The Indian Law Project is an attempt at developing and articulating a shared collective vocabulary for a vivid legal imagination based around the interface of life and law.
The draft of this post was written on the Constitution day i.e. 26 November 2020 - a year where we have invoked the constitution more than ever, perhaps. As Gautam Bhatia points out in a podcast, this is quite unique because the Indian society does not have a very robust relationship with the constitution. The document is not a part of the popular imagination of our society and the citizens do not hold it in as much reverence and sacrament as say, the Americans. That is not a value judgement, but an observation. This year, that started with the CAA-NRC protests saw the constitution and the constitutional vocabulary translate into everyday conversations. Rallies and protests were held where Article 14 and the preamble were printed out and read. The citizen was finally reclaiming the document as his own. I wonder, if the constitution is still seen as an elitist liberal imposition on an inherently illiberal population. The protests showed that the youth of this country is well versed in the vocabulary of rights, and entitlements. And it is important to keep reminding ourselves and the state, the difference between the two.
We are still grappling with the travesty that Covid-19 is, with every day still worse than one before it. The constitution and the courts have played a crucial role in this by their voices (or lack thereof). The migrant workers crisis was/is one of the worst humanitarian crisis we've witnessed in recent times. The courts were called to play a crucial role in that. How it performed is largely agreed upon. An extensive documentation of the Coronavirus and the constitution exists on Gautam's blog.
We also saw the state turning to technology to combat Covid-19 crisis and the myriad privacy and ethical concerns arising out of it. The mandatory use of Aarogya Setu (which was later made voluntary, but to not much avail) and the state's contradictory stand on it is symptomatic of the larger issue of arbitrary state tech-policies. The recent release of the back end code of the application saw some people accuse the state of deceiving the people by releasing a test backend code and not the final production code. A PIL has been filed against this matter. This month ends with a call for responses to the Data protection and Empowerment Architecture (DEPA). I've been involved with formulating comments on the draft paper through a policy center - and the comments do not look good. I'll release a separate post in it soon. I will end this tech determinism with the rather sad yet funny response of the CBSE to the RTI filed by the Internet Freedom Foundation on their use of a Facial recognition Technology for distributing marksheets. When asked as to under what regulation is the FRT authorized, the CBSE replied by saying there is no need for any legislation or any regulatory framework because what we use is a facial matching system, and not a facial recognition technology. The difference is best known to them. Again, the constitutional ideal of privacy and dignity suffers.
I end this post with the title phrase on the Indianconlawphil blog, which has largely inspired me to not only take up the law in some sense, but to also spend more time and effort in understanding it.
"To no one will we deny or sell, or delay right or justice"
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