News Type: Event

This week’s Faculty Seminar will focus on the paper ‘Right to Bail under UAPA: Emerging Jurisprudence from the Appellate Courts in India.’

Speaker:

Radhika Chitkara, Visiting Assistant Professor, NLSIU

About the Paper:  

India’s primary anti-terror law, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), encodes special procedures for investigation and prosecution which deviate from ordinary criminal procedure and fair trial guarantees. Human rights organizations have long alleged that these special procedures enact process as punishment by increasing discretionary police powers, prolonging detention without bail, eventually culminating in low rates of acquittal. The UAPA enables this under Section 43D by statutorily extending periods of pre-trial detention and police custody, and raising a bar against bail in case there are reasonable grounds to believe that the allegations against accused are prima facie true. For non-citizens, the UAPA absolutely bars the right to bail. Such prolonged detention before conviction on a prima facie standard of proof undermines a cardinal principle of criminal jurisprudence and fair trial, the presumption of innocence. This creates an exception to ordinary law under the Code of Criminal Procedure, where ‘bail is a norm, jail is an exception’, recognizing the right to bail as an integral part of liberty and due process under Article 21. Where constitutional courts have upheld earlier anti-terror laws for fair trial violations, burgeoning jurisprudence relating to special bail provisions under UAPA reveal a shift in the legal site of struggle from constitutional to criminal courts in the defence of liberty and due process under anti-terror laws. This article seeks to survey this emerging bail jurisprudence under UAPA to clarify the scope of exception from the right to bail under ordinary law, and outlines contemporary contestations on jurisdiction, burdens of proof and the nature of judicial scrutiny. The article further subjects this jurisprudence to a tentative theory of fair trial as separation of powers, to analyse the application of judicial, procedural and democratic checks and balances over executive discretion in the defence of the right to bail.

Here, I am mapping prior precedent under TADA-POTA, and emerging doctrine under UAPA, through a deep dive into legal databases (SCC and Manupatra), documenting legal reportage of unpublished Supreme Court and High Court orders, and monitoring trial court proceedings in select ongoing UAPA prosecutions. As such, this is ongoing research, and this draft may more appropriately be considered as a working paper which maps issues, landmark cases and some preliminary findings focusing on the right to bail. While some references to High Court judgments have been included in this working draft, these are not yet exhaustive. Lastly, I also plan to further map precedent under TADA-POTA, which are widely used to settle legal controversies under UAPA.

After a gap of two years, we are pleased to announce the return of the collaboration between the Cultural and Fine Arts Committee and the SPIC MACAY Foundation! This year, we are proud to present a Rajasthani folk music performance by Janaab Bhungar Khan Manganiyar and troupe. The performance will be held on 3rd September 2022 (Saturday) in the New Academic Block (NAB) Lounge from 6-7:30 PM.

About the SPIC MACAY Foundation

The Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music and Culture Amongst Youth (SPIC MACAY) is a 45-year-old non-profit, volunteer-run global youth movement which aims to provide a platform for eminent artists and professionals to showcase their skills in the fields of music, dance, theatre, yoga, poetry, crafts and paintings among others. As of present, the Foundation has collaborated with over 1500 educational institutions, both in India and abroad, to further this purpose.

About the artistes – Janaab Bhungar Khan Manganiyar and Troupe

Janaab Bhungar Khan Manganiyar is a young folk artist who has been the recipient of several prestigious awards such as the Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar from the Central Sangeet Natak Akademi, in recognition of his contributions to Rajasthani folk music. He is also skilled in playing the Khartal. He will be performing on campus along with his troupe, which consists of: Nehru Khan (vocals), Sadik Khan (harmonium and vocals), Bhetu Khan (vocals), Bhugde Khan (khamiacha), Sawai Khan (dholak). They will be performing traditional and popular Rajasthani folk songs, and are renowned for their powerful voices and moving performances.

To find out more about the troupe and have a look at their performances, head over to their webpage linked here.

We hope to see you all turn up in large numbers for what we expect to be a truly memorable evening!

The Chair for Consumer Law and Practice (CLAP), National Law School of India University, Bengaluru (NLSIU) invites papers for the International Conference on ‘New Facets on Consumer Protection Challenges and the Way Forward.’

About the Conference

The International conference, scheduled for November 19, 2022, is being organised by CLAP-NLSIU in association with the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, GoI. The conference will focus on a large array of issues on Consumer Protection. The agenda of the conference will mainly focus on following themes:

• Consumer Protection with respect to Sale of Goods and services through social media platforms; 
• Consumer Protection from Fake Reviews on E-Commerce Portals;
• Consumer Protection & Fall Back Liability 
• Imposing service charges on Consumer for the services rendered at Hotels and Restaurants;
• Recognition of Right to Repair as a Consumer Right;
• Assessment of Consumer Protection in India in par with International Best Practices
• Sustainable Consumerism
• Settlement of Cross Border Consumer Disputes
• Dark patterns and Consumer Protection

Submission of the Abstract

ABSTRACT FORMAT:

• The Abstract shall not exceed 500 words.
• The first page of the submission must contain the title of the paper, the name of the author(s) along with a Cover Letter.
• The abstract should be in Times New Roman, font size 12, with 1.5 line spacing, and footnotes (if any) in Times New Roman, font size 10, with single line spacing.
• The texts and footnotes must conform to OSCOLA 4th Edition.
• Only One Co-authorship is allowed.
• The Abstract should followed by an Outline of the Article with a brief Discussion.
• The submission of the abstract must be in (.doc) or (.docx)
• The submission should contain a disclaimer to the effect that the piece is original and has not been published or is under consideration, for publication, elsewhere.
• All submissions are subject to a plagiarism check.

Important Dates

• Submission of Abstract: 30th September 2022
• Confirmation of abstract selection: 10th October 2022.
• Submission of full paper and registration: 1st November 2022
• Intimation of Selected paper for Presentations: 10th November 2022
• Date of the Conference: 19th November 2022

How do I submit?

Please submit your abstract by clicking the link here.

Know More

To know more about the conference, the prize money for the papers, publication of the edited book, and other details regarding the submission, please read the brochure here.

With the term about half-way through, we thought it will be fun for the NLS community to gather for an informal open mic/ poetry reading in the New Academic Block. As a new space on campus that’s begun to bustle with classes, this may be a good way to make the space our own, and promote a cultural and social life.

Come with your own/ someone else’s poems/ song/ prose- whatever suits your fancy, and share with the rest of us!

Hope to see you there!

Queer Archive for Memory Reflection and Activism (QAMRA) Archival Project at NLSIU invites you to their first on-campus event – a panel discussion on ‘The 377 Journey: Archives, Activism and the Law’ on Saturday, August 27, 2022. The event will take place between 3 PM and 5 PM in Room 201, New Academic Block, NLSIU.

Speakers:

• Anuja Gupta, Founder of RAHI
• Ashwini Ailwadi, Co-founder of RAHI
• Kunal Ambasta, Assistant Professor, NLSIU
• Dr. Arun K Thiruvengadam, Professor of Law, NLSIU

Abstract:

“Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code symbolised all that was wrong with our sexual universe from the viewpoint of the right to love, the right to dignity and the right to equality and expression. The court battle spanning seventeen years got its final quietus with the reading down of Section 377 in Navtej Singh Johar v Union of India in 2018. What were the various strands of activism, resistance and legal strategy which went into achieving the final result ? Who were the pioneers of this battle? How do we tell their story ? As much as the archive is about the past, it is also about the future. What is the significance of the verdict for Indian constitutional law ?”

To look at some of these fascinating questions, QAMRA presents a conversation between Anuja Gupta, Ashwini Ailwadi, who were both part of the team that filed the first petition against Sec 377 in the Delhi High Court in 1994, along with NLSIU faculty members Kunal Ambasta and Dr. Arun Thiruvengadam to tell another story about the verdict in Navtej Singh Johar v Union of India.

To know more about the QAMRA Archive, click here.

For further queries, please contact +918722031067 or write to .

This week’s faculty seminar will be delivered by Vidhya Raveendranathan on the paper titled ‘Presumed Guilty by Law? Crime, Regulation and the Making of the Domestic Servant in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Madras.’

About the Speaker:

Vidhya Raveendranathan, Visiting Assistant Professor, NLSIU.

Vidhya is a historian of modern South Asia and her work is at the intersection of urban, legal and labour history with a special focus on the impact of infrastructure building, property making, policing and legal regulation and sanitary engineering in reworking a broad range of occupations formerly subject to particularistic obligations and social ties into abstract labour.

Currently, she is a final year Phd candidate at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Goettingen, Germany. Her research has been funded by the German Research Foundation, German Historical Institute, London as well as the Henry Luce Foundation dissertation grant. She was also a former doctoral fellow at the Centre for Global Asia, New York University, Shanghai.

About the Paper: 

The expansion of the city’s territorial frontiers together with the steady traffic of outcaste labour into European households in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, instilled fears about the conniving and capricious native domestic servant in Madras. Anxious efforts by the colonial state to reform the policing and prosecution of various forms of urban crime was limited by the intimacy of labour that enabled domestic servants to breach both spatial and racial hierarchies as well as made them privy to certain hidden forms of knowledge about households. Such illicit and unregulated proximities, however become the stepping stone for the colonial policing and legal apparatus to transform the space of the household into sites of judicial inquiry. Given the ambiguities surrounding domestic service being both a contractual and personal relationship, the governance and the legal constitution of the household required both the clear outlining of distinctions between a servant, slave, and coolie as well as the meanings of crime. While both the structure of policing and procedural politics of law framed the domestic servant as a figure of crime, it had the paradoxical effect of enabling them to access colonial courts to arbitrate over issues relating to wage disputes and corporeal violence against their masters. By exploring these paradoxes, the paper shows how the category of the domestic servant and the concomitant links between crime, servitude and meniality was produced during the process of policing, judicial deliberation and arbitration of crime. I argue that in the absence of older status relationships which had previously been used to construct labour relations in the eighteenth century, the colonial state in nineteenth-century Madras relied on the presumption of guilt clauses and a highly informal justice system to enforce contractual obligations on the domestic servant and also separated the domestic servant from other labouring groups.

NLSIU invites you to our public lecture on ‘The Gold of Words: Sultans and Sufis on Money in Persian Literature’ this Thursday at 5 PM.

Speaker

Prashant Keshavmurthy, Associate Professor, McGill University, Canada.

Abstract

The convex mirror of pre-modern Persian literature, a tradition extending from the 800s to the 1800s across a vast zone from the Balkans to Xinjiang and Bengal to Arcot, offers us the world’s oldest continuous magnifications of the relations between virtue and money. This talk sets forth, with passages and paintings, two initially divergent ethical attitudes towards money with attention to the literary forms that magnify them: courtly thrift and Sufi excess. It then traces the convergence of these attitudes around 1500 into a new ethics and aesthetics of sacralized wealth in the centuries before English colonialism.

NLSIU invites you to our next public lecture titled “Many lives of land” on August 5, 2022 at 5 PM. The lecture will take place at Room 201 of the New Academic Block on campus.

Speaker

Nikita Sud is Professor of the Politics of Development at the University of Oxford. She is Governing Body Fellow and Vicegerent (Deputy Head) of Wolfson College. She researches the neoliberal transformation of the state and governance in the Global South; and the social and political life of nature, especially land and water in the era of Climate Change. She is the author of the academic monographs The Making of Land and The Making of India (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and The State: A Biography of Gujarat (Oxford University Press, 2012). Besides publishing in journals across the social sciences, Nikita speaks and writes regularly for the media. Her work has appeared in The Conversation, Scroll.in, Wire.in, NDTV, Thomson Reuters Place, Mongabay, Al Jazeera, openDemocracy, East Asia Forum, BBC World Service, Radio 4, Radio France and Mediapart, among others.

Abstract

For long, humans have conceived of land as inert. Modernization as the institutional control of nature sought to mould this land, as also water, air, minerals, flora, and fauna in the service of economic growth. Building on research from across the social sciences, Nikita Sud’s work rethinks land as the solid, dry surface of the earth. Instead, it presents land as multi-dimensional. Land is imbued with identity and history. It is simultaneously enlivened, territory, property, authority, and a point of contested access and exclusion. Materially and conceptually “unfixed” land is not “naturally” so. It is constantly made and re-made by institutions of the state, market, and politics. In her field sites in post-liberalization, globalizing India, land is sought to be ordered for capitalist development. In the process, a state attempting to order a layered topography is stretched into shadowy domains of informality and unsanctioned practices. A market in land may be advanced, but remains precariously embedded in sociality. Politics may challenge the land-making of the state and market. It may also effect compromises. Attempts at constructing a durable landed order thus reveal our own (dis)orders. In attempting to “make” the land, Sud shows that the land simultaneously “makes” us.

As part of our Faculty Seminar series, we are attempting something different this week. We bring together faculty from two courses, Constitutional Law and Sociology to throw open the question of teaching methods and pedagogy. This ‘seminar’ would be mostly about conversations we have had with each other — about designing course curriculum, styles of pedagogy, experiments and assessments and how we negotiate both the opportunities and challenges that emerge in the Classroom. The conversation, hopefully, the first among many, would be in the spirit of opening up wider conversations about why we do what we do, how we do it better.

Speakers:

• Dr. Aparna Chandra, Associate Professor, NLSIU
• Dr. Arun Thiruvengadam, Professor of Law, NLSIU
• Dr. Aniket Nandan, Assistant Professor- Sociology, NLSIU
• Dr. Atreyee Majumder, Assistant Professor- Sociology, NLSIU