(a) Do you think that the Buddhist traditions have lent greater ethical foundation to the ancient Indian political thought? Give…

(a) Buddhist Ethics and Ancient Indian Political Thought Buddhist traditions gave ancient Indian political thought a distinctive ethical foundation, though their institutional reach was narrower than that of the Brahmanical and statecraft traditions. The Buddha shifted legitimacy from ritual purity and kshatriya dominance to moral conduct. The Aggañña Sutta gives a quasi-contractual origin of kingship: people elect a Mahasammata ("great elect") to keep order in return for a share of grain. The Dasa Raja Dhamma lists ten royal virtues, including charity, integrity, non-anger and non-violence; the Cakkavatti Sihanada Sutta makes relieving poverty the king's duty, since neglect breeds crime; and the Mahaparinibbana Sutta praises the Vajjis' seven conditions of welfare, including frequent assemblies held in concord. After Kalinga, Ashoka's Rock Edict XIII renounced conquest by arms for conquest by Dhamma (dhamma-vijaya), and his Dhamma Mahamatras and edicts on animal welfare and care of subjects show a welfare orientation restrained by ethics. The sangha, with its elected, rule-bound, egalitarian discipline, offered an early model of collective self-governance, and opening monastic life to lower castes and women challenged the Brahmanical hierarchy that tied authority to birth and sacrificial knowledge.

Against this, Kautilya's Arthashastra, composed after the Buddha, is a contrasting tradition built on state interest, revenue, espionage and strategic power. The Buddhist contribution is therefore greater in ethical depth but not in institutions: it produced no constitutional or administrative system comparable to the Arthashastra. Its influence was moral and civilisational, and Ambedkar later drew on it, holding that Indian democracy had roots in the sangha.

(b) Marx's Concept of Alienation Alienation is essential to capitalism because it names the estrangement produced by wage labour and private property. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (published in 1932) it has four dimensions. The worker is alienated from the product, which becomes an external commodity owned by the capitalist; from the process, since labour is forced, repetitive activity rather than self-expression; from species-being, as human creative and social capacities shrink to survival; and from fellow workers, who become competitors. Its roots lie in private property and the capitalist division of labour. In Capital, Vol. I (1867), commodity fetishism deepens the diagnosis: relations between producers appear as relations between things, and the extraction of surplus value hides behind the market. Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974) extended it to the deskilling of work under scientific management, while Althusser argued that the mature Marx broke with this humanist concept.

The idea remains relevant in India's informal labour markets, where casual workers lack security and bargaining power, and in the gig economy (NITI Aayog estimated about 77 lakh gig workers in 2020–21, rising to 2.35 crore by 2029–30), where platforms extract data and labour while presenting work as flexible. The Code on Social Security, 2020 (in force since November 2025) and Rajasthan's Platform-Based Gig Workers Act (2023) now try to bring such workers into social protection. Alienation thus captures not only low wages but loss of control, meaning and social connection.

(c) Deliberation and Democracy Democratic legitimacy depends not merely on counting votes but on citizens forming preferences through open, equal and reasoned discussion. Habermas's communicative rationality holds that validity claims must be tested in a public sphere where participants can challenge power and offer reasons; the ideal speech situation requires freedom from coercion ("free"), equality of voice ("fair") and inclusion of affected parties. This contrasts with aggregative democracy, which treats preferences as fixed and reduces politics to majority calculation. Rawls's public reason, Joshua Cohen's deliberative procedure, Gutmann and Thompson's reciprocity, publicity and accountability, and Fishkin's deliberative polling develop the ideal, while Iris Marion Young and Chantal Mouffe warn that norms of calm "rational" argument can exclude marginalised voices and suppress legitimate conflict.

In India, the Gram Sabha under the 73rd Amendment is a local forum for plans, budgets and exclusion, and Kerala's People's Plan Campaign (1996), which devolved about a third of plan funds to local bodies, showed deliberation bringing transparency to resource allocation. The Constituent Assembly debates remain the model of deliberative constitution-making, whereas fewer Parliament sittings and fewer bills sent to committees weaken deliberation today. Elite capture, caste and gender hierarchies, linguistic exclusion, the digital divide and social-media misinformation can distort it.