Mohan Guruswamy | The myth of Magna Carta: The struggle still goes on

We now take our liberties and rights for granted, and the way of life it guarantees us as inherent. But what we now have has come after a long evolution process, and often they flowed out of something else quite unintended. The Magna Carta is a case in point. The English-speaking world recently celebrated over 800 years of the Magna Carta, or Great Charter, that is synonymous with fundamental rights and rule of law that are the cornerstones of modern democracy. Much of the world believes the Magna Carta came out of an eruption of a long-suppressed yearning among ordinary people for protection against the monarch and nobility. But it is not so.

It came out of an intra-elite struggle between 40 barons and their ruler. England’s King John had emptied the royal treasuries in a fruitless war with France, and the barons were unwilling to meet his demands for higher taxes. The consequence was the Magna Carta — to protect the barons from the King’s demands. The demand to be judged by their peers was another protection. It was not meant for ordinary people, but only for barons. The Magna Carta was thus not a grand demand for equality, basic freedoms or the rule of law, but just a narrow demand for restricting the ruler’s powers, to ring-fence the interests of the elite.

But the Magna Carta’s myth endured and was invoked whenever and wherever people struggled against injustice and freedom. Mahatma Gandhi invoked it in South Africa when he fought for racial equality, and emancipators and freedom fighters like Nelson Mandela, Jawaharlal Nehru, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Martin Luther King Jr invoked it when they were being tried for sedition by oppressive regimes. Like the English barons, they too were arguing for limiting the oppressive and unjust powers of rulers, but not just for themselves and their peers, but for all their peoples. The story of modern democracy is about the long journey from the rights of a few to the rights of all.

Another myth that endures is that the twin notions democracy and the rule of law somehow originated with the Magna Carta. The fact is that the King rejected the Magna Carta soon after it was presented to him. But John avoided the consequences of the barons’ indignation by dying and thereby perpetuating the myth.

The first democracies long preceded the 1215 Magna Carta. As early as sixth century BC several “independent republics” existed in India as sanghas and ganas. Their main characteristics were a raja, elected or hereditary, and a deliberative assembly. These assemblies met regularly and passed laws pertaining to finances, administration and justice. The raja and other officials obeyed the decisions of these assemblies. While these assemblies mostly comprised the nobility and landowners, in some cases they included all free men. But the Brahminical system prevailed, in that the monarch always had to be a Kshatriya. While Licchavis, who held sway over the Kathmandu Valley in today’s Nepal and a major part of northern Bihar, were governed by an assembly of about 7,000 rajas, who in turn were the heads of all major families, others like the Shakyas, the clan to which Gautama Buddha belonged, had assemblies open to all people, rich or poor, and noble or common.

The greatest contribution to the evolution of democracy as a philosophy was in Athens, where great philosophers like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle lit up public discourse with their brilliance and original thinking. Socrates and his pupil, Plato, deliberated and expounded on the role of a citizen within a community and laid down the foundations of the political philosophy that flourished in Athens and spread to most of the world in the next two and a half millennia. Aristotle, who counted among his students Alexander the Great, dwelt more on systems of government and who first qualified liberty as the fundamental principle of democracy.

Aristotle wrote in Politics: “Now a fundamental principle of the democratic form of constitution is liberty — that is what is usually asserted, implying that only under this constitution do men participate in liberty, for they assert this as the aim of every democracy. But one factor of liberty is to govern and be governed in turn; for the popular principle of justice is to have equality according to number, not worth, and if this is the principle of justice prevailing, the multitude must of necessity be sovereign and the decision of the majority must be final and must constitute justice, for they say that each citizen must have an equal share; so it results that in democracies the poor are more powerful than the rich, because there are more of them, and whatever is decided by the majority is sovereign.”

This principle that “whatever is decided by the majority is sovereign” has always had to contend with the rights of individuals. In the US, created after a great debate among the founding fathers as a democracy, it was by majority will that slavery flourished till the Civil War. It took another century before equal rights for black people became the majority will. This constant struggle for individual rights against the will of the collective has been the central story of the evolution of the modern democratic state.  Free India, by contrast, provided for all these rights and liberties from the beginning in its Constitution. The Magna Carta, because it sought to limit the powers of the ruler, perhaps still has a place in our hearts and minds. To most citizens in democratic states, our life is also a constant struggle against the assertion of collective will to trample individual liberties or the rights of smaller groups.

The rise of democratic, elected Parliaments in England and Scotland just 50 years after the Magna Carta is not a coincidence but a consequence of that demand to share power. It is from the Magna Carta that the English writ of habeas corpus evolved, safeguarding individuals and their freedoms against unjust and unlawful imprisonment with the right to appeal. It is from this emergence of petitioning for the production of the body that Parliaments in due course became to be increasingly used as a forum to address all the concerns and grievances of ordinary people.

Thus, whatever be Magna Carta’s first intent, its consequences greatly expanded over centuries into a charter, which guarantees individual liberties, equality and justice to all, irrespective of race, religion and class. But that struggle is far from over. It goes on, and only its forms change as human values and means change.