The Daily Guardian
A few days ago, Uttarakhand witnessed yet another flood and I am not sure I want to call it a “natural disaster” which could give the impression that it wasn’t caused by human activity…
Tag: Bharat
A soft state and judicial populism: A match made in hell
The Daily Guardian
Over the past several weeks, a lot has been written about the farm laws, the concerns of farmers of a few States and the Central Government’s position…
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Indigeneity, land ontologies and ‘development’
The Daily Guardian
Most indigenous societies, until afflicted by “modernity” owing to the European colonizer’s advent, shared a sacred and harmonious relationship with nature which was not seen merely as an object of conquest and possession…
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Vedantic universalism, Indic civilisational renaissance & diversity
The Daily Guardian
Swami Viveknanda's teachings on Vedanta through his lectures on the subject reveal that Swamiji’s take on Vedanta could serve as a key foundational building block for an Indic Renaissance i.e. the rejuvenation of Bharat as a living civilization which still has a lot to offer to the world…
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A feudal democracy?
The Daily Guardian
Over the past few days, a well-known and fairly accomplished Senior IPS Officer, who is currently the Home Secretary to the State Government of Karnataka, has been in the news for her public spat on Twitter with a widely followed and encyclopaedic anonymous commentator on history who prefers to go by the Twitter pseudonym, “True Indology” which is perhaps a nom de guerre…
Religion, race and colonialism
The Daily Guardian
A reading of the literature on colonialism reveals that the story of European colonialism may be traced to what has been referred to as “the Age of Discovery” in the fifteenth century when Christopher Columbus set out in 1492 to “discover” the “New World”, namely the non-Christian world…
The coloniality of modernity
The Daily Guardian
The word modern was not only a reference to the time that something belonged to, it was equally, and perhaps more importantly, a reference to the period it did not belong to…
Public morality, public opinion and policymaking
The Daily Guardian
In a democracy where referendum is the exception, and periodic elections are the norm, how are elected representatives expected to gather public opinion on matters of policy, including morality, before passing legislations which are ostensibly based on “public morality”?…
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Etching the contours of public morality
The Daily Guardian
The sum and substance of these discussions is that under the framework of the Indian Constitution, it is the State, meaning thereby the Executive and the Legislature but not the Judiciary, which has the power to invoke public morality within reasonable bounds for the purposes of placing reasonable restrictions on fundamental rights guaranteed by Part III…
Is judiciary part of the ‘State’ under Article 12?
The Daily Guardian
On the basis of this history, it can be reasonably stated that Part III of the Constitution, which deals with fundamental rights and the remedies to enforce them, has been crafted with a view to protect fundamental rights from unreasonable and summary abridgement by legislative and executive bodies of all grades who form the “State”. The role of the judiciary is limited to exercising its power of judicial review under Articles 32 and 226 to assess the constitutional validity of such State action. …
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Yukti 