Legitimacy and Legality

Abstract

By viewing legality as distinct from a state’s legitimacy, we can appreciate the significance of Nehruvian statism on India’s democratic history. The 1950s were regarded as a period of high legitimacy for the Indian state but the schismatic effect of the 1975–77 Emergency crucially informed its decline. The relation between legitimacy and legality would seem to have shifted since colonial rule but upon scrutiny, a different picture emerges. While the Nehruvian period coincided with a consolidation of statism, political trials in colonial courts had reinforced the need for institutions, officials, and legal procedures. Thus, a fundamental faith in the state preceded independence. When charged with sedition, Gandhi, Tilak and Nehru all served prison sentences under an illegitimate state. After Independence, Nehruvian statism appeared to promise a reinvention of state ideology and apparatus ending the duality between good laws and bad states. In fact, the persistence of statism itself derives from an overarching faith in the ability of the state to deliver justice. However, in tracing the antecedents and legacies of Nehruvian statism, we see a twinned staging of individual exceptionalism and mere symbolic justiceability.