Swarati Sabhapandit

On this Constitution Day, a look at how the basic structure doctrine has travelled from India to other countries in need of a guardrail against populism and majoritarian governments.

Despite the Supreme Court’s strong guidelines in 2009 to monitor and curb ragging, a recent report reveals that ragging related offences surged in India between 2012 and 2023. To effectuate the Constitution’s transformative vision on India’s educational spaces, we need a deeper relook at how gender, class and caste inform everyday oppression on our campuses.

The string of State actions against social media influencer Ranveer Allahabadia for a joke on an online show, and a recent decision by the Chhattisgarh High Court acquitting a person accused of committing marital rape have something in common. As liberal democratic principles erode systematically, how the State responds to offences will be shaped by the society’s majoritarian impulses.

The infrastructure of surveillance and data mining in India — like DigiYatra’s promise of seamless travel and Aarogya Setu’s medical-tracking — have caused legal conundrums on privacy and transparency. How do we make sense of the changing nature of India’s sovereignty while also striving to advance general welfare of the political community?

Once an autonomous institution producing credible scientific, and independent research on India’s diverse, complicated history, the ASI today stands as a key instrument for the State’s revisionist agenda. If the place of worship disputes are any indication, the judiciary has been complicit in this revisionist project, relying blindly on the ASI’s compromised studies to betray its own polyvocal commitments

More than seven decades after independence, the State and its institutions appear strikingly detached from the ethos of transformative constitutionalism—nowhere more evident than in their continued reliance on and justification of the preventive detention regime.