Articles for category: Indian Constitutionalism in the Last Decade

Uniting the Indian Opposition

More than 35 parties have come together to form a big-tent united opposition bloc called the ‘Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance’ (“INDIA”) to jointly fight the BJP in the 2024 General Elections. They believe that if the opposition could field a single common candidate against every BJP candidate, they could potentially defeat the BJP or at least challenge its ambitious goal of winning a supermajority. The strategy of uniting the opposition against an electorally strong and populist leader is not uncommon, both for India and globally. In the following paragraphs, I’ll discuss how this strategy has played out in the recent past and what lessons INDIA could learn from such a global experience.

28. April 2024

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The End of a Dream?

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) may have officially declared war on the hijab in 2022, but the Hindu right’s battle strategy has been set in place since at least 2014 when the BJP rose to power under the leadership of Narendra Modi. A tenacious master of populism, the BJP has successfully altered the mainstream Hindu perception of the Muslim as a threat to secularism. Within this imaginary, Muslims are believed to constantly seek exemptions from the secular regulations constraining the Hindu community.

23. April 2024

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Selective, Reactive and Liminal

With a staggering 450 million internal migrants (as of the 2011 census), migration has become integral to the political economy of India. India also has the largest diaspora in the world, numbering 18 million people. The modes, institutions, and ideological underpinnings of migration governance vis-à-vis both internal and international migration have witnessed substantial shifts and continuities ever since the ascendance of the NDA (National Democratic Alliance) led Modi government in 2014.

21. April 2024

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The Right to Education and Democratic Backsliding in India

Since the election of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power in the federal elections in India in 2014, the country’s performance in key indicators of democratic quality has suffered. Over the course of its two terms in power, the party has sought to subvert key institutions for accountability, enact an ethno-cultural majoritarian electoral agenda, and use federal law enforcement agencies against their political opponents. While there is extensive literature on the erosion of civil-political rights in the past ten years, the effects of the BJP government on social rights like education and healthcare remain under-explored. Therefore, in this post, I explore three striking dimensions of primary educational policy under the BJP government.

19. April 2024

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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?

17. April 2024

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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.

15. April 2024

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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.

11. April 2024

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Subordination and Arbitrariness in Citizenship Law

In 2019, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party returned to power in India. The Bharatiya Janata Party oversaw the enactment of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 (‘CAA’) which gave Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian (but not Muslim) migrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan a fast-tracked pathway to Indian citizenship. This post argues that the CAA is unconstitutional, and uses it as an example to clarify two important under-theorised Indian constitutional principles: anti-subordination and arbitrariness.

10. April 2024

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Amending the Constitution Without Deliberation

India is undergoing a “deliberation backsliding”. Since the current government was elected to office in 2019, only 13% of all government bills introduced in Parliament were referred to Parliament Committees for detailed study, scrutiny and stakeholder consultations. While the deliberation deficit is concerning with respect to ordinary government bills, it becomes alarming with respect to bills which seek to amend the Indian Constitution. In this blog post, I argue that the promise of deliberative democracy in India is coming undone, which sets back the project of constitutionalism in India.

8. April 2024

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