What is of relevance to us is the question of the great Indian state and the legitimacy it seemingly enjoys to do and claim all the things it does. We do not ask these questions often. We have ceased to inquire after first causes, and we refuse to consider that which the right way to govern our lives is. We allow unfair people to rule us. The question of the power of the state became relevant the moment it broke from the church in the West. Even while the king was considered sovereign, others sought to have him share his authority, as is clearly evident from the early example of the Magna Carta. In the summer of 1215, a crude bill of rights was drawn up by the rebellious barons of England, to which King John affixed his seal in Runnymede.
That document marked the weakening of the sovereign, and since then, up to the regicide of Charles I in 1649, a tussle ensued between the nobles and the state. Other events like the French Revolution individual liberty and natural rights became central concerns, with republican ideas and rendering the status of the monarch merely titular.
In all this democracy has played a big role, for it is the manifest instrument through which such a claim is argued. The tag of democracy legitimizes regimes do not practice constitutional liberalism, whereas on the other hand seemingly non-democratic rulers practice it. The rule of law prevails in Singapore, which is not a democracy and it does not even in the world’s largest democracy-India.
Democracy prevails in states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and that is concluded because people queue up to vote. They do so to make us believe their will is imprinted on the state to which they subject their will in the belief that it will ensure the rule of law, create opportunities for their economic well-being, protect their rights and not treat them arbitrarily. It is because of this implied belief that we accord venerated status to those who are allowed to rule through the electoral system. When liberalization happened in the 1980s under Rajiv Gandhi and got formalized by Manmohan Singh in 1991, economic power merely shifted from a closed group of capitalists to the emergent middle classes.
The best real estate is owned by the government in the name of the state. Public land as a concept is developed with the idea of the commons, as opposed to the notion that the king owned all land. In India today, there are no commons. The commons belong to the state. When groups of people do what the state has been doing for its own interest, their, activities are labeled illegal. The state does is working only in the name of people and engaged, with some help from those who are its, legitimate instruments, in the business of making people’s lives miserable in today’s democracy.