The Daily Guardian
In this piece, continuing with my discussion on sedition from the last three pieces, I will examine the Constituent Assembly debates on sedition…
Continue reading Constituent Assembly debates on sedition: Part 1
Tag: Fundamental Rights
INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND INDIGENEITY
The Daily Guardian
How does one determine the indigeneity of thought? Does this translate to recognition of the concept of terroir of a certain thought…
Section 295A: The ‘Blasphemy’ Provision
The Daily Guardian
Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code 1860 is commonly known as the “Blasphemy” provision. Its origin story, while dark, is extremely interesting from a civilizational perspective…
The curious case of Indian secularism
The Daily Guardian
Over the years, the notion that religious minorities have greater religious institutional freedoms has gained a fair amount of traction in public discourse. However, there is nothing in the language of Articles 25 and 26 of the Constitution which remotely suggests that the rights recognised and guaranteed therein are more available to one community than the other…
In Re Noise Pollution and Judicial Restraint
The Daily Guardian
And so without any reference to any text or calling for any evidence, in just a handful of lines, a Bench of the Supreme Court comprising the then Chief Justice of India R.C. Lahoti and Justice Ashok Bhan concluded in 2005 in the landmark judgement of In Re Noise Pollution that there was no nexus between the bursting of firecrackers and Diwali/Deepawali…
Continue reading In Re Noise Pollution and Judicial Restraint
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…
Free speech and its impact on policymaking
The Daily Guardian
A democracy too places a premium on maximising good for the maximum number of people, but what makes it different is the premise that there is a lot more room for accommodation of diverse voices with every voice, in theory, being equal in the eyes of law notwithstanding its station in the society’s unwritten pecking order. The inherent participatory premise of democracy and the promise of egalitarianism, howsoever illusory, ephemeral and superficial, is what makes it seem so attractive…
Fifty one shades of speech
The Daily Guardian
Over the last few days, “hate speech” has become the talk of the town because some have taken offense to the contents of a certain programme which, they believe, target a particular community. While the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and the Hon’ble Supreme Court, are simultaneously, and perhaps incongruously, seized of the case, it may be worthwhile to understand the relationship between speech, culture and public morality. In the interest of fair disclosure, this author is appearing on behalf of a few Intervenors in the proceedings before the Supreme Court.…
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 Article 32 available against the judiciary?
The Daily Guardian
In the previous piece, this author had demonstrated through application of principles of interpretation and with the aid of Constituent Assembly Debates (CAD) that the Judiciary does not fall within the meaning of “the State” for the purposes of Article 12. This effectively leads to the conclusion that the Judiciary does not have the Constitutional mandate to interfere with fundamental rights…
Continue reading Is Article 32 available against the judiciary?
Yukti 