Shubh Dhanteras: For National Wealth

धनात् धर्मः ततः सुखम्।

This fragment of a famous shloka says that wealth enables dharma, which is the begetter of happiness. I would add that wealth also brings security, and security gives peace. Moreover, wealth sustains culture and fulfils our aesthetic sense.

 
Another famous shloka says:
साहित्यसङ्गीतकलाविहीनः
साक्षात्पशुः पुच्छविषाणहीनः।
तृणं न खादन्नपि जीवमानः
तद्भागधेयं परमं पशूनाम्॥

The famous shloka translates as follows: A person devoid of literature, music and the arts is no better than an animal without a tail or horns. That he lives without having to eat grass is indeed the great good fortune of other animals. The critical and hidden dimension of this saying is that literature, music and the arts, which transform a bare biological being into a human being, all depend on wealth. Despite this, too many literary, cultural and artistic figures celebrate penury and renunciation, contrary to what they themselves aspire to and opposed to the national interest. This is not merely ignorance; it is deceitful conduct.

The very Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) repeatedly remind us that economic production is the belly of the body politic, which sustains its muscles, meaning military power. Yet, we nurture bad bacteria in the form of ideas that weaken the gut and eat into the muscles of the country.

Only through our ceaseless endeavour to optimise capacities, efficiency and cost-effectiveness can we stand our ground in the world. All those with a sense of responsibility and concern must focus on the processes that strengthen our position against others, particularly when many state and non-state actors are hell-bent on having their own way in total disregard for moral norms and fairness.

The critical fact is that national wealth is the principal determinant not only of our national well-being but also of our very existence. We must always remember that we are no longer facing a colossal dragon, but a dragonoid.

Wishing you all a very auspicious Dhanteras. Let its spirit guide your words and deeds.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Organisational Awareness

Bureaucracy is a form of organisation. It is the modern way in which people organise their public affairs or private enterprises. Max Weber identified it, delineated its features, and developed an ideal type of bureaucracy. Much of what people commonly criticise as bureaucratism is, in fact, the result of poor organisational design, inadequate procedures, and a lack of institutional awareness, rather than an inherent failing of bureaucracy itself.

Bureaucracy is rational: it pursues rational goals and operates through rational mechanisms. It is also legal: positions and procedures are determined by law or, within private organisations, by internal rules and bylaws. The people who work within the system are separate from the positions they occupy. These features make bureaucracy a rule-based, impersonal and predictable form of organisation.

Bureaucratic organisation can be appropriated even for irrational, unjust or devilish ends and pursued through equally undesirable means. The point here, however, is not the desirability, legitimacy or morality of the ends or means employed, but the organisational viability and efficiency with which the chosen course of action can be executed. Bureaucratic rationality is a property of the organisational mechanism; it does not, by itself, confer legitimacy on the ends pursued or the means employed.

This brings us to two essential considerations: the pursuit of the common good as the purpose of public organisation, and efficiency as a means of ensuring fairness and impersonality. Personnel should have minimal discretion, as the prescribed procedures should ordinarily suffice to ensure the proper functioning of the system, without requiring anything beyond ordinary professional competence. Its USP is its mechanical functioning, with human sensibility on the part of personnel being an integral part of its design and training, so that the system combines human consideration with mechanical efficiency. As opposed to affective and customary ways of working, the rational-legal approach is certainly more efficient and, if designed with human well-being in mind, works far better for human beings than other approaches. Bureaucracy by itself is only as good or as bad as it is designed to be and the way it is observed, but even its basic template offers a far more efficient form of organisation than humanity had evolved until then.

Knowledge of a process, combined with the desire to improve it, makes a system better, while ignorance and carelessness make it dysfunctional. Awareness and civic sense, or their absence, make a country better or worse.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Glocal Platforms: Reimagining India's Retail and E-commerce Ecosystem

Grocery and kirana stores face stiff competition from e-commerce and quick-commerce platforms, a competition that is proving increasingly difficult, and for many, impossible, to survive. This raises a few important issues and possibilities.

1.    Why did India fail to emerge as a pioneer in e-commerce?    Despite its extensive trading network and large pool of software experts, India could not develop a pioneering e-commerce ecosystem. It certainly had the capacity to do so, as demonstrated by its success in the field of digital payments.

2.     Can traditional kirana stores adapt and reinvent themselves? They can still align their businesses with an indigenous digital platform. Each store could function both as a bright store, a conventional, customer-facing retail outlet that also fulfils online orders, and as a dark store, a dedicated fulfilment centre for online orders. They could also integrate their operations with local suppliers and producers, thereby creating a locally rooted supply and distribution network.

3.     Leveraging personal relationships and trust: A local retailer can retain and attract loyal customers by offering a line of credit to trusted customers, continuing the traditional practice of maintaining khatas (credit accounts), with customers settling their dues periodically, often at the end of each month. Such personalised relationships and trust-based arrangements can give local retailers a distinctive competitive advantage. Digital platforms can facilitate the maintenance of these accounts and make the transactions more transparent and convenient.

4.    Integrating farmers and producers: Farmers growing fruits, vegetables, flowers, cereals, honey, milk, and other products can learn to sell directly by integrating with this network. With appropriate packaging, storage and supply chains, they can market their produce far and wide, reaching consumers beyond their immediate localities. SMEs, too, can participate in this network and benefit from its wider reach.

5.     Building cooperative platforms: Better still, local retailers, farmers and producers can form cooperatives and pool their resources to develop their own digital platforms. These cooperatives can then cross-connect their platforms with those of other cooperatives, creating an interconnected network of locally owned marketplaces.

6.     Reinventing existing platforms: Existing e-commerce platforms can also reinvent themselves by aligning more closely with local suppliers, producers and shopkeepers, while extending their networks and operations globally.

7.     Taking the model global: If Amazon and Walmart can do business in India, why can't Indian enterprises and cooperative platforms do the same in the United States and other continents? There is no reason why India should remain merely a market for global e-commerce companies rather than become a global player in its own right.

The larger idea is to build Glocal Platforms, combining local roots with global reach. Such platforms would integrate kirana stores, farmers, producers, artisans, SMEs and other local businesses into interconnected digital networks. They would draw upon existing local resources, relationships and infrastructure while enabling businesses, however small, to access wider national and international markets. This would combine the advantages of local participation and decentralised ownership with the efficiencies and reach of digital commerce.

The point is to compete and serve your customers better. Think and act, or perish. The only thing you can blame is your own lack of imagination and action. 

Niraj Kumar Jha 

Distracted

For a large part of the world, the world is becoming not only hazardous but also increasingly difficult to navigate. The existing superpower and the emerging one are aggressively expanding their leverage, making other countries increasingly vulnerable to their pressure. India has little choice but to become a superpower itself, as it too faces these predatory pressures.

India has immense potential, but the challenges involved in realising it are equally formidable. What we witness on a daily basis is that people generally fail to focus on matters of critical importance.
Ease of doing business is one such obvious priority. India, being the most populous country in the world, must have the highest ease of doing business. Greater ease of doing business simply means more people being able to realise their potential.

The global competitiveness of Indian companies is another critical necessity. Indian corporations must be able to operate across the world, and India must have a greater share of Fortune 500 companies.

Thirdly, India must become a global educational hub, attracting students and experts from across the world to learn and enhance their skills.

Fourthly, we must have hospitals offering the best and most advanced medical services, attracting people from all over the world for treatment. We must also have clean cities, unpolluted rivers, and green mountains. India has immense tourism potential, yet its realisation remains meagre.

Fifthly, our universities must be elevated to a level that justifies their very existence as universities. They must be centres of world-class research, pioneers in cutting-edge technologies, and custodians of morality and aesthetics.

There are so many things that need to be done, and so much untapped potential waiting to be realised.

And what are we discussing? What are we actually doing?

Niraj Kumar Jha

Ṛta and Dharma

Dharma is about knowing and calibrating one's conduct according to the ṛta, the universal law sustaining all and making existence possible. As human beings are not passive constituents of what exists, their actions must discern what sustains and what does not. It is about seeing reality as a whole, to the extent that its interconnections are decipherable, but from the vantage point of the immediate and the now. Keep in mind that the microcosm and the whole are interconnected and cannot be understood in isolation. Dharma is about moving back and forth between the big and the small. It may happen that all are doing their jobs right, but the ship sinks. Various permutations and combinations can cause a ship to sail or sink. The ṛta of human affairs informs us that all are responsible and, therefore, all must try to see things both as a bird and as a worm, and find synchrony between one's immediate dharma and the larger dharma. Beyond one's contingent dharma, one must fulfil one's human dharma by making an effort to know the larger truth and give space to the larger truth to unfold. In human affairs, ṛta does not enforce itself; its realisation depends on human dharma.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Intelligence: Super or Artificial?

It is not “super,” but a comprehensive and autonomous knowledge-processing system, and basically remains a human extension. The very word “artificial” indicates that it is a human creation, something that does not exist naturally but is brought into existence through human knowledge, ingenuity, and action. Artificial intelligence is therefore an exclusively human phenomenon: it arises from the uniquely human capacity to transcend the biological through knowledge, tools, and technology. Calling it “super” is like surrendering to an extension of ourselves and mistaking its power for superiority. Human extensions are meant to serve human safety, flourishing, and each member's autonomy. Yet poor common intelligence has produced a history in which extensions have come to dominate their creators. We must therefore be wary of this possibility.

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Vocation of Political Theory

Is it about digging out the thoughts of the past? Is it an exercise in esotericism? Is it about speaking of cities of castles suspended in mid-air? Is it talking about exotic-sounding terms and concepts? Is it about shaping and polishing folk-tales? Partly yes, but only as side hustles.

One must bear in mind that political theory is primarily about humanity: municipal affairs figure in it, but they are not its substance. One must not forget the world's interconnectedness and how humanity as a whole affects the denizens of any location, or even those flying high above the ground at any moment, through its epistemological predilections and acts of omission and commission. Theory must address the big questions of the times and must offer something doable for humanity.

Its other side is much more micro: an individual's cognitive toolset and how they do and should conduct themselves. These are the two nodes that must be the primary concern of practitioners of the theory.

In between come the people practitioners encounter in their day-to-day lives. Their thrills and travails must be accounted for, and their implications must be understood. Determining the deeper realities behind them and finding ways to minimise their difficulties in tangible ways must be among the purposes of theory. Fashioning it as ethnic, mysterious, modular, barren, historical-accounting, demolitionist, or agentic-neutral is to undo theory.

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Next Generation of Reforms

Businesses got some semblance of what they needed to function as the lifeblood of society in 1991, when not doing so had brought everything to a halt. It was then that the consequences of mistaken, ideologically driven policies had brought the economy to the bottom of an abyss, leaving it with no choice but to climb back to sanity, with the World Bank imposing the conditions for doing so.

Reforms continued haltingly, with forward and backward movement, and only to the extent that doing so did not lead to a major crisis. And yet, the reforms transformed living standards, accelerated the growth of the national economy, and contributed to the rise in national power and prestige. People old enough, and with a sound memory, can compare the times and know this. The fact remains, however, and it is a worrisome predicament, that there was no public support when reforms first forced themselves upon us, nor was there much public support for them later.

Now, the challenge from not doing enough is truly critical. Today, the greatest challenge is to withstand technological, trade and productivity competition internationally, while building leverage in terms of military and diplomatic prowess to protect national interests. Those who have an edge are relentlessly seeking to extend it further, by fair and foul means. The European nations, once masters of much of the globe, are, for instance, themselves reeling under pressure as they struggle to match the accumulated strength of the old superpower and the kinetic energy of the challenger. How to make the economy competitive is the moot question, and we can avoid it only at our peril.

Citizens must create an ambience supportive of the next generation of reforms so they can drive political parties and governments to talk about and pursue them. All must focus on aiding and supporting reforms, that is, on making it easier to do business sustainably.
Frivolity in our talk and actions may land us in dire straits.

Niraj Kumar Jha

To a Hot Peace

G2 - Cold War to Hot Peace! As the world may move from the Cold War to a hot peace, it must prepare for frostbites from heatwaves.

NKJ

Profit for Social Good

Profiteering is obviously not, but profit is a perfectly legitimate motive. Those who deny its legitimacy often aid, though inadvertently, the devils in their devilry. It is but natural; for instance, poets who sing of the transcendental also have a belly, and they cannot but help themselves by bargaining for a fee, though without recognising the incongruity between the two acts.

Shri Dhirendra Shastri told an interviewer very candidly, and quite rightly, on the issue of babas (holy men) commercialising their holiness: “I deliver moral discourses and receive offerings and spend the same for the needy.” This is perfectly fine.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Life or Scripted Drama?

Capitalism has never been an ideology. It has been, to use a phrase which its very opponent used to define freedom, the recognition of necessity. People recognised what was evolving and useful and articulated it; that, in turn, evolved as humanism, with liberalism as its cognitive script, constituted by democracy in the political sphere and capitalism in the economic domain.

Capitalism does not seek to extract particular human traits from human beings, nor does it question their innate humanity. It rests on the belief, or rather the truism, that human beings are free-willed, autonomous entities and are not meant to act according to a scripted drama. On this basis, they seek harmony of interests.

The irony, and indeed the ontological crisis, afflicting humanity despite its having discovered itself, that is to say, despite its coming to humanism, is that it fancies collectivism as a solution to the crises it often faces. For any problem, it seeks a reversal to the form from which it has evolved. The DNA often works against accumulated knowledge. The educated need to recognise that.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Ends and Their Means

Ends and their means are not simple affairs in public life. In public affairs, everyone is inescapably a participant, notwithstanding the distinction between activity and passivity, and everyone receives, in one form or another, whatever public affairs produce, whether pleasing or painful. Yet people hardly take note of the pains of common affairs, as those pains affect people in common, and they tend to take pleasures for granted, as though they were happening on their own.

The intellectual construction of collective ends is, in fact, a critical human need. Wicked people take benefit from weak, faulty, ill-organised, deficient, or manipulated conduct of public affairs that follows from misconceived or mistaken public ends. Their success can then convert their perversion into what they present as personal life goals for others, often within an idealistic framework. The earlier imperial and colonial authoritarian order provides an instructive instance. Its administration of public affairs essentially worked at the subjects' expense and for the benefit of the ruling people and their agencies. Yet the very positions and roles that were instruments of subjecting and imperilling the subjects became enviable possessions for aspiring people from among the subjects themselves, who came to regard attaining such positions as proud accomplishments of life. These roles could include even menial, hazardous, and degrading forms of service to the ruling power. This is only one instance. By the way, Mahatma Gandhi, in contrast, presented a thought for the reclamation of human worth.

Political Science is a far more serious intellectual engagement than what many of its practitioners make of it by merely regurgitating concepts and theories gathered from global history and presenting them fancifully as chapters of knowledge or, worse, though not relevant here, by inventing inconsequential but fanciful ideas merely for self-celebration. Let me elaborate on the first part of what I have just said.

A history chapter on the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, for instance, may conceal far more than it reveals. It can resemble a cinema that glorifies violence and makes violence thrilling while skipping the depiction of the prolonged, excruciating pain and the profound dislocations it causes to the sufferers and their kin among both the losers and the winners. The events are thus presented primarily through their dramatic political outcomes. In contrast, the human costs of those events, the stratagems of the people involved, and the devastating aftereffects recede into the background. The French Revolution was followed by a reign of extreme terror and unrestrained manslaughter, which later obliterated the distinction between the persecutor and the persecuted. Similarly, the Russian Revolution created a totalitarian regime that collapsed under the weight of its follies merely a few decades later.

In other words, the ugliest things can be masked as attractive. Violence can be made heroic, oppression can be made glorious, and often avoidable suffering can be presented as lofty idealism. One can comprehend the recurrent reality by looking at Orwellian depictions. The intellectual task of Political Science should therefore be not merely to recount political events, institutions, concepts, and theories, but to examine the ends being pursued, the means employed to pursue them, and, most importantly, the immediate and enduring human consequences of both.

Let me end this with an invocation of the Kalyan Mantra:

सर्वे भवन्तु सुखिनः।
सर्वे सन्तु निरामयाः।
सर्वे भद्राणि पश्यन्तु।
मा कश्चिद्दुःखभाग्भवेत्।
ॐ शान्तिः शान्तिः शान्तिः॥

May all be happy. May all be free from illness and suffering. May all see what is auspicious and good. May no one suffer or be afflicted by sorrow. Om, peace, peace, peace.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Educationology

Perhaps the most critical component of civilised life figures least proportionately in our philosophical speculation and scientific studies: education, particularly its content and purpose.

The great masters of the past reflected deeply on education and wisely embedded it within larger moral, social, and political questions. Today, we face a widening lag and gap in our thinking about education itself.

In post-independence India, higher education was, to a considerable extent, turned into an instrument of ideological indoctrination, particularly into leftist thought. The resulting economic backwardness ironically weakened the system’s very capacity to absorb even the graduates produced by the technical education it offered.

We need to think about education, philosophise about it, and study it scientifically. Education is too vital to be left merely to educational practices, the fashioning of pedagogical nitty-gritty, or ideological preferences. We also need to weed out from the frameworks of education what may be called pseudo-education or anti-education.
We need Educationology: a systematic body of philosophical and scientific inquiry into education, its contents, purposes, methods, institutions, and consequences. A distinct discipline and dedicated schools of Educationology are critically needed to understand and strengthen this most vital component of civilised life.

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Public, the Private, and the Personal

The distinction between the public, the private, and the personal is vital to human good, dignity, and excellence, both in their recognition and in their proper roles. The public agency is meant to serve private entities so that they operate free of friction or coercion, and to protect the personal from external interference, so long as that does not harm others.

A civilisation distinguishes itself from barbarity by maintaining the sanctity of the private in terms of ownership, autonomy, safety, and ease. A civilisation that forgets this human principle invites either decadence and chaos or a lifeless solidity. The past and the present, history and politics, speak to no other conclusion.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Democratic Epistemology

Democracy nests in its own epistemology; it cannot be otherwise. Its foundation lies in the individual, the security of the person and their possessions, the autonomy of their agency, and the dignity of their being. What appears to be the simple basis of democracy requires a complex institutional and social mechanism to give it substance and sustain it. Such a mechanism, in turn, requires an evolved social order capable of creating, maintaining, and renewing it. This is why democracy has historically found it difficult to gain substantive roots in societies where the requisite social and institutional conditions have not evolved. In India, however, it could take root because of its deep civilizational legacies.

Worldwide, the epistemological foundations necessary to sustain democracy have eroded in both depth and commitment. One of the first major manifestations of this erosion was the defeat of the neoliberal order popularly associated with LPG, or liberalisation, privatisation, and globalisation. Secondly, across continents and civilisations, many popular movements, from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring, either came to nought or produced outcomes that left societies no better, and in some cases considerably worse, than before.
Now, the rise of ICE and AI poses an even more profound challenge to the desired democratic way of life, whose crux remains humanism and human dignity. The central issue is not merely technological disruption but the growing redundancy of human agency and faculties for a large section of humanity. When people increasingly lose the capacity, opportunity, or relevance to act as autonomous agents, the very epistemological foundations of democracy begin to weaken.

This calls for a deeper systemthink. We need to understand democracy not merely as a form of government or a set of institutions, but as a way of knowing, valuing, and organising human existence. Its survival will ultimately depend on whether we can preserve the human being as an agent, not merely as a subject of governance, a consumer, or a replaceable component of increasingly autonomous systems.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Vikasdharma: A Dharmic Theory of Development

The only sustainable path to national development is to allow people the greatest possible opportunities to participate in economic activities, subject only to such collective mediation as is necessary and justifiable. When individuals are able to engage in enterprise in a hassle-free environment, they create wealth, generate employment, and foster innovation, all of which contribute to national development.

Indeed, what is commonly described as negative liberalism I regard as positive liberalism. I view it from another, and arguably more realistic, perspective. By leaving initiative in the hands of individuals, particularly the entrepreneurial class, it expanded the scope of voluntary cooperation, enterprise, and civil society. While it is often criticised for producing economic inequality and exploitation, such criticism captures only one part of the historical experience. It is commonly argued that democracy evolved in opposition to exploitation and inequalities. which capitalism engendered. Yet the more substantive historical fact is that capitalism created the economic and social conditions that enabled people to organise themselves, demand a more humane life, and press for political rights. Prosperity generated resources, education, and an increasingly independent middle class, all of which strengthened the capacity for collective action.

The French Revolution of 1789 illustrates this dynamic. Although its causes were multiple, it occurred in one of Europe's most economically dynamic societies, where a commercially prosperous bourgeoisie had acquired sufficient economic strength to challenge the privileges of the ancien régime. More broadly, many institutions of civil society, voluntary associations, professional organisations, trade unions, and democratic movements flourished in societies where individuals enjoyed substantial economic freedom. Thus, rather than viewing liberal capitalism merely as the object of democratic opposition, it may also be understood as one of the principal conditions that made democratic mobilisation and civic advancement possible.

One must also keep in mind what capitalism replaced. It displaced a ruthless feudal order in which ordinary people were often treated little better than the property of their masters. Equally important is the fact that modern imperialism extended the capitalist model to the colonies in exploitative ways, and many of those societies eventually evolved into democratic political orders. This does not absolve imperialism of its sins, but it does suggest that some of the institutional and economic transformations associated with capitalism, most notably the emergence of a capitalist class and a market-based middle class, later provided conditions conducive to democratic development. These social groups acquired sufficient economic independence and organisational capacity to demand political representation, civil liberties, and constitutional government.

This is not to deny that regulations are necessary to prevent crimes, fraud, manipulation, breaches of trust, and other vile tendencies found among people. Nevertheless, the expansion of individual economic liberty has historically been one of the principal forces behind civic mobilisation, institutional development, and national progress. The challenge, therefore, is not to abandon laissez-faire but to optimise it by preserving economic freedom while ensuring that the state performs its essential functions of maintaining the rule of law, protecting competition, enforcing contracts, and preventing coercion, monopoly, and privilege.

The development school, in fact, confused the outcomes of capitalism with the conditions necessary for economic take-off in backward economies. Its emphasis on institutions, governance, property rights, infrastructure, education, and other structural prerequisites mistook the products of a successful developmental process for its primary causes. These institutions are undoubtedly important, but they are themselves the historical outcomes of a society in which informed human agency, entrepreneurship, voluntary cooperation, and economic freedom have been allowed to flourish. Development does not begin with institutions alone; rather, enduring institutions emerge from the cumulative exercise of responsible and productive human agency. It is this agency, more than the institutions it eventually creates, that constitutes the true foundation of development.

The concept of Dharma, in fact, predates the doctrine of laissez-faire by millennia. At its core lies a fundamental principle: the recognition of the proper sphere of individual action and the limits of external interference. Laissez-faire is but one modern economic articulation of this much older civilisational insight. I have invoked it only to explain the dynamics of development in the contemporary world. If we embrace the free-market principle, we are not merely borrowing a lesson from elsewhere; we are, in an important sense, rediscovering an insight long embedded in our own civilisational wisdom.

At its core, dharma enjoins each person to pursue one's legitimate pursuits without encroaching upon the legitimate sphere of others. Correspondingly, rajdharma requires the state not to direct or usurp the legitimate pursuits of individuals, but to ensure that no one interferes with others, violates justice, or undermines the common good. Its role is not to substitute individual initiative with bureaucratic control, but to preserve the conditions in which freedom, justice, and social harmony can coexist. Economic freedom, therefore, is not antithetical to the Indian conception of governance; rather, it is entirely consistent with a dharmic order in which individual initiative flourishes within a framework of justice, public responsibility, and the rule of law.

Viewed in this light, laissez-faire is neither a foreign prescription nor an imported ideology. It is a modern economic expression of a principle that Indian civilisation recognised long ago: individuals should be free to pursue their legitimate ends, while the state ensures that such freedom is exercised without injustice, coercion, or harm to others.

Niraj Kumar Jha

गणधर्म (Gaṇadharma)

The origins of republicanism can be traced to antiquity, yet it remains surprisingly underdeveloped as a conceptual category. Even today, there has been little sustained effort to distinguish it meaningfully from democracy. Republicanism is conventionally defined in opposition to monarchy, emphasising the absence of hereditary rule. Yet this negative definition leaves much unexplored. It says little about imperialism, even though the American republic emerged as much in opposition to imperial domination as to monarchical authority.

This conceptual limitation is reflected in the constitutional imagination of modern republics. One may consider the language of the earliest formal constitutions of the modern age. It is fundamentally a language of checks and restraints. Institutions are first created, powers are assigned to them, and then elaborate mechanisms are devised to regulate and balance those very powers. The assumption underlying this design is that power is inherently prone to abuse and must therefore be constrained through constitutional architecture. Constitutionalism, in this sense, is less a philosophy of public life than a technology of political management.

A striking contrast may be found in the concept of dharma. Rather than beginning with institutions, dharma begins with the individual as a duty-bound moral being. It conceives society as an organic moral order in which each person is connected to others through the conscientious performance of appropriate duties. The emphasis is not upon external restraints but upon the ethical formation of citizens and the cultivation of character. The primary safeguard of public life is therefore internal rather than institutional. Institutions certainly remain necessary, but they become secondary supports for a moral order rather than substitutes for one.

Modern republics have largely retained inherited institutional structures, adding little more than a democratic icing. Such cosmetic democratisation has not necessarily fostered a genuinely public ethos. Even the United States, arguably the most influential modern republic, exhibits significant tensions between republican ideals and the increasingly opaque and complex dynamics of contemporary politics. Constitutional checks, however sophisticated, cannot by themselves generate civic virtue, public responsibility, or a shared moral purpose.

The problem, therefore, is not merely institutional but conceptual. Republicanism has too often been reduced to a constitutional form of government rather than developed as a comprehensive philosophy of public life. If it is to remain relevant in the twenty-first century, it requires a fresh infusion of imagination and agency. It must move beyond defining itself by what it rejects, whether monarchy or imperial rule, and articulate a positive vision of civic virtue, public responsibility, dispersed power, and collective self-government. Such a reconstruction may also require republicanism to recover what constitutional design alone cannot provide: an ethical foundation that treats citizenship not merely as a bundle of rights and institutional relationships, but as a disciplined way of life grounded in duty, responsibility, and the pursuit of the common good.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Constitutional Devolution

What explains America's constitutional devolution? I do not know. One possible explanation is that, in a long period of material stability and prosperity, the need to remain entertained gradually becomes society's primary preoccupation. Entertainment begins to displace education, spectacle replaces civic formation, and, as a result, the constitutional culture slowly weakens. A constitution ultimately depends not only on legal institutions but also on citizens who possess the knowledge, habits, and discipline necessary to sustain it. When education yields to entertainment as the dominant cultural force, constitutional decline may follow.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Home and Neighbourhood

Two institutions require thorough reconstruction, both in their functionality and their dignity: the home and the neighbourhood community. The demands of economic mobility have hollowed out even the communal life of villages. Families have fragmented; even conjugal relationships are under severe strain, while community life has become shallow and largely superficial. In their isolation and insecurity, people are losing their sense of worth, and with it not only the quality of social life but, more importantly, their sense of purpose in life. The restoration of these foundations calls for thoughtful and patient work of social reconstruction.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Whither Liberalism?

Strangely, when totalitarian regimes were writing their own obituaries in the late twentieth century, liberalism, instead of spreading and deepening, began to shrink and lose its substance. The picture is now all too clear. How and why did this happen?

I have shared my thoughts on this and received only a single response. I do not expect anyone else to answer. That very absence of expectation is, in itself, an explanation.

Niraj Kumar Jha