17 April 2024
India’s Push-and-Pull on Reproductive Rights
For a piece mapping India’s push-and-pull on reproductive rights – the expanse of its protection and the edges it comes up against – history is a good place to start. Rights in the reproductive sphere are relatively new to India. While India enacted a seemingly liberal abortion legislation as early as 1971, concerns about women’s rights were hardly the drivers behind it. Women’s bodies were a means to achieve the State’s end of population control. It is difficult to justify if women were truly seen as rights-holders. Did this change in recent years? Continue reading >>
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15 April 2024
The Fabulous and the Fascist
The last ten years have witnessed the gradual collapse of democracy and constitutionalism in India. Where do LGBT rights figure in all this? I contextualize the wins and the losses and discuss why LGBT rights in India are not “under attack” as they have been under authoritarian governments elsewhere. Continue reading >>
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12 April 2024
Gender, Equality, and the Predicaments of Faith
In the context of the rise of the global right, feminist debates on gender and sexual rights can and have at times slipped into a left and right ideological divide. In reflecting on the ways in which gender equality has been addressed in the context of Indian constitutional law over the past two decades, what emerges is a more complex picture. Continue reading >>
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11 April 2024
The Digital Public Square meets the Digital Baton
The value a society and its laws place on protecting free speech is arguably most keenly felt where that speech takes a critical turn. Which is why the history of this field is littered with prosecutions and penalties being levied against problematic speech, inviting courts to draw the lines between what is protected and what is not. The past ten years in India demonstrate that when faced with speech that is critical of government policy or state action, the state has become increasingly hesitant to let it remain on air. What is perhaps most alarming for the health of democracy is that, in most cases, there is often a synergy across the three arms of the State that curbing problematic speech is the best course of action to follow. Continue reading >>
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07 April 2024
Reimagining Indian Federalism
As India’s new dominant party system coalesced after 2014, the country entered a phase of centralisation. India has always had federalism with a strong centre, but from the late 1980s to the mid-2010s, political and economic regionalism and national coalition governments encompassing national and regional parties produced an appearance of deepening federalisation. Since 2014, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) became the first party in over 25 years to win an outright parliamentary majority, the twin pillars of political centralisation under a dominant party system and economic concentration, have once again drawn attention to the contested nature of India’s federal contract. Continue reading >>
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06 April 2024
Civil Society and its Engagement with the Constitution
The Indian Constitution is as much a culmination of the ideas of the freedom movement against colonial powers as it is of the achievement of a social revolution through law. Our Constitution, which was inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, thus, not only provided for political freedom from foreign rule and established a democratic republic, but it also provided a road map to undo the deeply entrenched hierarchies, inequalities, and social exclusions in our society and therefore for a social transformation. Much of the civil society interventions of the last seven decades have been to work for redeeming the promise of the constitution inside and outside courts. Continue reading >>
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06 April 2024
Indian Constitutionalism in the Last Decade
Having been governed by Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the last ten years, India will hold elections in the following weeks. We use this moment as an opportunity to reflect upon the last decade and assess how the Hindu nationalists have impacted Indian constitutionalism. To do so, we have asked legal scholars and practitioners to reflect upon the developments in particular areas of Indian constitutional law over the last decade. This blog post will provide an introduction to the symposium. Continue reading >>20 October 2023
The Basic Structure Doctrine, Article 370 and the Future of India’s Democracy
A constitution bench (five-judges) of the Supreme Court of India recently concluded the hearings related to the the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution and the bifurcation of the State of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) into two Union Territories. How the Supreme Court finally decides this instant case will have far-reaching constitutional implications. In particular, the basic structure challenge pressed upon by the Petitioners, is likely to determine the future of India’s democratic federal architecture and the structural balance of power between the Union and states. Continue reading >>
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24 August 2023
On the State of Academia in India
The Economics Department at India’s Ashoka University received an unexpected visit from the Federal Intelligence Bureau. The reason for this visit was a paper titled ‘Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy’ by Sabyasachi Das, an economist. In his research, Das meticulously examined 11 contested seats during India’s 2019 general elections and uncovered imbalanced outcomes that favored the ruling party, BJP. Das noted that ‘the results point to strategic and targeted electoral discrimination against Muslims, in the form of deletion of names from voter lists and suppression of their votes during election, in part facilitated by weak monitoring by election observers.’ The subsequent visit by the Federal Intelligence Bureau is just one among several incidents that highlight the precarious state of academic freedom in India. Continue reading >>
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21 August 2023
Trivialising Privacy through Tribunals in India
On 11th August 2023, India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (‘DPDP Act’) has received Presidential assent. The Act’s passing is critical in light of increasing concerns about data security and surveillance in India, including allegations that the government has illegally been using spyware against activists. Moreover, the government and its agencies are major data fiduciaries, having access to various identification and biometric data that have in the past been breached on a large scale. Given this, it is vital that the DPDP Act is able to function effectively and independently against the government in cases of non-compliance. However, a novel provision bestowing appellate jurisdiction on a Tribunal that lacks both the necessary expertise and independence is likely to hinder this goal. Continue reading >>
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