Delivering the Rakesh endowment lecture in Chennai on Sunday, former Chief Justice of Orissa High Court, S. Muralidhar, said, we live in challenging times when there are persecutions, increase in polarisation on grounds of race/caste/religion, growing inequalities with the poor getting poorer, mass spontaneous protests by the affected people and the rule of law being made a mockery by dictatorial regimes, said.
The United Nations Development Programme’s recent Human Development Report talks about the ‘democracy paradox.’ It refers to tyrants getting elected through a democratic process. They, then continue ruling over you making a complete mockery of democracy and the rule of law, he added.
He went on to state, “This is something that Plato, the Greek philosopher anticipated several thousand years ago. For Plato, tyranny was the final stage in the perversion of the State... The tyrant’s progress starts with seemingly good intentions as a representative of the people. Plato thus assumes that a tyrant is popular at first, or rather a popular leader is a nascent tyrant.”
