard to keep non-violent, as Chauri Chaura in 1922 showed, when a mob killed policemen and Gandhi suspended the movement, to the dismay of many colleagues.
4. Ambedkar argued that the technique served the national struggle better than it served the socially oppressed within India, and that fasting used against a minority's demands is coercion whatever it is called.
5. The distinction between legitimate self-suffering and moral blackmail is not always easy to draw.

For full marks, cover: the fact with figures and comparisons, then ten or more factors each with an illustration, then an assessment of whether the length is a defect, with the reply and the trade-off.

The fact

The Constitution of India is the longest written constitution of any sovereign country in the world. As adopted on 26 November 1949 it contained a Preamble, 395 Articles in 22 Parts and 8 Schedules. After more than a hundred amendments it now contains around 470 Articles in 25 Parts and 12 Schedules. The United States Constitution has seven Articles and twenty-seven amendments; Australia's has 128 sections; Canada's and Japan's are likewise short documents.

The factors

5. Elaborate Fundamental Rights, with exceptions and remedies. Part III states each right, then the permissible restrictions, then the exceptions, then the remedies. Articles 19(2) to 19(6) occupy more space than the guarantee they qualify, and Articles 31A, 31B and 31C add further layers.
6. The Directive Principles and the Fundamental Duties. Part IV, borrowed from Ireland, sets out the aims of the state at length; Part IV-A, added in 1976, adds eleven duties. Neither appears in most constitutions.
7. Provisions for the services and constitutional bodies. The Public Service Commissions (Articles 315 to 323), the Comptroller and Auditor General (Articles 148 to 151), the Election Commission (Article 324), the Finance Commission (Article 280), the All-India Services (Article 312), and the official languages (Articles 343 to 351).
8. Emergency provisions, set out exhaustively in Articles 352 to 360, with the conditions, procedure, duration and consequences of each of the three kinds.
9. Distrust of ordinary legislation. The framers deliberately constitutionalised matters that could have been left to statute, so that they would be protected from an ordinary majority: reservation, election machinery and minority safeguards.

Assessment

The criticism: the Constitution is "a lawyer's paradise", inaccessible to the ordinary citizen, and it contains matters of detail belonging in ordinary statutes which must now be altered by the special procedure of Article 368.

The reply: in Indian conditions the length was necessary and prudent. A short constitution leaves gaps 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, placing reservation, minority rights and the independent commissions beyond the reach of a temporary majority. Ambedkar put it directly: a Constitution must provide for the conditions of the country it governs.

Step 2: labour power is itself a commodity. This is the decisive move. Marx distinguishes labour, the activity, from labour power, the capacity to work. The worker sells his labour power, and like any commodity its value is the labour time needed to produce and reproduce it, that is, the cost of his subsistence.

Step 3: necessary and surplus labour. Suppose the worker's daily subsistence is worth four hours of labour and he is employed for eight. The first four are necessary labour, reproducing his wages; the remaining four are surplus labour, and the value created in them is surplus value, taken by the capitalist as profit, interest and rent.

Step 4: the rate of exploitation is the ratio of surplus to necessary labour, here 100 per cent.

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

Step 6: absolute and relative surplus value. The surplus is increased by lengthening the working day (absolute) or by raising productivity so that necessary labour occupies less of it (relative).

4. It produced results by way of reaction: the eight-hour day, minimum wages, factory legislation, social security and trade union rights are reformist answers to problems he identified.
5. Alienation remains a compelling description of modern work.
6. As a method of criticism it endures: asking who owns what, in whose interest a law operates and who bears the cost is now routine.
7. It is comprehensive, offering an account of history, economics, politics, law and consciousness in one framework.

Criticisms of the interpretation of history:

1. It is monocausal. Religion, nationalism, language, race and, in India, caste have moved history at least as powerfully as class.
2. The base and superstructure relation is not one-way, as Engels conceded late in life.
3. It is deterministic, leaving no room for agency, and yet it calls on men to act.

Criticisms of class theory:

1. Class has not polarised into two camps; a large middle class grew instead.

The Indian critique. Dr B.R. Ambedkar argued that caste divides the working class against itself, so the unified proletariat Marx assumed does not exist in India. Gandhi located exploitation in greed rather than in structure, and held that changing the structure while leaving the character untouched hands the same greed a better machine.

Verdict

Marxism's diagnosis has outlived its prognosis. As an account of inequality, of the relation between economic and political power, and of the experience of work, it remains indispensable, and the concentration of wealth over recent decades has renewed its force. As a prediction, of polarisation, immiseration, revolution in advanced economies and a withering state, it has been falsified.

India's 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.

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.

Mill's own classification. He divides "the appropriate region of human liberty" into three departments:

1. Liberty of thought and feeling, and of expression. The "inward domain of consciousness": liberty of conscience in the most comprehensive sense, liberty of thought and feeling, and absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical, speculative, scientific, moral or theological. Mill treats freedom of expression as practically inseparable from it, since an opinion that may not be published is barely an opinion at all.

His three arguments for it, from Chapter II, and silencing an opinion is "robbing the human race" for each of them:

1. The suppressed opinion may be true, and to deny this is to assume our own infallibility.

Mill adds that no society is free in which these liberties are not, on the whole, respected, whatever its form of government, and that none is completely free in which they do not exist absolute and unqualified.

Criticisms: the meaning of harm is unclear, since almost no act is purely self-regarding, which James Fitzjames Stephen pressed in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873); the self-regarding and other-regarding distinction is hard to apply in an interdependent society; Mill's exclusion of "backward" societies is inconsistent with his own principle; and the whole scheme sits awkwardly with his utilitarianism.

Part 2: Mill and Bentham compared

Mill was educated by his father James Mill expressly to be Bentham's intellectual heir, and revised the doctrine substantially after a mental crisis in his twenties.

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