BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 3 Political Science 2 2019-20 Question Paper with Solutions

The single exception: since the whole purpose of the covenant is self-preservation, a man may refuse to kill himself, to accuse himself or to fight where his own life is immediately at stake, and the obligation lapses if the sovereign can no longer protect him, protection and obedience being correlative.

Other criticisms available: the labour theory of value is rejected by modern economics; the theory has no room for individual agency or political liberty, dismissing rights and dissent as bourgeois ideology; and the base and superstructure relation is not one-way, as Engels conceded late in life.

Power is the capacity to make others behave as one wishes, even against their will. Influence is the ability to affect another's conduct by persuasion, advice, example or reputation, without any right to command and without sanctions.

Two differences:

1. Sanctions. Power carries the ability to impose consequences for non-compliance, by force, penalty or the withholding of a benefit, so obedience is given from fear. Influence carries no sanction: the person influenced complies because he has been persuaded or because he respects the source, and refusal costs him nothing.
2. Whose will prevails. Under power the power-holder's will is carried out despite the other's contrary preference, so the subject's own judgment is displaced. Under influence the person acted upon changes his own mind and acts on his own judgment, so his will is engaged rather than overridden.

A third difference: power is usually deliberate and directed at a particular outcome, while influence may be unintended, as with the influence of a teacher's example.

Because democracy is government by discussion and by consent, and both require an alternative to the government of the day.

1. It holds the government accountable, through questions, debates, motions, committees and the public exposure of failure, which is the principal check between elections.
2. It offers a real choice at the next election. Without an alternative government in waiting, an election is a formality and the citizen's vote loses its point.
3. It represents the minority, giving those who did not vote for the government a voice inside the institutions rather than outside them, which is what makes majority rule tolerable.
4. It improves legislation, since a bill that must survive scrutiny is a better bill.
5. It restrains the majority, deterring arbitrary action by raising its political cost.
6. It makes peaceful change of government possible, and a democracy is best measured by whether power actually changes hands.

Resistance to law is the refusal to obey, and active opposition to, a law or a government regarded as unjust, on the ground that political obligation is not absolute: the citizen owes obedience, but the state owes justice, and where it fails the ground of the obligation is weakened.

How it is exercised:

1. Non-cooperation: withdrawing support from the government, boycotting its courts, schools, legislatures and titles.
2. Civil disobedience: openly and deliberately breaking the unjust law, non-violently, and accepting the penalty. Gandhi's Salt Satyagraha, 1930.
3. Satyagraha, Gandhi's name for resistance grounded in truth and non-violence.
4. Strike and hartal, the collective withdrawal of labour or of normal activity.
5. Hijrat, voluntary migration out of the oppressor's jurisdiction.
6. Revolution, the overthrow of the government itself, as a last resort.

Modern or positive liberalism regards the state as a positive good and an instrument of freedom, not as the "necessary evil" of the classical school.

Its perception rests on T.H. Green's redefinition of freedom as "a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying". On that definition, poverty, ignorance, disease and unemployment restrict a person as effectively as any law, and the state's task is to remove those obstacles. A law compelling school attendance or limiting working hours therefore enlarges liberty rather than diminishing it.

In consequence the state is expected to: provide compulsory education, public health and social security; regulate the economy through factory legislation, minimum wages and safety law; and secure substantive equality of opportunity rather than merely formal equality before the law. Its thinkers are Green, the later J.S. Mill, Hobhouse, Laski, Keynes and later Rawls, and its monument is the welfare state built on the Beveridge Report (1942).

The third is Article 20(3): protection against self-incrimination, that no person accused of any offence shall be compelled to be a witness against himself, considered in State of Bombay v Kathi Kalu Oghad (1961) and, in relation to narco-analysis and brain mapping, in Selvi v State of Karnataka (2010).

The crucial consequence is that equal protection permits classification, because treating unequals equally would itself be unjust. The classification must satisfy the twin test of State of West Bengal v Anwar Ali Sarkar (1952): it must rest on an intelligible differentia, and that differentia must have a rational nexus with the object of the law. Article 14 forbids class legislation but permits reasonable classification.

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 others rising from below. "History is a graveyard of aristocracies." The mechanism is the circulation of elites, and the two types that circulate are the lions and the foxes, an imagery taken from Machiavelli.

The psychological foundation: residues. Residues are the constant, non-logical sentiments underlying human conduct; derivations are the rationalisations offered for what residues drive. Two classes matter politically:

1. Class I, the instinct for combinations: inventiveness, imagination, calculation, scepticism, 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:

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

His conclusion: revolutions do not abolish elite rule, they merely change the elite. The masses are the instrument, never the beneficiary, which is why Pareto regarded the socialist promise of a classless society as an illusion.

Criticisms: the categories are crude, since real leaders are mixtures; the theory is close to unfalsifiable, because whoever rules is by definition the elite; it is pessimistic and undemocratic, and Mussolini claimed Pareto's authority; and it ignores the economic structure Marx placed at the centre.

2. It is severe, since the pain must outweigh the expected gain.
3. It is forward-looking, concerned with prevention rather than with settling a score.
4. It treats the offender as a rational calculator responding to incentives.
5. It requires publicity, certainty and swiftness: a punishment nobody hears about, or expects to receive, or receives only years later, deters nobody.

Merits:

1. It protects society by reducing crime, which is the state's first duty.
2. It works well against calculated offences: economic crime, tax evasion, smuggling, corruption and traffic violations, where the offender genuinely weighs cost against gain.
3. It upholds the authority of the law and public confidence in it.
4. It is administratively simpler than individualised reformative treatment.

Demerits:

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. Max Weber: it is the belief of the governed in the rightfulness of the rule, resting on tradition, charisma or legal-rational rules. Lipset: the capacity of a system to maintain the belief that its institutions are the most appropriate for the society.

Its significance:

1. It converts power into authority. Power is the capacity to compel; legitimacy is the belief that the compulsion is rightful. Without it a government has force and no title, and is obeyed only while the force is applied.
2. It makes government economical. No state can post a policeman behind every citizen. A legitimate government secures voluntary compliance, obedience given when nobody is watching, which is the only kind of obedience a large state can afford. Tax is paid, licences are taken out and judgments are complied with overwhelmingly without enforcement.

7. It underpins international standing: recognition, treaty-making and membership of international institutions follow from being accepted as the lawful government of a territory.
8. Its absence is fatal. A government that loses legitimacy is thrown back on coercion, which is expensive, brittle and self-defeating, since repression itself becomes the grievance. That is why usurpers seek referendums, constitutions and elections: they are buying legitimacy because power alone is not enough.

How it is maintained: free and fair elections under an independent authority, in India the Election Commission under Article 324; the rule of law and judicial review; delivery of security, justice and public services; inclusion, so that no group is permanently excluded; transparency and accountability, including the Right to Information Act, 2005; toleration of dissent; and symbols, ceremony and civic education.

Max Weber (1864 to 1920) distinguished power from authority and classified authority by the ground of its legitimacy, that is by the reason people believe the command ought to be obeyed.

Power and authority first. Power is "the probability that an actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance". Authority is legitimate power, accepted as rightful, so that obedience is voluntary. Weber's question is what makes people accept it, and he found three answers.

1. Traditional authority

Basis: "an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of those exercising authority under them."

Features: authority is inherited by birth and succession; obedience is owed to the person, not to an office; the ruler is bound by custom rather than enacted law; administration is personal, officials being retainers chosen for loyalty and kinship; and the type is conservative, since innovation attacks the source of the authority itself.

Features: obedience is owed to the office and the rules, not to the person; authority is impersonal, defined and limited by rules, so an act beyond competence is void; officials are recruited on merit, salaried and pursuing a career; the official's private life is separate from his office; and administration proceeds by hierarchy, written records and specialisation, which is bureaucracy.

Examples: the modern constitutional state, the civil service, the courts, a statutory regulator.

Assessment

Merits: the classification is simple, universal and comparative; it explains the basis of obedience rather than merely describing who rules; and it supplies a theory of historical change through routinisation and rationalisation.

Criticisms: the three are ideal types and never occur pure, so every real regime is a mixture; they are not exhaustive, since Weber has no comfortable place for authority resting on expertise or on ideology; charisma is subjective and identifiable mainly after the event; and the scheme ignores the economic basis of authority that Marx placed at the centre.

3. "Will, not force, is the basis of the state." This is Green's central proposition: a state rests ultimately on the recognition by its members that it serves the common good, and not on coercion.
4. Rights are social. A right is a claim recognised by society as necessary for the realisation of the common good, so rights exist in and through society, and rights and duties are correlative.

His view on obedience and resistance

The presumption is strongly in favour of obedience, and Green states it more firmly than most defenders of resistance, because the general maintenance of law is itself part of the common good. Habitual disobedience injures everyone, so a citizen may not disobey merely because a law inconveniences him.

But obedience is conditional. Since the whole ground of the obligation is that law serves the common good, a law that defeats the common good weakens the obligation, and may be resisted.

The conditions Green attaches, and reproducing them is what earns the marks:

3. The idealist premise that individual and social good cannot conflict is optimistic; where a minority is oppressed by a settled majority, its good and the majority's do genuinely diverge.
4. L.T. Hobhouse and others criticised the idealist tradition for giving the state too exalted a status.

It is issued in matters when there is a need to produce the detenue before the court so as to judge the preconditions and dimensions of his arrest. (a) Identify and explain the writ as reflected in the given facts.

(b) Name three constitutional provisions aiming to realise political justice in India.

(a) The writ: HABEAS CORPUS

The facts identify it exactly: the writ is issued "when there is a need to produce the detenue before the court so as to judge the preconditions and dimensions of his arrest".

5. It is available against preventive detention as well as punitive detention, and the safeguards of Article 22 are enforced through it.
6. It does not lie where the detention is under a lawful order of a competent court, or where the person is already free.

Why it is called the most important writ: it protects personal liberty, without which no other right can be exercised. It is called the "great writ of liberty", and its historical significance is that it makes the executive answer to a court for every deprivation of freedom.

The Indian caution. In ADM Jabalpur v Shivkant Shukla (1976) the Supreme Court held during the Emergency that habeas corpus was unavailable while Article 21 stood suspended, a decision universally regarded as its lowest point and expressly overruled in K.S. Puttaswamy v Union of India (2017). Justice H.R. Khanna's lone dissent is the celebrated judgment in the case. The corrective was the 44th Amendment, 1978, which provides that the enforcement of Articles 20 and 21 cannot be suspended even during an Emergency.

2. Article 325: no person may be excluded from, or claim inclusion in, an electoral roll on grounds only of religion, race, caste or sex, and there is to be one general electoral roll for every constituency, which abolished the separate electorates of the colonial period.
3. Articles 330 and 332: reservation of seats for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the Lok Sabha and in the State Legislative Assemblies, so that communities historically excluded from power are represented in the bodies that make the law.

Others that would earn the marks equally: Article 324, the independent Election Commission; Article 16, equality of opportunity in public employment; Articles 243D and 243T, reservation for SCs, STs and women in panchayats and municipalities; the 106th Amendment, 2023, providing for reservation of one-third of seats for women in the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies; and Article 19(1)(a), (b) and (c), the freedoms of speech, assembly and association, without which political participation is impossible.

1. Whom the doctrine covers. Utilitarianism aims at the greatest happiness of the greatest number, so a minority may be sacrificed whenever the aggregate rises. Sarvodaya, from sarva (all) and udaya (rise), aims at the welfare of all without exception, and holds that no one may be sacrificed however large the gain to others. Gandhi's test is his talisman: will the step help the poorest and weakest person you have seen?
2. The standard of value, and the treatment of means. Utilitarianism is quantitative and material, measuring pleasure and pain by the felicific calculus, and it accepts that the end justifies the means. Sarvodaya is moral and spiritual, resting on truth and non-violence, and insists that means and ends are inseparable: the means are the seed and the end the tree.

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.

What follows: pleasures are measured by the felicific calculus of intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity and extent; natural rights are "nonsense upon stilts", since rights are created by law and law justified by utility; and punishment, being itself a pain, is admissible only to prevent a greater one.

3. Sons of the soil politics, demanding local preference in jobs, education and land, which is hostile to migrants from other States and cuts against Article 19(1)(d) and (e), the right to move and settle anywhere in India.
4. Encouragement of separatism at the extreme. Regional identity pressed to its limit shades into demands for autonomy beyond the constitutional scheme, and in some periods into secessionist movements.
5. Instability at the Centre. In a coalition, a regional partner can withdraw and bring the government down, which was the experience repeatedly between 1989 and 1999, and instability postpones long-term policy.
6. Blackmail power out of all proportion to strength: a small party holding the balance can extract concessions, portfolios or projects for its State that a national calculation would not justify.
7. Obstruction of national policy requiring uniformity, and of inter-State cooperation.

3. They strengthen federalism. They resist centralisation, bargain for State autonomy and for devolution, and, in the coalition era from 1989 to 2014, made national policy require the consent of parties answerable to different electorates. That is federalism operating through the party system rather than through the constitutional text.
4. They have deepened democracy socially. The rise of the SP, BSP, RJD and the Dravidian parties brought previously excluded castes and communities into power, which is among the most significant democratic developments in independent India.
5. They provide an alternative and an accountability mechanism in States where a single national party would otherwise be unopposed.
6. They are decisive in coalition formation, both nationally and in States, and their support determines the shape of national alliances.
7. They act as a check on the concentration of power at the Centre, which is a structural safeguard rather than a merely political one.

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, physical or moral.
3. Legal moralism is excluded: society may not coerce a person because the majority finds his conduct immoral or distasteful. Mere offence is not harm.
4. Persuasion remains permissible: remonstrating, reasoning, persuading or entreating, but never compulsion or penalty.

2. The self-regarding and other-regarding distinction is hard to apply in an interdependent society.
3. Mill's own exceptions are inconsistent with his principle.
4. It sits awkwardly with his utilitarianism: if aggregate happiness is the sole test, liberty should yield whenever restriction raises the total.
5. It underrates the social nature of man, the communitarian objection.

Impact on the Indian Constitution

1. Article 19(1)(a), freedom of speech and expression, is the constitutional form of Mill's defence of free discussion. Decisively, Article 19(2) permits restrictions only on defined, harm-based grounds: the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, contempt of court, defamation and incitement to an offence. Listing the permitted grounds is Mill's principle written as a schedule, since a restriction on any other ground fails however sensible it appears.
2. The "reasonable restrictions" requirement, with reasonableness for the court and not the legislature, institutionalises the presumption in favour of liberty.

9. Shafin Jahan v Asokan K.M. (2018): the choice of a partner belongs to the individual.
10. Constitutional morality over popular morality, held expressly in Navtej and Puttaswamy, is Mill's rejection of legal moralism adopted as Indian doctrine.

Where India departs from Mill

Article 19(2) permits restrictions in the interests of "decency or morality" and of "friendly relations with foreign States", wider than harm to others; Article 25 subjects religious freedom to public order, morality and health; and Indian law retains paternalist legislation, including compulsory helmet and seat belt rules and prohibition in some States, the last expressly contemplated by Article 47. Mill is an influence on the Constitution, not a template for it.

3. The economic base determines the superstructure. "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness." Law, the state, religion, morality and education arise from the mode of production and function to preserve it.
4. 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", and "political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another".
5. Ideology conceals this. The ruling ideas of every age are the ideas of its ruling class, and the resulting false consciousness makes the arrangement appear natural and just, which is why Marx called religion "the opium of the people".
6. Class struggle is therefore the form political conflict takes. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles": master and slave, lord and serf, bourgeoisie and proletariat.

Part 2: Why power is a TEMPORARY phenomenon

4. Because the state exists only to hold down a subject class. Once the proletarian revolution abolishes private ownership and classes disappear, there is no class left to be coerced, so the state has no function. It is not abolished by decree; it withers away, in Engels's phrase, and "the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things".
5. The stages are therefore: revolution, the transitional dictatorship of the proletariat in which the state is strongest, socialism with distribution according to work, and finally communism, classless and stateless, with distribution according to needs.

Part 3: The Marxian theory of political obligation

Its main features:

1. No obligation is owed to the capitalist state. A body that exists to maintain exploitation cannot generate a duty in those it exploits; the premise of every theory of obligation, that the state serves those it governs, is simply false for the proletarian.
2. The obligation asserted by bourgeois law is false consciousness. Since law is part of the superstructure and protects bourgeois property, the sense of duty it inspires is an ideological product and not a moral insight.

7. In the final stage the question lapses, since with the withering away of the state there is nothing left to obey.
8. Two qualifications. Marx did not counsel constant lawlessness meanwhile: he supported the struggle for the franchise, factory legislation and trade union rights, because these build the organisation and consciousness that make revolution possible. And his position is a limiting case of the ordinary conditional theory rather than a departure from it: Locke says obligation lapses when the trust is broken, Green when a law defeats the common good, Raphael when justice and the general interest fail. Marx holds that the capitalist state never satisfies those conditions for the proletariat, which makes his disagreement empirical as much as philosophical.

Criticism

1. It assumes all political power is class power, ignoring religion, nationalism, language, race and, in India, caste.
2. It leaves the citizen no criterion for judging a socialist state, since the party is assumed to represent the class, which is precisely how a transitional dictatorship becomes permanent.

For full marks, cover: satyagraha and its origin, truth as the end, ahimsa as the means, the argument connecting them, the conditions and techniques; then the Gandhian provisions of the Constitution across Parts III, IV and IX, the amendments, and an honest assessment of what was accepted and what was rejected.

Part 1: Truth and Ahimsa as the pillars of Satyagraha

Satyagraha is a Sanskrit compound of satya (truth) and agraha (firmness), meaning "holding firmly to truth" or truth-force. Gandhi coined the word 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, and Gandhi defined it as "the vindication of truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on one's own self".

Satya, Truth: the first pillar and the END

2. It operates by self-suffering (tapasya), not by inflicting suffering.
3. Its aim is to convert, not to defeat. The opponent is to be won over, because the object is a shared society afterwards.
4. It is a positive force, "the greatest force at the disposal of mankind, mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man", and not mere abstention.

How the two pillars are connected

Truth is the end and non-violence the means, and Gandhi's argument for the connection is epistemic rather than merely ethical: because everyone's grasp of truth is partial, anyone may be wrong, and a person who may be wrong must not use a weapon whose effects cannot be undone. Self-suffering places the cost 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. His practical reason is that a movement winning by violence produces a state that keeps power by violence, having trained its people in nothing else.

1. Article 40: organisation of village panchayats as units of self-government, the direct expression of Gram Swaraj. This is the most important Gandhian Article.
2. Article 43: promotion of cottage industries on an individual or cooperative basis in rural areas, and a living wage, which is khadi and village industry in constitutional form.
3. Article 43B: promotion of cooperative societies, added by the 97th Amendment, 2011.
4. Article 46: promotion of the educational and economic interests of the weaker sections, particularly the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, which is the talisman as a directive.
5. Article 47: prohibition of intoxicating drinks and drugs injurious to health, and the raising of nutrition and public health, prohibition having been a central Gandhian demand.
6. Article 48: prohibition of the slaughter of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle, and the improvement of animal husbandry.
7. Article 45, in its original form, free and compulsory education for children, reflecting Nai Talim, basic education.

For full marks, cover: the fact with figures and comparisons, ten or more factors each with an illustration, and an assessment weighing the criticism against the reply.

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.

The factors

1. The size and diversity of the country. Provisions were required for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Articles 330 to 342), linguistic minorities (Articles 29, 30, 350A and 350B), and particular States and regions under Articles 371 to 371J, together with the Fifth and Sixth Schedules for Scheduled and Tribal Areas.

7. Provisions for the services and constitutional bodies: the Public Service Commissions (315 to 323), the Comptroller and Auditor General (148 to 151), the Election Commission (324), the Finance Commission (280), the All-India Services (312) and the official languages (343 to 351).
8. Emergency provisions, exhaustively set out in Articles 352 to 360.
9. Distrust of ordinary legislation. The framers deliberately constitutionalised matters that could have been left to statute, so that they would be protected from a temporary majority.
10. Borrowing from many constitutions: the United Kingdom, the United States, Ireland, Canada, Australia, Germany and the Soviet Union.
11. The Constituent Assembly's composition and method: it sat for 2 years, 11 months and 18 days, was dominated by lawyers, and worked clause by clause.
12. Transitional and temporary provisions for the integration of the princely states.
13. Frequent amendment, adding Parts IX, IX-A and IX-B and the Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth Schedules.

For full marks, cover: the reformative theory with its basis, features, methods, merits and serious criticisms, and its expression in Indian law; then Bentham's view with the four cases where punishment is unmeet, his rules of proportion, and a conclusion connecting the two.

Part 1: The Reformative theory of Punishment

The theory. 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, illiteracy, addiction or mental condition, and the state's task is to remove the cause. Its slogan is that the criminal, not the crime, should be treated.

Its basis lies in nineteenth and twentieth century criminology and psychology, which found crime strongly associated with social conditions rather than with innate wickedness, and in the humanitarian movement in prison reform.

Its features:

Criticisms:

1. Weak against grave and premeditated crime, where a purely therapeutic response fails to protect society or to satisfy the sense of justice on which the law's credibility depends.
2. No principle of proportion, and therefore no upper limit: treatment continues until the offender is judged cured, so it can justify indefinite detention. C.S. Lewis put it sharply: the humanitarian theory removes the offender from the realm of justice, where he is entitled to be punished no more than he deserves, and hands him to experts who may detain him as long as they think fit, for his own good.
3. It denies the offender the status of a moral agent who chose, which Kant and Hegel regarded as a failure of respect.
4. Expensive, requiring trained probation officers, psychologists and facilities most prison systems lack, so the theory is often more real in the statute book than in the prison.
5. Limited effect on habitual and professional criminals.

1. All punishment is in itself an evil. "All punishment is mischief: all punishment in itself is evil. Upon the principle of utility, if it ought at all to be admitted, it ought only to be admitted in as far as it promises to exclude some greater evil."
2. Its purpose is prevention, not vengeance. Punishment looks forward. Its ends in order are: to prevent all offences where possible; failing that, to prevent the worst offence; to induce the offender to do no more mischief than necessary; and to prevent mischief at the least cost in suffering.
3. Deterrence is the principal mode. Punishment must add enough pain to outweigh the profit of the crime, so that crime never pays. He distinguished general prevention, by example, which he called the chief end, from particular prevention.
4. The four cases in which punishment ought not to be inflicted: where it is groundless (no mischief to prevent), inefficacious (it cannot deter, as with infancy, insanity, unavoidable ignorance, or a retrospective law), unprofitable (the mischief of the punishment exceeds that of the offence), or needless (the mischief may be prevented more cheaply, by instruction or persuasion).

Conclusion: how the two relate

The two are not opposed, and Bentham's sixth property, subserviency to reformation, shows that he anticipated the reformative theory rather than excluding it. But they differ on the crucial question of a limit. Bentham supplies a ceiling of a kind, since an excess of punishment is a waste of pain, though it is fixed by efficiency rather than by desert. The reformative theory supplies no ceiling at all.

That is why neither is sufficient alone, and Indian sentencing blends them with retribution, which fixes the maximum by desert. Reformation dominates at the lower end of the scale, through the Probation Act and juvenile justice; the "rarest of rare" doctrine of Bachan Singh v State of Punjab (1980) marks the retributive limit at the top; and Mithu v State of Punjab (1983) struck down a mandatory death sentence precisely because it removed the discretion that proportionality requires.

1. It ends exploitation. Under private ownership, those who own appropriate value created by those who do not, which Marx's theory of surplus value states precisely: labour power is bought at the cost of subsistence, the worker produces more than that, and the difference is taken. Socialism removes the relationship rather than mitigating its effects.
2. It reduces economic inequality. Capitalism produces cumulative inequality, since wealth generates further wealth and is inherited, and socialists argue that inequality on that scale corresponds to no difference in effort or desert.
3. It makes freedom real by securing its material conditions. This is the strongest merit and the one most often missed. Formal freedom without means is empty: a person who is hungry, ill, illiterate or unemployed cannot use the liberties the law gives him, and a contract between grossly unequal parties is free for only one of them. This is the same argument T.H. Green made within liberalism.
4. It makes political equality real. One person one vote is nominal where a few control the resources with which opinion is formed and elections are fought. Ambedkar made this the central warning of his closing speech to the Constituent Assembly on 25 November 1949.

Counter-arguments, briefly for balance: socialism is charged with destroying incentive; with concentrating dangerous power in the state, which is Hayek's argument in The Road to Serfdom; with the information problem identified by Mises and Hayek, that no planner can know what millions of dispersed decisions know; with producing bureaucracy and inefficiency; and with a poor historical record where fully implemented.

Part 2: The Right to Property in India after the 44th Amendment

The position before 1978. Property was doubly protected as a Fundamental Right:

1. Article 19(1)(f): the right of every citizen to acquire, hold and dispose of property, subject to reasonable restrictions in the interests of the general public under Article 19(5).
2. Article 31: no person to be deprived of property save by authority of law, and compulsory acquisition only for a public purpose and on payment of compensation.

The twenty-seven-year conflict. Parliament wanted to abolish zamindari and impose land ceilings; the courts read the property guarantee strictly and struck the legislation down; and each side answered the other:

The present status. The right to property in India is:

1. Not a Fundamental Right, but a constitutional or legal right under Article 300A.
2. Not enforceable under Article 32, since that remedy is available only for Fundamental Rights, though a person may approach a High Court under Article 226, and may sue in the ordinary courts.
3. Still a real protection: deprivation must be by authority of law, meaning a valid enacted law and not executive action; the law must be within the legislature's competence; the acquisition must be for a public purpose; and the Supreme Court has repeatedly described property as a constitutional and human right, holding that the State cannot take it without following the procedure the law prescribes.
4. Governed for acquisition by the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013.
5. Preserved as a Fundamental Right in two special cases: Article 30(1A), on compulsory acquisition of the property of a minority educational institution, and the second proviso to Article 31A(1), on land held within the ceiling limit under personal cultivation.