Hindu Administrative Institutions c8.s3.48

c8.s3.48

This bears eloquent testimony to the form of constitutional monarchy in practice at least in the early centuries before the Christian era. The above procedure shows that the virtual ruler was the ‘royal writ’ rather than the king himself. Has the king no powers to make the procedure null and void? Personally he could not. But he could issue an appeal to the sovereign assembly of the realm which goes by different appellations of a sabhā, or a rāṣṭra, or a jānapada—all terms connoting one and the same institution of the assembly, where the people’s representatives sat and which it is the duty of the Pariṣad or the deliberative council to satisfy, lest it