Prolonged power can change the form of governance

“With great power comes great responsibility”

 The above famous line from the movie ‘Spiderman’ is used for every leader. But I think the sentence is incomplete. There should be more to it. The full sentence should be – With great power comes great responsibility, but with prolonged power responsibility can be misused.

The same can be said about governance in a country. If a person, group or a party holds power to run and administer a country for too long then it becomes capable to use its power to manipulate things. It has the potential to change the political condition of a country to satisfy its own whims. This results in change in the form of governance. Change in governance can come in both positive and negative ways. First lets analyse the positive aspect.

Over the course of the history of mankind,people have always needed someone to whom they could look upto. Whoever had the courage to become their leader acquired power. Eventually, Monarchy system came up. As the monarch’s power grew with time, it became a despot and finally resulted in nepotism. This made sure that the authority of the state remains within the family. The only way to wrest the power was to defeat the monarch by another one in a war. The reason that a monarch could prolong its power for so many years is that no one else from the state would question its authority. After many centuries during the Renaissance period, when people started to reason about things, they questioned the degree of authority of the monarch over them. So various political thoughts and systems like Marxism, Socialism, Leninism, Communism, Totalitarianism and Democracy developed in last 2 centuries. In any of these systems, the objective was to give the power to the masses and abolish Monarchy. So, prolonged power in the hands of a despot and its family bore fruits for a long time but gradually got distributed among more and more people.

The positive consequence of prolonged power can be seen in medieval history. But its negative impact happens in the modern times.

We know that democracy is the latest and most power-distributed form of governance among modern political systems. A democratic state too needs a party to rule its people and the power is transferred to another one through the elections after a fixed period of time. But, what if the same party remains in power for a long time?It starts to misuse its power, safeguard themselves from anyone who threatens to take it and suppresses against those who protest against them. Though this situation is difficult to happen in a democracy, its not impossible. Gradually, the party becomes too powerful that it becomes capable of changing democracy into oligarchy, Marxist-Leninist state and eventually into a communist state. Later on if the leader of the powerful party becomes authoritative among themselves autocracy, theocracy (if its a religious state) and dictatorship may come into existence. Ultimately, prolonged power returns to one person having full authority over its people.

In modern politics, this happens in developing and poor countries where either people are not happy or the administration is unstable. In India, change in governance was almost experienced when the then PM Indira Gandhi who had become very powerful declared Emergency throughout the country. In other weak countries, sometimes military interferes and does a coup d’etat, snatching the power from the political leaders.

It is a universal knowledge that power is like money. The more you have it, the more you want it. Ultimately it depends how one uses and manages power.

Abraham Lincoln: “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

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