News Type: Event

NLSIU’s UNHCR Chair Panel Discussion | Representation in Refugee Law: The Right to Legal Aid for Refugees in India

The UNHCR Chair on Refugee Law at NLSIU is organizing a panel discussion titled “Representation in Refugee Law: The Right to Legal Aid for Refugees in India”, on May 20 (Monday), 2024, at 5 PM, in OAB 106. This panel will focus on the legal and material aspects of legal aid for refugees in India. The panelists are Advocate Sahana Basavapatna, and Paralegal and Researcher Iftikar Hussain Siddique.

Background

India is not a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention or to the Optional Protocol. Refugees have been accommodated in India on a case-by-case basis, however, in the absence of a comprehensive legal framework for their protection, most refugees are treated as illegal migrants, and are vulnerable to criminal prosecution. Even after refugees have served their sentence, they may be transferred to detention centres, awaiting deportation to a country which poses a risk to their lives. The recent deportation of 77 refugees from Myanmar, who had taken shelter in Manipur after the 2021 Military coup in Myanmar, indicates just how vulnerable refugees are in the absence of effective legal aid.

Refugees in India need legal representation not only at the stage of criminal prosecution, but also to enable them to apply for long-term visas, and seek access to various entitlements that they may qualify for. However, in the absence of recognition of their status as refugees, state-sponsored legal aid may fail to address their distinct needs. Recognising that there exists a constitutional imperative to provide free legal aid, this panel will focus on the experiences of together individual practitioners who work with refugees, to understand the challenges in providing them legal aid.

About the Panelists

Sahana Basavapatna is a lawyer by training and for more than 9 years, has been practising in the trial courts in civil, criminal and commercial law in Bangalore. Prior to relocating to Bangalore from New Delhi, Sahana worked at first in The Other Media from 2006-2009, an organisation that, at the time, worked with Burmese refugees. Sahana went on to pursue a career as an independent researcher working on forced migration and environmental law. Her research includes work with and on, among others, on the Chins and the Rohingyas from Burma and Dalits from Pakistan. She is a member of the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, based in Calcutta.

Iftikar Hussain Siddique, is an Inlaks Shivadasani Fellow and a paralegal from Assam. He is working on creating access to legal aid by conducting awareness and empowerment camps at the community level and by training other paralegal volunteers. He has worked with multiple organizations, researchers, academics, and institutions at grassroots-level and helped people get legal representation during the pandemic. He also regularly conducts awareness programmes at the Matia Detention Centre in Goalpara, Assam, and works with refugees in the detention centre to provide them access to legal representation.

Celebrating 10 Years! | BA LLB (Hons) | Batch of 2013

NLSIU is excited to host a campus reunion for the batch of 2013 this Saturday, May 11, 2024 as they celebrate 10 years of their graduation from law school. Our alumni will be spending the day on campus re-connecting with batchmates, faculty, and other members of the NLS community.

The batch of 2013 has expressed a keen interest in reconnecting with faculty and staff members who played a significant role in shaping their educational journey. Therefore, we have allocated a dedicated time slot from 12:15 pm to 1:00 pm for an interactive session between the batch members and the faculty and staff. This session will be held in a hybrid format at the OAB-101 classroom, allowing for both in-person and virtual participation.

The schedule of events on May 11 (Saturday), 2024, is provided below.

A day filled with nostalgia

The day began with a session of introductions and updates from the alumni who gathered on campus along with many others who joined the session virtually over Zoom. The alumni came from diverse backgrounds such as International Law, Litigation, Finance, Civil Services, Corporate Law, Taxation, among other fields. They shared fond memories from their time at NLS, and surprisingly, almost all of them seemed to be able to recall their roll numbers from their law school days!

They interacted with NLS faculty Prof. Somashekar, Prof. Mrinal Satish,  and the University Vice Chancellor Prof. Sudhir Krishnaswamy who spoke to them about key campus developments and other measures being undertaken at NLSIU.

Following this introductory session, the alumni gathered together for lunch and later went on a campus walk to see the newer developments on campus including the redeveloped Library, the New Academic Block, the amphitheatre and both new and old hostels – this naturally included a visit to the hostel rooms where the alumni had resided during their time here on campus. After the campus walk, the alumni met the current students for a ‘Townhall’ and concluded the day with a photo session with their fellow batchmates.

Reflections

We asked some of our alumni to share their thoughts on how it felt to be back on campus after a decade, and here’s what they had to say:

Janhavi Manohar, Partner, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas

“Those who believe that you can’t turn back time have probably not attended an NLS reunion. Setting foot into (what used to be) our second year classroom was all the impetus that was needed to send us hurtling back a decade or so – every single one of us remembered our roll numbers and where we sat with some very vivid re-tellings of our favourite anecdotes. The campus tour and faculty interaction was in equal parts a walk down memory lane as well as a reminder of how much things had changed since we were last here. With the brand new amphitheatre, the library, the new Acad Block and the slew of changes in the offing, including the new academic courses, we look well poised to make good on our promise of being the Harvard of the East (and bettering that).

We are very grateful to Prof. Sudhir, Prof. Somashekar, Prof. Shreya Rao and Prof. Mrinal Satish who took the time out on a non-working day to meet us (and regale us). Also, a special shout out to the student volunteers who had the unenviable task of shepherding a bunch of noisy, boisterous (and magically de-aged) 20-year-olds across campus. Thank you NLS for everything – for shaping us, nurturing us, helping us create the best memories, and indulging us with small blips in the space-time continuum every now and then!” 

Aruj Garg, Branding and Marketing at Rebel Foods

“It was lovely to be at NLS with my batchmates and friends for our reunion. Some parts of the campus have been given a very aesthetic facelift and it was great to see students interacting with those changes. At the same time, a lot was exactly how it was when we were around, which brought back a lot of memories. For me, the hostel life was big part of the experience and visiting my old room was a highlight.”

Akshaya Ramadurai, Advocate, Madras High Court

“Returning to law school after 10 years was like a visit back home – the warm welcome by faculty, the VC and the coordinators made me feel I had never left. The campus tour was a beautiful trip down memory lane and also surprised us with the newer features. While we did get nostalgic about ‘Chetta’ and our extended chilling sessions there, the new and vibrant amphitheatre and renovated library made us envious. As a batch, we recalled both the naughty and some serious/sober moments and yearned for more time together.”

Gallery

Schedule

11:00 am – 12:00 pm – Arrival and Registration (Main Gate)
12:00 pm – 12:15 pm – Introduction of Batch members (OAB-101)
12:15 pm – 1:00 pm – Interaction with Faculty and Batch members
1:00 pm – 2:30 pm – Networking Lunch
2:30 pm – 3:00 pm – Guided Campus Tour
3:00 pm – 4:00 pm – Town Hall discussion with current law students
4:00 pm – 4:15 pm – Group Photo Session

Meeting Link for the 12 noon session: Class of 2013 Reunion
Meeting ID: 920 3903 9334 | Passcode: 469972

 

Faculty Seminar | Preventive Detention in Karnataka

Prof. Mrinal Satish and Anushka Pandey will present a paper titled “Preventive Detention in Karnataka”. Pranav Verma will be the discussant.

Abstract

Of all the coercive powers available to the State, preventive detention remains the most drastic infringement of an individual’s liberty, given that it allows States to detain individuals in the present on the basis of a suspicion of future public harm. These powers were introduced into the Indian criminal justice system by the British to control both crime as well as dissent – but the post-colonial Indian State not only retained them but in fact expanded their scope. Presently, numerous Indian States, including Karnataka, have enacted “Goondas Acts.” These legislations give law enforcement agencies wide powers to preventively detain individuals based on an assessment of their “dangerousness.” Considering the wide range of offences mentioned in the Karnataka Goondas Act and a paucity of publicly available information regarding the number and nature of detentions in Karnataka, a study detailing the exact manner in which the preventive detention law is being used in the State of Karnataka was thought to be necessary. Through this study, our attempt  is to present a more well defined picture of the state of preventive detentions in Karnataka, both in terms of the numbers as well as narratives that help us make sense of those numbers. In the course of the study, we also discovered that the police in Karnataka use Chapter VIII of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 (CrPC) which deals with “Security for keeping the peace and for good behaviour” for preventive policing purposes. Hence, we also examine Chapter VIII of the CrPC. to analyze its use in preventive policing.

Overengineered & Under-designed: Spaces for People in Indian Cities Today | HUPA Chair on Urban Poor and the Law

NLSIU’s Chair on Urban Poor and the Law is organizing a talk titled “Overengineered and Underdesigned: Spaces for People in Indian Cities Today” to be delivered by Pravar Chaudhary.

Pravar Chaudhary, Founder of Bengawalk, will be speaking about his long standing work on Bangalore’s infrastructure and how that impacts the public.

About the Speaker

Pravar is a designer with experience in architecture, graphic design, film making and urban planning. He enjoys telling stories about Bangalore on the internet where he runs a page called bengawalk. Currently, bengawalk is doing a series of videos on YouTube where they review public spaces in the city. In his free time Pravar likes to play music and book tickets on IRCTC.

About the talk

There’s an ongoing trend where development translates to building massive infrastructure that’s flashy looking but inconvenient to use and incredibly wasteful. Some examples include the steel trees in Pune, white topped roads in Bengaluru, and the SMVT railway station. In our conversation, we will understand what led to this trend, discuss how to identify it, and explore what can be done moving forward.

The NLS Public Lecture Series | Book Discussion: ‘A Thousand Tiny Cuts – Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands’

In our upcoming public lecture on May 6, 2024, NLSIU will host a book discussion with Sahana Ghosh, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. The discussion is on her book titled ‘A Thousand Tiny Cuts – Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands’. The event will take place from 5 pm – 6.30 pm. NLS faculty member Dr. Atreyee Majumder will be the discussant.

About the speaker

Sahana Ghosh uses ethnography and feminist research methods to study the forms and experiences of inequality produced through the intersection of mobility, militarism, and gender in our contemporary world. Her first book A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands (University of California Press 2023), and her academic and public writing, center on borders and borderlands, gendered labor, and migration and national security regimes in South Asia.

About the book 

A Thousand Tiny Cuts chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in northern Bangladesh and eastern India, it shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the making and management of threat in relation to mobility. Rather than focusing solely on border fences and border crossings, the book argues that bordering reorders relations of value. The cost of militarization across this ostensibly “friendly” border is devaluation—of agrarian land and crops, of borderland youth undesirable as brides and grooms in their respective national hinterlands, of regional infrastructures now disconnected, and of social and physical geographies disordered by surveillance. This ethnography of the gendered political economy of mobility illuminates the violence of bordering, migration and citizenship, and transnational inequalities, with important political stakes for borders and security regimes in South Asia and beyond.

The NLS Public Lecture Series | Book Discussion – “Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood”

NLSIU will host a public lecture by Dr. Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav, Senior Research Fellow, University of Leipzig. Dr. Rinku Lamba will be the discussant for the talk.

About the Speaker 

Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav is an intellectual historian of modern South Asia with a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford. Her research has been published in the Journal of Asian Studies, Global Intellectual History, Studies in Indian Politics, and Religions. She has been a Research Fellow at ICAS: M.P., New Delhi, India, and a Senior Research Fellow with “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”, University of Leipzig, Germany.

Abstract

“Being Hindu, Being Indian” undertakes a systematic intellectual study of Lala Lajpat Rai’s nationalist thought through his active political life, spanning 1888 and 1928. Contesting the dominant scholarly interpretation of Rai’s nationalism as the precursor of Savarkarite Hindutva, it highlights the internally differentiated nature of ‘Hindu nationalism’. An examination of Lajpat Rai’s thought as a Hindu Mahasabha in the mid-1920s reveals that Rai organised a Hindu politics in service of a secular Indian nation-state. The book argues that this neither reduces his secularism to Hindu majoritarianism, nor completely proves right revisionist scholarship that increasingly questions the analytical contrast between these categories. Methodologically, the book constitutes an argument to respect the nuances, fluidity, and internal tension in a politician-thinker’s thought.

‘How is India doing? A Historian’s Reckoning’ | Discussion with Dr. Ramachandra Guha at NLSIU

NLSIU will host an in-person interactive discussion with historian and author Dr. Ramachandra Guha on Wednesday, 24th April, at 4 pm. The focus of this conversation will be – “How is India doing? A Historian’s Reckoning”. This session will be moderated by NLS faculty Dr. Rinku Lamba.

This session is being organized by the Student Initiative for Promotion of Legal Awareness (SIPLA), a student committee at NLSIU. It will be an open-forum interactive session, allowing for an extended Q&A with students.

About the speaker

Dr. Ramachandra Guha is a historian, biographer, political commentator, environmental activist, and cricket aficionado, among many other things. Some of his bestselling works include – “India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy” (Picador, 2007), a popular tome on the history of India since independence, and “Gandhi Before India” (2013), which focuses on Gandhi’s years in South Africa.

Dr. Guha earned his Bachelor of Arts Degree in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, a master’s degree from the Delhi School of Economics, and his Ph.D. in Sociology from the Indian Institute of Management at Kolkata, where he wrote a doctoral thesis on the history and prehistory of the Chipko movement.

His other notable works include “Patriots and Partisans”, a collection of essays on the politics of our time; “The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya” (Oxford University Press, 1989), a pioneering work in environmental history; “A Corner of a Foreign Field” (Picador 2003), an award-winning social history of cricket. His most recent book is a memoir titled “The Cooking of Books”, chronicling the four decades-long relationship between him and Rukun Advani, his first editor.

The registration form for all those who would like to attend this session is available here.

Online Book Discussion | Lives of Circumcised and Veiled Women: A Global-Indian Interplay of Discourses and Narratives by Dr Debangana Chaterjee

An online discussion on the book, Lives of Circumcised and Veiled Women: A Global-Indian Interplay of Discourses and Narratives by NLS faculty Dr Debangana Chaterjee, will be held on April 22, 2024, at 7:30 pm IST.

The discussion will feature commenters: Professor Shirin Rai (SOAS), Khushi Singh Rathore (Jawaharlal Nehru University), and Professor Laura Sjoberg (Royal Holloway, University of London), moderated by Dr Annika Bergman Rosamond (The University of Edinburgh).

About the book

The book unravels the politics of representation and the process of exoticising women’s bodies through the prism of external gaze and knowledge production. It brings out the intricacies of representational discourses around cultural practices of female circumcision (FC)/female genital cutting (FGC) and Islamic veiling. Focusing on crucial international legal texts and national legislation, the book gives an overview of the cultural nuances in FC/FGC and juxtaposes it with the Indian variation, khafz.

The author studies the international veiling narratives that conjure up a fractured discourse containing aspects of colonialism, Islamophobia, and Islamic fashion and maps them with the regional variations of Islamic purdah in India. The volume explores the cultural practice of khafz and purdah through narratives in India, portraying how representational factors from international discourses reflect on the Indian context and vice versa.

Amid the world of binaries and polarised opinions, the book offers a nuanced analysis of the space in-between, characterised by narratives from women. By situating women’s narratives in relation to family, community, state, and international politics, the book explores the global-Indian interplay of discourses on FC/FGC and Islamic veiling. This volume will be of interest to scholars, students, and readers of gender studies, feminism, cultural and religious studies, sociology, South Asian studies, and International Relations.

The South Asian Edition of the book is available here. You can also read our interview with Dr. Debangana Chatterjee, on her book.

Additional information and registration link for this online book discussion, is available here.

Faculty Seminar | An Institutional Ethnography of Counter-Terrorism

NLS faculty Radhika Chitkara will present a paper titled “An Institutional Ethnography of Counter-Terrorism”, and Dr. Atreyee Majumdar will be the discussant.

Abstract 

This draft is part of the doctoral thesis and identifies its method and scope of inquiry. The author proposes an institutional ethnography of counter-terror policing institutions in India from the standpoint of ‘suspect communities’ in Jharkhand, namely adivasis qua ethnic and ideological minorities. The current draft lays out the problematic, standpoint and texts for such an institutional ethnography, and offers background to the empirical work to follow. The draft specifically identifies the four prongs of policing constituting the problematic in this exercise in IE, namely, investigations, prosecution, intelligence-gathering and enforcement.

Faculty Seminar | From Colony to Sovereign: Understanding India’s Pre-Independence Legal Personality

NLS faculty Dr. Akhila Basalalli will present a paper titled “From Colony to Sovereign: Understanding India’s Pre-Independence Legal Personality”. Prof. Kamala Sankaran will be the discussant.

Abstract 

India’s engagements with international law and organizations predates its independence. Rewarding the participation in the First World War, the Imperial War Conference of 1917 declared that the Dominions (Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand) including India, should have autonomous status and representation in foreign affairs. However, India was not granted dominion status and was only acknowledged with a foreign voice. Treaties were concluded on behalf of India by British representatives and Indian representatives, mostly Maharajas of native states during the period 1919-1947. The paper argues that India without dominion status was not a self-governing territory and its capacity to enter into international obligations and membership in international organisations is an irregularity. India continued the international legal personality of British India becoming a party to 627 treaties and member of 51 international organizations by the time of independence. The paper emphasizes the importance tabula rasa for newly formed states and draws attention to the Nyerere Doctrine adopted by Eastern African States, where colonial treaties were only binding upon the new state if they were formally accepted within a specific timeframe. The India Independence Act of 1947 bound India to its past treaties, as the succession of dominions from British India was seen as secession rather than dismemberment. This continuity of legal personality was further validated by the United Nations.