‘I belong to the Constitution of India’: Indira Jaising on the launch of her memoir ‘The Constitution Is My Home’

ON THE EVENING OF MAY 21, the Seminar Halls of the Kamaladevi Complex at the India International Centre filled to capacity with lawyers, academics, students and public intellectuals. The occasion was the launch of Senior Advocate Indira Jaising’s memoir, ‘The Constitution Is My Home’. The book which has been published by HarperCollins India is a conversation with the feminist writer and publisher, Ritu Menon, and is written in a distinctive conversational form. 

The evening brought together a wide-ranging discussion between Jaising and senior journalist Sreenivasan Jain, followed by a keynote address by Justice B.V. Nagarathna of the Supreme Court of India, and a video message from Chief Justice of India Surya Kant.

‘I belong to the Constitution of India. I belong there.’: Jaising

Sreenivas opened the discussion by pressing Jaising on what he described as the heart of her book, the question of whether India’s legal system has truly been effective as a guardian of the Constitution over the six decades she has practised. Her answer reached immediately for the title. She explained that calling the Constitution her home was a deliberate and deeply personal choice. As a migrant, a refugee from Pakistan for whom no Indian state bears the name of her place of origin Sindh, she had long grappled with the question of belonging. “I belong to the Constitution of India,” she said simply. “It is the values of the Constitution which I identify with, and which make me identify with my fellow citizens. It is my bond with my fellow travellers.” That bond, she made clear, has been tested by virtually every government since independence. 

The Emergency remains the most obvious historical example, but Jaising was careful to distinguish it from the present moment. “During the emergency, it was the Constitution itself that was used to oppress the general public. They invoked the emergency provisions. So it’s much more easier to fight a written text, a written document, to challenge it.” What is happening now, she argued, is far harder to contest. “Every other form of transformation is happening without the change in the written text,” she said, a transformation from a liberal and secular republic toward a Hindu nationalist state, driven by the ruling BJP. To call it an undeclared emergency was, in her view, actually too charitable. “An emergency, for God’s sake, is an emergency. It’s temporary. We’ve gone past the temporary stage.”

‘Women are more honoured by our courts in their death’: Jaising

When Jain turned to the courts’ record on gender justice, Jaising was unflinching. “When it comes to the issue of violence, women are more honoured by our courts in their death. You will find long lectures when you have a dowry death. But when she’s alive and she’s going to court and she’s saying protect me, then you might hear arguments: ‘Oh, you’re misusing the law.’” The record on gender justice, she said, is deeply contradictory. Judgments like Vishakha, which declared freedom from sexual harassment a fundamental right, sit alongside a daily reality in which real, flesh-and-blood women who come before the courts find their cases filtered through the stereotypes of the bench. “If the law is kind of sanitized of all reality, then it’s fine. But the minute you get into a real flesh and blood person who comes before you, all your stereotypes come into the picture.”

‘It is only a strong bar which can keep a judiciary in check’: Jaising

On the persistent deference of the judiciary to executive power, Jaising said she genuinely cannot locate a logical explanation. “Our judges have security of tenure. They are indeed more powerful than any politician can ever be. So there is absolutely no logical reason for this. Perhaps the reasons are beyond logic.” She was equally clear that this deference was not a reason to abandon constitutional courts. “Those of us who believe in democracy, if we abandon constitutional courts, then it’s all over for us.”

She spoke candidly about the cost of speaking out. When she publicly criticised the handling of the sexual harassment accusation against Justice Ranjan Gogoi, cases were opened against her under multiple laws, including by the CBI. “I am not a martyr, I am not a victim, I am not a hero. I’m just me. The biggest challenge for me was how do I continue being a professional notwithstanding the attack?” But she did not conceal the weight of what had happened. “The most painful moment was to realise that the institution that I had served all my life was the very institution that attacked me.”

“In my opinion, it is only a strong bar which can keep a judiciary in check. The tragedy is that we do not have a strong and militant vociferous bar in this country,” she said as she recalled a remark by Justice Oka, who had observed that when judges themselves come under attack, the bar simply does not stand up. “If the legal profession doesn’t stand up to the judges, then no one can. No journalist can, nobody can stand up to them.”

When asked about stratospheric legal fees, Jaising responded, “There is no regulation of legal fees in India.” A properly funded legal aid system, one that actually pays its lawyers, is the only viable solution. “No lawyer has a right to take on cases beyond what they can actually deliver, beyond what they can handle. It is wrong to ask for an adjournment. Just wrong,” she noted.