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1. Shamnad Basheer
2. Lawrence Liang
3. Sudhir Krishnaswamy
Let's start with Sudhir. Even his most ardent supporters would agree that QUANTITATIVELY his scholarship output is low. Thus, we need to look at his QUALITATIVE output, which would essentially be confined to his book Democracy and Constitutionalism in India: A Study of the Basic Structure Doctrine. This book was based on his DPhil thesis at Oxford. But is this book really so great that it deserves an award? Aren't Rajeev Dhavan's many writings on constitutional law much superior? Also more prolific and diverse in terms of the breadth of topics covered?
Then we move on to Lawrence Liang. His biggest contribution has been opposition to IP. But is he more of a polemicist than a scholar, with opposition to IP rooted largely rooted in ideological rhetoric that opposes private ownership of property? Have any of his books been published by OUP, CUP etc? He has published in a few journals, but are they worthy of him being anointed as an Infosys awardee? Wouldn't a more deserving candidate in this category be BS Chimni? He is a Marxist and opposed the WTO TRIPS Agreement, but did so on solid scholarly grounds. His contribution to the TWAIL movement is also significant.
Shamnad Basheer: I do not want to criticise the deceased, but again I would respectfully argue contend that others could have been considered.
I'm not from NLS. I cannot think of anyone from my NLU or from others who might even compare. Maybe Anup Surendranath, Maybe Araghya Sengupta and Alok Prasanna Kumar, Rohit De in a few years. But half of those guys are NLS too.
Every award cant go to dhawan and chimni and baxi as if theyre gods in a temple. This award did not exist when they were in their heyday. They are no longer in their heyday. Should we start by giving the infosys award to ambedkar? to nehru? Gandhi? BN Rau? where does it stop?