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

Republicanism

Republicanism is almost an unknown idea and ideal even among the literati. Certainly, the general understanding that the head of state is an elected office is widely prevalent; however, its deeper significance is rarely discussed in private conversations or public discourse. In contrast, democracy is invoked ad nauseam in both spheres.

Republicanism is the opposite of monarchism, but this is only the starting point. At a deeper level, it must be seen as an attempt to reverse a long civilizational process in which human history has largely been a march toward the refinement and strengthening of tools of domination, of some over others, both among political units and within them. To begin with, by republicanism, the American founding fathers meant elite mediation within their democratic setup, so that popular will itself did not subvert the idea of freedom. Today, however, the idea requires an infusion of fresh moral and institutional inputs if it is to contribute meaningfully to human progress toward a more fulfilling life.

For instance, republicanism may be invested with Gandhism, which alone articulates a reversal of this civilizational trajectory by anchoring human affairs in truth and non-violence, i.e. in morality and compassion, and through decentralisation and horizontalisation.

Niraj Kumar Jha

What is happening?

Let me first dwell on the epistemological crisis. The crisis is that there is epistemological chaos as no ideology is powerful enough to command people to some common purpose in any political unit or in any geography of size. This may be that people are moving from ideologism to objectivism, but without a compatible epistemology in place on the wider plane. 

Despite the melee caused and made to happen by social media with other phenomena, all voices get to our ears and all concerns brush our consciousness, and with that humanity is at its highest in its ascendance so far. We indeed see strong waves and sometimes eruptions but quite opposite to what they are made out to be, these mark the surges of republican and secular sensibilities. Objectivism gets people to take parochial posings and garbs to resist parochialism as such. Now humanity speaks to its constituents without mediation and has every one of them to play the deserved role. 

Niraj Kumar Jha 

Republicanism

Democratism, as a conceptual category and as practice, gets all the attention. Another very powerful idea, closely resembling this and perhaps for this reason only, has been grossly overlooked. Republicanism has great potential as an idea or concept, and its non-realization leaves civic life much poorer than it could have been in the case of realization. Democratism as an idea is highly susceptible to monarchism on the one hand and demagoguery on the other, and worse it provides cozy nesting of ideologies of all hues. The Republican idea calls for cutting emotions and all such deviations which seek to deprive people of their happiness (or to induce them to opiated bliss). It is the rationalization of order, which aims at ensuring that each one has all the chances of self-fulfillment. It seeks the paramountcy of science and civics in life. Residues of monarchist and feudal forms, norms, and mores are still quite burdensome. They choke human senses and sensibilities.

Niraj Kumar Jha