Local Government in Ancient India c6.s1.5

c6.s1.5

The fact is that India presents the rare and remarkable phenomenon of the state and the society co-existing apart from, and in some degree of independence of, each other, as distinct and separate units or entities, as independent centres of national, popular, and collective life and activity. Both of them were independent organisms with distinct and well-defined structures and functions of their own and laws of growth and evolution. The limits of state-interference were accordingly so defined and fixed as not to encroach upon the sphere of the activities of the social organization. A policy of non-interference was recognized as the ideal policy of the state, the functions of which were ordinarily restricted to 'the irreducible minimum', viz. the protection of life and property and realization of the revenue for the proper execution of that duty. There was a well-understood delimitation of the respective boundaries of the political and the social organization, both of which were co-operating agencies for the promotion of the common weal. This peculiar and predominant tendency in ancient and mediaeval Indian politics is in marked contrast with that of European or Western politics generally. In the West the predominant tendency has been towards a progressive extension of state interference and state control so as to bring within its limits all the main departments of social life and national activity until the ideal is attained of a complete nationalization or socialization of all the means and processes of life itself. The state, beginning as an agent of society, becomes its master and representative; society is merged in the state to which it surrenders its functions, dropping its independent life. Thus in the West the king or the repository of the sovereign power is the head of the state as well as of society, including even the church in some cases. In ancient India the king was head of the state, but not of the society. He had a place in the social hierarchy, but it was not the highest place. As the symbol of the state he appeared to the people like a remote abstraction with no direct touch with their daily life which was governed by the social organization. The points of contact between the state and the ordinary interests of the daily life of the people were indeed very few.