The Supreme Court in Modi's India

In what is globally called ‘autocratic legalism’, current authoritarian regimes maintain a semblance of legality and constitutionalism while in practice attempting to remake the judiciary in their own image. In this article, published in the new Journal of Right-Wing Studies, published out of Berkeley University,  I look at how the Indian Supreme Court (SC) has responded to executive incursions under the Narendra Modi regime since 2014. Even today, the court continues to deliver important democracy-enhancing judgments, breaking away from India’s colonial inheritance in matters like criminalizing same-sex relationships and adultery. However, the last decade is strongly marked by two features: first, an unwillingness to hear major constitutional issues that might challenge the regime; and second, judgments that serve as an advertorial for the regime, reinforcing an antiminority ideological orientation, justifying the government’s actions, and promoting Modi’s personality cult. By outsourcing several political decisions to a seemingly disinterested and neutral judiciary, the Modi government has been far more successful than it would have been if it had imposed those decisions purely by legislative majority. In turn, by addressing a variety of political issues as purely procedural matters and not addressing them as constitutional questions, the courts have collaborated in the delegitimization of dissent and reinforced the claims of the Modi regime.

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/313700c7

Five Acres in Lieu of Citizenship: Parsing the Ayodhya Verdict

The Muslims of India approached the Supreme Court for affirmation of their citizenship.  Instead, they were given five acres of land.

In their verdict on the Ayodhya dispute, the bench recognised “it is necessary to provide restitution to the Muslim community for the unlawful destruction of their place of worship.” But in sharp contrast to their lengthy exegesis on other issues – like the indubitability of faith, the archaeological evidence for a temple below the mosque, the way that historical texts must be read – there is absolutely no discussion of what ‘restitution’ means, and more importantly, what it might involve in this specific context.

“Go back to India and cover every statue of Gandhi so that he doesn't have to face this shame”: Kashmiris mark the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birthday with Satyagraha

“Go back to India and cover every statue of Gandhi so that he doesn't have to face this shame”: Kashmiris mark the 150^th anniversary of Gandhi’s birthday with Satyagraha

Nitya Ramakrishnan (Advocate) and Nandini Sundar (Sociologist)      

We visited the Kashmir Valley between 5^th and 9^th October 2019. We spoke to a cross section of people in three different regions.

MM Kalburgi and the death of rational enquiry?

Can a log which chisel and hammer cannot split
be split with axe and sickle?
Would a mind which
after being chiseled with the nectar of elders’ vachanas …
yield to the axe and sickle of the Veda and aagama?
It will not. 

The 17^th century vachana poet, Hemagalla Hampa might well have been writing of the 21^st century vachana scholar, M M Kalburgi, who was shot in his home on August 30th. Kalburgi was a Kannada epigrapher, winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award for his collection of essays Marga-4, and Vice-Chancellor of Hampi university. Can a clear, penetrating mind ever be vanquished by the petty tyrannies and guns of those who claim to own faith? Kalburgi’s name will live on, while even the police don’t seem to want to know the names of his killers.

A little memory can go a long way

A little memory can go a long way

It is the silences that attend media coverage of Yakub Memon’s impending execution and not the Shiv Sena’s aggressive calls for his hanging that hold a mirror to Indian democracy most clearly. Leading national dailies carry photos of mangled bomb blast sites and interview those affected, as if to justify the imposition of the death penalty; none ask why other victims must continue to suffer silently the indignity of watching their attackers go scot-free.

The language of Hindutva

HRD Minister Smriti Irani’s commitment to the Constitution is absolutely commendable. We are supposed to understand that the decision to stop the teaching of German in Kendriya Vidyalaya (KV) schools has nothing to do with the influence exercised by the Sanskrit Shikshak Sangh to replace the third optional language taught to children in school with Sanskrit and everything to do with the Constitution.

Educating for Inequality

 

Educating for Inequality: The experiences of India’s ‘Indigenous’ Citizens. Asian Anthropology, Vol. 9, September 2010, pp. 117-142. 

This report deals with the contradictions and dilemmas concerning education faced by adivasis, the preferred local term for “indigenous people,” in central India. The full article is available at:  

http://www.scribd.com/full/46102521?access_key=key-12e1xsut7f0dtudx14ze

Teaching to hate: The RSS’s Pedagogical Program

“Teaching to hate: The RSS’s Pedagogical Program.” In Economic and Political Weekly 39 (16), 2004, 1605-1612 (Also in Tom Ewing ed. Revolution and Pedagogy, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005, 195-218).

 If schools are the one of the modes by which nations imagine and reproduce themselves, debates over schooling systems – availability, cost, curriculum, language, pedagogical techniques  - are, at heart, debates over the style and content of this imagining.  Increasingly in India, RSS notions of citizenship, nationhood and patriotism have come to be critical to this debate. This article is an attempt to explore some of the RSS/BJP’s educational interventions and their implications for the future production of ‘citizens’, first, at the national level through the textbook debate and then, through ethnographic fieldwork in RSS schools in Chhattisgarh. 

The full text of the article is available at: 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46103038/Teaching-to-Hate

Indigenise, Nationalise and Spiritualise: An Agenda for Education?

“Indigenise, Nationalise and Spiritualise: An Agenda for Education?” In International Social Science Journal, 173, September 2002, 373-383.

This paper explores the relation between ‘indigenous knowledge’ and ‘formal education’ through the juxtaposition of two different but closely related examples from India  – the inclusion of astrology as 'indigenous knowledge' in the university curriculum, and schooling among 'indigenous peoples'. In both cases, the valorization of a certain body of knowledge as indigenous and its incorporation into a formal system (which then certifies it as legitimate ‘knowledge’) depends on the status and power of the social group claiming indigenous status, rather than the substantive content of the knowledge. Vedic astrology finds a place in the Indian university curriculum because the group backing it, the Hindu right, has been successful in claiming indigeneity, and they have the political power to transmute their beliefs into certified ‘knowledge’. On the other hand, indigenous peoples have not been able to assert themselves politically, and therefore their languages and systems of knowledge remain marginal. Ultimately then, ‘indigenous knowledge’ is a political and contextual category rather than one with substantive content. 

Full text available at:  

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46103000/Indigenise-Nationalise-Spiritualise