Articles by Upendra Baxi

Iterations of Law: Legal Histories from India edited by Aparna Balachandran, Rashmi Pant and Bhavani Raman, Oxford University Press, 2017; pp 312, ₹ 950.

We, a group of academics, activists and artists in India, came together in June 2010 to campaign against yet another apartheid regime by extending support to the international campaign for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel.

Counting castes among the population is a more complex and contradictory affair than thus far imagined by its proponents and opponents. The opponents present it as an affair of expediency, not of justice; the proponents valorise it in terms of a realistic Utopia remoulding sovereign power towards an "ethical" state-formation.

The second act of the catastrophe in Gujarat was carried out within parliamentary portals, in the course of the debate on the Gujarat violence which exposed the hypocrisy that while political discourse might concern itself with people's anguish, it is in reality driven by aspects of competitive politics. Even as extraordinary violence was perpetrated on Indian women, it was women's bodies that provided the necessary domain for the assertion of competitive party politics - a fact reflected in the arguments and counter-arguments offered during the debate. As this essay suggests, the ominous final message that seeps through is that constitutional governance can achieve little except normalise violence, almost as a social cost of democratic politics, in which even structured practices of governance are established that deny as well silence women's sufferings. The task for the 'active citizen' thus is to frame imaginative patterns of social action that would not merely empower victims but also adequately present the voices of suffering, giving voice to the anguish - a task that could effectively challenge the newly instituted narratives of 'pride' and 'honour'.