Examine the nature and limits of the rights of Resistance and Revolution recognised in modern political theory. (1997)
A right of resistance makes political obligation conditional: citizens may oppose a government that breaks the terms on which it holds power. Revolution is its extreme form, overthrowing the government or the whole order. Modern theory moved from denial, through John Locke‘s conditional licence, to disciplined dissent within constitutional democracy, adding limits at each step.
Nature: From Denial to Licence
- Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) allowed no rebellion, since the sovereign is party to no covenant; only self-preservation is inalienable.
- Locke (Second Treatise, 1689, ch. XIX) made government a trust. When rulers substitute arbitrary will for law, obstruct the legislature or invade property, government dissolves and power returns to the people. With no judge on earth, the remedy is the appeal to heaven; the ruler who breaks the trust is the real rebel.
- Declarations. The American Declaration (1776) made it the people’s right to alter or to abolish a destructive government; the French Declaration of 1789 (Art. 2) listed resistance to oppression among natural rights.
- Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790) accepted 1688 as restoration but condemned 1789 for destroying inherited order; Thomas Paine (Rights of Man, 1791) replied that no generation can bind its successors.
- Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin (The State and Revolution, 1917) made revolution a historical necessity: the class state must be smashed, not reformed.
Nature: Disciplined Resistance
- Henry David Thoreau (“Resistance to Civil Government”, 1849) grounded refusal in individual conscience.
- Mohandas K. Gandhi made satyagraha a mass method: open, non-violent, a last resort, the penalty accepted, the opponent converted.
- John Rawls (A Theory of Justice, 1971, §§55–59) defined civil disobedience as a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law, addressed to the majority’s sense of justice.
Limits
- Denial. Immanuel Kant (The Metaphysics of Morals, 1797) denied any right of rebellion, since no public law can authorise its own overthrow; the citizen’s remedy is the freedom of the pen (“Theory and Practice”, 1793).
- Gravity, last resort, collective judgment. Locke required a long train of abuses judged by the people as a body, not a private man. Rawls confines disobedience to clear and substantial injustice after legal appeals fail.
- Means. Non-violence and fidelity to law, shown by accepting punishment, separate disobedience from rebellion.
- Institutional substitutes. Democracy converts revolution into elections, judicial review and free speech; Germany’s Basic Law (Art. 20(4)) keeps resistance only against those abolishing the constitutional order.
Indian Illustration
On 25 November 1949 B. R. Ambedkar told the Constituent Assembly that once constitutional methods exist, civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha are the grammar of anarchy. Article 19 protects peaceful assembly subject to reasonable restrictions; in Amit Sahni v. Commissioner of Police (2020), arising from Shaheen Bagh, the Supreme Court upheld protest but not the indefinite occupation of public spaces. The farmers’ agitation of 2020–21 showed disciplined dissent working: the farm laws were repealed in November 2021.
Conclusion
Modern theory recognises resistance as a residual, conditional right: grounded in trust, triggered by grave, persistent injustice, bounded by publicity, non-violence and last resort. Revolution stays a moral claim, not a legal right, and democracy exists to make it unnecessary.