Page 28 - All India Magazine Aug-2025

cording to their right law and measure of satisfaction and subject
and subordinated to the ethical and social and religious dharma.
All the members and groups of the socio-political body had their
Dharma determined for them by their nature, their position, their
relation to the whole body and must be assured and maintained in
the free and right exercise of it, must be left to their own natural
and self-determined functioning within their own bounds, but at
the same time restrained from any transgression, encroachment or
deviation from their right working and true limits. That was the of-
fice of the supreme political authority, the sovereign in his Council
aided by the public assemblies. It was not the business of the state
authority to interfere with or encroach upon the free functioning
of the caste, religious community, guild, village, township or the
organic custom of the region or province or to abrogate their rights,
for these were inherent because necessary to the sound exercise of
the social Dharma. All that it was called upon to do was to coordi-
nate, to exercise a general and supreme control, to defend the life
of the community against external attack or internal disruption, to
repress crime and disorder, to assist, promote and regulate in its
larger lines the economic and industrial welfare, to see to the pro-
vision of facilities, and to use for these purposes the powers that
passed beyond the scope of the others.
CWSA 20: 404-405

Dharma in politics
Thus in effect the Indian polity was the system of a very com-
plex communal freedom and self-determination, each group unit
of the community having its own natural existence and adminis-
tering its own proper life and business, set off from the rest by a
natural demarcation of its field and limits, but connected with the
whole by well-understood relations, each a copartner with the oth-
ers in the powers and duties of the communal existence, executing
its own laws and rules, administering within its own proper limits,
joining with the others in the discussion and the regulation of

28 All India Magazine, August 2025