Neeraj Grover, Assistant Professor at NLSIU, will present a paper titled “Corporate Purpose and Financialization”. Dr. Sudhanshu Kumar will be the discussant.

Abstract

This draft section is part of the larger project that maps the legal structure, design, and nature of the corporations against the backdrop of recently enhanced global convergence towards corporate social responsibility (“CSR”). The project questions if corporations thwart their social responsibility by design, and whether such design is a consequence of corporate law as it emerges from the fundamental jurisprudence of contracts and property.

In this section, the focus is on financialization. Financialization (or financialism) is a process that has changed the landscape of shareholders who are the most critical of the corporate stakeholders. It generally refers to the “increasingly important role of financial markets, motives, actors and institutions in the operation of the economy”.(Fligstein N. and Goldstein A.2015). At the level of the corporation and its shareholders, this manifests in the orientation of equity markets towards share value maximisation as its primary goal. In a legal design still path dependent on favouring shareholders at the cost of CSR, financialization appears to resist true corporate responsibility by reinforcing shareholder power and control over companies.

With the emergence of larger institutional investors who invest across borders, it is also understood as a symptom of wealth concentration in the financial markets. This accumulation of shareholder wealth amongst fewer but larger institutional investors, who are interested in their corporations in ways different from retail investors, also homogenises shareholders as a group. Here, I ask whether financialization has been aided by corporate law, eventually requiring the ‘fix’ of stricter CSR mandates (especially in India) to make corporations socially responsible. To answer, I place four elements from the relevant legal theory and legislation on spot: (a) consecutive and incremental dominance of the protection of shareholders as the primary agenda of corporate finance law; (b) classic corporate law literature that pitted company directors against shareholders, and accordingly espoused the reduction of agency costs between “managers” and “shareholders” as the primary conundrum of corporate governance, (c) homogenisation of shareholders as a class in corporate law literature, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy of all shareholders interested in share value maximisation, (d) new ESG regime that links CSR with enhanced share value. [Note: for this version, I focus only on the last element, that is (d).]

The section is structured as follows: Part 1 describes financialization and explores how it restricts true CSR; Parts 2 deals with law’s role in enabling financialization, and sub-parts (a), (b), (c), and (d) each elaborate on how the four respective elements aforementioned reinforce financialization; Part 3 then concludes and connects this chapter with possible threads in progressive corporate law literature that might be useful in examining legal approaches that have the effect of restricting financialization. This includes debates around the legal duties of company directors.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.