This week, the Rajasthan High Court held that the Jain practice of santhara – a ritual of “ voluntary and systematic fasting to death ” was illegal, since it amounted to abetment to suicide (criminalised under Section 306 of the Indian Penal Code). There are many issues that arise out of this judgme...

After two decades of litigation, Air Hostesses, Air Flight Pursers and the Union of India met again, in one final battle before the Courts. After the decision of the Supreme Court in Yeshaswinee Merchant, refusing the merger of cadres, the struggle for equalisation was taken (again) outside the judi...

Air India vs Nargesh Mirza was only the first salvo in a legal battle that was to last thirty more years. After losing in the Supreme Court, the air hostesses took their battle to the political arena: in 1989, they petitioned the Lok Sabha against the discrimination in retirement ages and other serv...

Fundamental Rights or Fundamentally Right? The Founding Fathers of our Constitution had a gargantuan task of drafting what turned out to be the most extensive written Constitution in the world. When the Constituent assembly was handed over this huge responsibility - I wonder what would have taken th...

In the previous essay, we noted the analytical problems with the Supreme Court’s judgment in Air India vs Nargesh Mirza. However, six years later, in 1987, the Supreme Court handed down another judgment that substantially undercut the ratio in Nargesh Mirza. In MacKinnon Mackenzie vs Audrey d’Costa ...

With the exception of its 1954 judgment, Yusuf Abdul Aziz, which cursorily upheld the constitutionality of adultery, the Supreme Court did not have occasion to seriously deal with sex discrimination under Article 15(1) in the first three decades after the Constitution. The cases that we have discuss...

Today, in a detailed order in the ongoing Aadhar litigation, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court referred the question of whether there exists a fundamental right to privacy under the Constitution, to a five-judge bench. In its order, the Court explains that the Attorney-General referred to the...

The decisions of the Kerala High Court in Vijayamma (1978) and A.N. Rajamma (1983), sandwich the Supreme Court’s landmark holding in Air India vs Nargesh Mirza (1981). Nonetheless, in this essay, I will break chronology and discuss the two decisions together, and then turn to Nargesh Mirza. This is ...

The cases that we have discussed so far have followed a common argumentative pattern. It will be helpful to provide a step-by-step conceptual schema: (1) All these cases are cases of direct discrimination. This means that the distribution of benefits and burdens directly tracks the line that divides...

On April 12, 1949, the Governor of East Punjab passed an order directing that in the Jails Deparment, women would be ineligible for appointment to all posts in Men’s jails, apart from that of clerk or matron. In 1972, this order was challenged before the Punjab & Haryana High Court by a women w...

In the previous essay, we outlined the key questions that arise out of a textual reading of Article 15(1) of the Constitution, which prohibits discrimination “on grounds only of… sex.” In some of earliest cases after the commencement of the Constitution, these battle-lines were drawn sharply by the ...

In this series of essays, we shall discuss sex discrimination under the Indian Constitution. This is an area where there is a significant amount of case law (for an introductory discussion, see Kalpana Kannabiran’s Tools of Justice). But like other other aspects of our fundamental rights jurispruden...

(Back in December, the Rajasthan government had introduced an ordinance imposing educational qualifications as pre-requisites for standing for elected office in local government, days before those elections. The ordinance was challenged before the Supreme Court and the Rajasthan High Court, who fail...

Mercy-No Mercy Sidharth Arora Advocate,Delhi High Court In a civilized country nothing can be more precious than the life and liberty of it’s citizens. Of all the parts of the Constitution nowhere else has been a more vociferous advocacy of the Right to Life and Personal Liberty than in Article 21 o...

The Indian Journal of Law & Technology of the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore, in association with the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore is now inviting submissions for its special issue on Net neutrality. Given the contemporary relevance of the theme, this s...

(In this guest post, Dheeraj K. explores a constitutional controversy around local government elections in Bengaluru) — Recently the Karnataka High Court while dealing with petitions against the inaction of the State government to hold elections to Bengaluru’s urban local body, the Bruhat Bengaluru ...

Over the last two weeks, on this blog, we have had an extensive debate about the various aspects of the National Judicial Appointments Case, where the validity of the 99th Amendment and the National Judicial Appointments Commission Act have been challenged. Recall, once again, that the 99th Amendmen...

(In the final substantive essay of our two-week long debate on the NJAC, Professor Sanjay Jain examines the issue of revival from a jurisprudential perspective. A round-up post will follow tomorrow) — The question as to whether the doctrine of revival can be applied to deal with unconstitutional con...

(What is the Supreme Court finds that the 99th Amendment and the National Judicial Appointments Commission, in their present form, are constitutionally unsatisfactory, but also does not wish to strike them down? In the first part of this guest post, Chintan Chandrachud explores what the Court might ...

(Rounding off our debate about Article 124C of the Constitution, in this second part of their two-part essay, Ritwika Sharma and Faiza Rahman defend its constitutionality.) — In the first part of our defence of Article 124C, we argued that the said provision is neither violative of the principle of ...