Socrates: If the whole is ailing the part cannot be well / Ajit Prakash Shah: Darkness at noon, felled by the judiciary

By Dilip -

The Sophists taught, rather publicly, that the summit of happiness is to combine the appearance of justice with actual injustice: G. A. McBrayer; On the origin of the Idea of Natural Right; in Brill's Companion to Leo Strauss, 2005; p 44

Actor Ashutosh Rana की आवाज में Poet Aalok Shrivastav की ये Hindi Ghazal

"that as you ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head, or the head without the body, so neither ought you to attempt to cure the body without the soul.... for the part can never be well unless the whole is well." For all good and evil, whether in the body or in human nature, originates, as he declared, in the soul, and overflows from thence, as if from the head into the eyes. And therefore if the head and body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul; that is the first thing. Socrates, in Plato, Charmides, Sec 156(b)

DISAFFECTION AMONG SUBJECTS - Kautilya: The Arthashastra (1992)

When a people are impoverished, they become greedy; when they are greedy, they become disaffected; when disaffected, they either go over to the enemy or... {7.5.27}. Impoverishment, greed and disaffection are engendered among the subjects when the king:

(i) ignores the good [people] and favours the wicked;

(ii) causes harm by new unrighteous practices;

(iii) neglects the observation of the proper and righteous practices;

(iv) suppresses dharma and propagates adharma;

(v) does what ought not to be done and fails to do what ought to be done;

(vi) fails to give what ought to be given and exacts what he cannot rightly take;

(vii) does not punish those who ought to be punished but punishes those who do not deserve to be;

(viii) arrests those who should not be arrested but fails to arrest those who should be seized;·

(ix) indulges in wasteful expenditure and destroys profitable undertakings;

(x) fails to protect the people from thieves and robs them himself;

(xi) does not do what he ought to do and reviles the work done by others;

(xii) causes harm to the leaders of the people and insults those worthy of honour;

(xiii) antagonizes the [wise] elders by lying and mischief;

(xiv) does not recompense service done to him;

(xv) does not carry out his part of what had been agreed upon; and

(xvi) by his indolence and negligence destroys the welfare of his people. {7.5.19-26}

[A king who is profligate with ancestral wealth, spendthrift with his own wealth or miserly also practises wrong policies; see {7. 1 3 . 1 3 } in X . viii .] Therefore , the king shall not act in such a manner as would cause impoverishment, greed or disaffection among the people; if, however, they do appear, he shall immediately take remedial measures… L N Rangarajan (ed) - Kautilya: The Arthashastra (1992); p 159

Darkness at noon, felled by the judiciary Ajit Prakash Shah

(Former Chief Justice, Delhi High Court)

It has been 81 years since Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon was first published. The novel is set in the backdrop of the Great Purge of the late 1930s in the Soviet Union under Stalin. This period was marked by, among other things, political repression, police surveillance, general suspicion of the opposition, imprisonment, and executions. Decades on, thousands of miles away, darkness fell at noon in India too, when Father Stan Swamy passed away at a private hospital in Mumbai on July 5. 

Ominously reminiscent of the macabre world Koestler had drawn, Fr. Swamy’s death is much more than the death of an activist accused of terrorist activities. It is the result of a systemic abuse of majoritarian authority and disregard for the rule of law….

https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/darkness-at-noon-felled-by-the-judiciary/article35201982.ece

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