In a piece called Death and the Sovereign (the reference is unmistakable), Pratap Bhanu Mehta has an important critique of the Rajasthan High Court’s Santhara judgment. He argues that legal categories (such as “suicide” and “attempted suicide”) are insufficient and inaccurate...
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Experts & Views
Constitutional Law
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Fundamental Rights or Fundamentally Right?
The Founding Fathers of our Constitution had a gargantuan task of drafting what turned out to...
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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...
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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....
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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(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,...
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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...
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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...
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(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...
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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...
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(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...
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(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...
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