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2002 research outputs found
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Beyond Friend and Enemy: the Stranger as a Political Category in Colonial Modernity
No full textThis piece is a book comment on Jon Wilson’s “The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India 1780–1835.” Center-staging early colonial Bengal as an innovative site of practice in the history of modern law and constitutionalism, the book moves beyond the political distinction between friends and enemies and introduces the category of the “stranger” as an essential ingredient of state formation in South Asia and the modern world. It convincingly shows how the British colonial enterprise in India broke away from pre-colonial relations of concrete familiarity and intimacy to govern a distant and inscrutable society through the detached rule of a mechanistic, bureaucratic, and positivist state. However, Wilson does not reckon seriously with the constitutive role of ideas and ideology and misses out on intellectually engaging with the question of whether colonial practices were determined by the strangeness of the colonized other, or whether abstract estrangement was a product of colonial rule itself. More than an empirical or sociological phenomenon, we argue that strangeness is a conceptual and psychical category crucial for a renewed subjectivity, and promises rich dividends for the discipline of Indian political thought looking past the framework of imperialist and nationalist historiography
Bringing Shadow Libraries out of Legal Shadows: An Opportunity for the Delhi High Court
No full textAt the heart of the copyright bargain is the need to strike a balance between fostering creativity, by incentivizing producers of intellectual property and promoting the interests of the public at large. These two are often in tension with each other. Some cases bring this tension into sharp focus. The ongoing litigation in the Delhi high Court, on the legality of shadow libraries - Libgen and Sci Hub - is one such case. The case has seminal importance for ensuring that the right to education is duly respected and fulfilled.
In this paper, we argue that this litigation offers the Delhi High Court an opportunity to build on its progressive jurisprudence on the educational exception embodied in Indian Copyright Law and to further push its frontiers, by regarding these shadow libraries as falling within the ambit of the fair dealing exceptions, and holding their access to be a facet of the Constitutionally guaranteed right to education. We hope that our contribution will assist stakeholders involved in the litigation and others to work towards fashioning a solution to the litigation that enables continued access to these shadow libraries, as that is what the public interest in this case demands
Cartel Leniency Programme in India—Why No Race Here?
No full textThis article evaluates the implementation of the cartel leniency programme by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) using comprehensive data covering all related decisions of the CCI from 2009 to 2021. All other things remaining the same prima facie discoveries of cartels should have resulted in a ‘shock’ to ex ante expected returns of cartels, thereby encouraging more leniency applications. But, we find no such results or rather no ‘race’ to the agency. A successful leniency programme requires a transparent and deterrent penalty, plus consistency in applying leniency provisions. However, inconsistencies in the choice of penalty base and uncertainties in determining final penalties while using mitigating and aggravating factors have led to a poor correlation of penalties with cartel gain or harm. Strategic or otherwise, this has encouraged appeals to the appellate authority, thereby reducing the effective penalty to levels below deterrence. Many acts of bid rigging have been penalized using less stringent criteria and, in a few circumstances, also provided the benefit of leniency. Further, while individuals concerned in leniency cases have always been penalized, the CCI has not been so consistent in non-leniency cartel cases. These asymmetries and ‘other’ costs create disincentives for exercising the leniency option. We offer suggestions for enhancing the possibility of a race to the agency
The Growing Necessity of Interim Measures to Preserve Competition in Rapidly Changing Digital Markets
No full textOn March 9, 2021, the CCI granted interim relief to Fab Hotels and Treebo by overturning their de-listing from certain platforms and directing their re-listing, to safeguard their presence in the relevant market during the pendency of competition law proceedings.1 In the background of rapidly changing digital markets, the protection afforded by interim orders assumes immense significance. It is important that the CCI activates its power of granting interim orders, conferred under Section 33 of the Competition Act, 2002, and uses this tool effectively to prevent irreparable injury to competition, pending outcomes of the investigations directed by it. This article analyses why the CCI has granted interim reliefs sparingly since the very inception of the law and examines the need for using this power pro-actively in fast-paced, digital markets, where it may be impossible for the competition regulator to restore an industry to its competitive status quo ante
Bharatiya Sakshya Bill: Implications of Proposed Changes to the Indian Evidence Act, 1872
No full textIn August 2023, the Indian Government introduced the Bharatiya Sakshya Bill, meant to replace the Indian Evidence Act, 1872. While the bill introduces some major changes to the Indian Evidence Act, the majority of changes merely amount to the re-numbering or re-structuring of existing provisions. Moreover, the Bill is replete with drafting errors and misplaced provisos, which can cause confusion on substantive law in some instances. The authors undertake a clause by clause comparison between the two and discusses the implications of replacing the Indian Evidence Act 1872 with the Bharatiya Sakshya Bill
Deconstructing Police Discretion as Brahminism
No full textPolice violence is cast as a graphic, brutal spectacle of power on the bodies of the poor. This popular understanding is only the most visible form of routinised arbitrary violence perpetrated by the police. In this article, we study the scope and forms of police discretion in ordinary policing tasks informed by Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 to argue that the police frame criminality not through evidence-gathering but through the power of language and distorted narratives that are passed off as discoverable truths derived from the institution of caste. Through a study focused on alcohol policing under the Madhya Pradesh Excise Act, 1915, this article seeks to underscore that police discretion is constructed by caste, resulting in the criminalisation of oppressed caste communities
Book Review l Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942–1962 by Kalyani Ramnath (Stanford University Press 2023)
No full textKalyani Ramnath’s Boats in a Storm undertakes the formidable task of retelling the histories of decolonisation in India, Burma, Malaya, and Ceylon using characters who would rarely fit the description of conventional historical actors. Ramnath departs from the rich political and diplomatic histories that celebrate the independence of nation states from the yoke of imperial rule. Instead, she focuses on the ways in which these states, with their newly re-instituted legislative, juridical, and bureaucratic regimes, wreaked havoc on the lives of itinerant migrants who straddled between ‘homes’ and places of work across the Bay of Bengal and eastern Indian Ocean in the mid-twentieth century. Boats in a Storm illuminates how migrant bodies—stranded in the high seas by the decolonised nation states’ multiform technologies of self-determination—navigated their lives and negotiated their livelihoods via ‘seemingly banal’ encounters with the law
Designing the Narratives of Protests: The Role of Design in the Portrayal of Protests on Social Media Platforms in India
No full textIn recent years, social media platforms have played a significant role in the political discourse in India. Political narratives around protests and movements have been widely seen on social media. The design of platform interfaces has also been questioned for the influence it can have on people’s behaviour online. This study examines the impact that interface design of platforms has in enabling the spread of political messaging around the anti-CAA NRC and anti-farm bill protests. Focusing on four social media platforms; Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram, the study critically analyses the use of interface design elements such as comments, hashtags, News Feed, and Threads, in the political discourse. It further contextualises the findings to the impact on individual rights of people, and highlights the existing policy and regulatory gaps
