State and Government in Ancient India c11.3

c11.3

Ancient Indian political thinkers have hardly devoted any space to the discussion of these problems, and no wonder. While discussing the relations between the state and the citizen the political science seeks mainly to define the mutual rights of the two parties. Hindu constitutional writers have approached the problem from quite a different point of view. They usually describe not the rights of the citizens, but the duties of the state; the former are to be inferred from the latter. Similarly they discuss the duties of the citizens, from which we are to indirectly infer the extent of the control the state could exercise over its subjects. In our ancient works, therefore, there is no systematic discussion of the problem from the point of view of the rights of either party.