How does a gaping crater of this magnitude in the law continue? How are civil services and legislators able to ward off reform so successfully?

Birth to senility

A movement, an organisation is originally inspired by an ideal: to undo what is wrong, to establish what is right.

Whether it triumphs or fails in its initial objective, over the years it becomes a political party.

At its inception, the party too is impelled by ideals. The crusade from which it has taken birth is still vivid, the idealists who led the movement, who then founded it and toiled to raise it are a living presence. Propelled by these memories, the party seeks to change the order, it wants to recast the polity of course, but more: it wants to recast society into the ideals to attain which it has been formed.

Over time, it forsakes this idealism, and becomes a mere electoral machine.

Soon, it putrefies into a machine that fails to win even elections.

Members become increasingly anxious: after all, if the party continues its decline, they tell each other, it isn’t just that the ideals which are its very reason for existence will not be attained, that the transformation for which they have been striving will not come about; but also, their personal fortunes will evaporate. They run from leader to leader, urging reform, a return to ideals. Their efforts go nowhere. The party does not reform. It does not die. It just goes on falling to pieces.

... contd.