Impoverishment, greed, and disaffection, he says, are engendered when the king:

1/ ignores the good [people] and favours the wicked;

2/ causes harm by new unrighteous practices;

3/ neglects the observation of the proper and righteous practices;

4/ suppresses dharma and propagates adharma;

5/ does what ought not to be done and fails to do what ought to be done;

6/ fails to give what ought to be given and exacts what he cannot rightly take;

7/ does not punish those who ought to be punished but punishes those who do not deserve to be;

8/ arrests those who should not be arrested but fails to arrest those who should be seized;

9/ indulges in wasteful expenditure and destroys profitable undertakings;

10/ fails to protect the people from thieves and robs them himself;

11/ does not do what he ought to do and reviles the work done by others;

12/ causes harm to the leaders of the people and insults those worthy of honour;

13/ antagonizes the [wise] elders by lying and mischief;

14/ does not recompense service done to him;

15/ does not carry out his part of what had been agreed upon; and

16/ by his indolence and negligence destroys the welfare of his people.

It is clear from the above that whether it be a king or any sovereign howsoever appointed, an experience of injustice is accompanied by the sense of unfairness, which enters the perception of a violated promise. When Prime Minister Modi tells us that too great an insistence on rights and too little emphasis on duties has weakened India; he should keep in mind that these norms apply especially to those in authority. If the misuse of authority, the violation of promises, and unfair practices in government were visible twenty-five centuries ago, they do not require divine wisdom to be noticed by the public today.

(Arthashastra, translated by L. N. Rangarajan, 1992, p. 159)

Legal indeterminacy has been compounded by ideology, and the ongoing attempt to replace the rule of law by the rule of ideology. Even when law under a factional regime has been permeated by ideology, if in specific circumstances the laws conflict with the requirements of the regime, they will be cast aside and power will take precedence.

We will have arrived at the polity known as an ideocracy, the tyranny of an ideology.

We need only recall the fate of 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, scholar and journalist, whose only crime was to take seriously Article 35 of the Constitution of the PRC, which guarantees China’s citizens “freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.” Having spent 5 years in jail during the 1990’s, he and other Chinese intellectuals drafted Charter 2008, calling for democratic reforms. He had also investigated and exposed the involvement of senior state and communist authorities in rampant corruption. In late 2009, a Beijing court sentenced him to 11 more years for undermining state authority.

All that Liu had asked was for the Chinese constitution to be honoured by the Chinese state….

The above is an extract from my essay: The Lady Vanishes

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The measure of the man

Gandhi’s Assassin. By Dhirendra K Jha

The law of killing: A brief history of Indian fascism

Corruption and Fraud / Auditor General of India calls out massive financial irregularities

Will half-truths in the Parliament bring peace to Manipur?

India’s subdivision of criminality (how one massacre deserves another)

How Manipur Is Forced To Parade Their Losses To An Ignorant India