Abhinav chandrachud

Premium Story March 18,2020 00:30:23 AM After a cooling-off period, several years after his retirement, Hidayatullah accepted the post of Vice President of India under the Janata government. It is about time that we start expecting the judges of our constitutional courts to follow CJI Hidayatullah’s excellent example. Wed, Mar 18, 2020

Seventy-four years after Independence, the time has come for us to seriously ask whether the law of sedition in India needs to be reconsidered. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, in 2019, only 3.3% of sedition cases culminated in a conviction. This conviction rate is negligible in contrast to other offences under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) like murder (41.9%) and cheating (22.8%). The number of sedition cases registered is microscopic – in 2019, there were only 229 such cases pending investigation as against 2.84 lakh cases of forgery, cheating and fraud. However, the fear that the police might arrest you on trumped up charges of sedition if you criticise the government serves as a serious fetter on the fundamental right to free speech and expression. In 2019, some 96 people were arrested for sedition, many of whom might have been opponents of the government and, statistically speaking, most of whom will eventually be acquitted. Sedition in England The law of sedition was introduced into the IPC by a colonial government intent on discriminating against Indians. Since 1832 in England, sedition had virtually become a dead letter and prosecutions were extremely rare. Sedition in England was a minor offence – a ‘misdemeanor’ as opposed to a ‘felony’. It attracted a sentence of around two years in prison. It was a ‘bailable offence’, meaning that a person arrested for sedition had the right to be immediately released on bail. A person charged with sedition had the...

In 1947, Justice Felix Frankfurter of the U.S. Supreme Court advised one of the chief architects of India’s Constitution, Sir Benegal Narsing Rau, to delete the words “due process of law” from the text of India’s draft Constitution. However, two recent cases, one decided by the Supreme Court and the other by the Bombay High Court, tell a very interesting, yet conflicted, story about the incorporation of the U.S. doctrine of substantive due process in Indian constitutional law. The 5th and 14th amendments to the U.S. Constitution provide that a person cannot be deprived of “life, liberty or property, without due process of law”. Only a few decades before the meeting between Frankfurter and Rau took place, the U.S. Supreme Court had used the “due process clause” in the 14th amendment to invalidate social welfare legislation. This phase in American constitutional history is often described as the “Lochner era”, named after the dreaded case of Lochner v. New York (1905) in which the Supreme Court invalidated a New York law which prohibited confectionary establishments from employing workers for more than 60 hours per week. The Lochner era is said to have come to an end around 1937, starting with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937), when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt threatened to “pack” the Supreme Court with favourable justices in order to ensure the survival of his ambitious “New Deal” legislation. Rau and Ambedkar Even though t...

• 23 February 2021 Abhinav Chandrachud: Republic of Religion: The Rise and Fall of Colonial Secularism in India Penguin – Viking (an imprint of Penguin Random House, India, 2020), Hardback, 284 pp, Price: INR 599. ISBN: 978-0-670-09245-1 • ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3835-7999 • Liverpool Law Review volume 42, pages 305–311 ( 2021) Cite this article Sarkar, S., Sarkar, S.K. Abhinav Chandrachud: Republic of Religion: The Rise and Fall of Colonial Secularism in India. Liverpool Law Rev 42, 305–311 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10991-020-09275-8 • Accepted : 19 December 2020 • Published : 23 February 2021 • Issue Date : July 2021 • DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10991-020-09275-8

‘My dear Chagla’ High Court Chief Justices are now considered inferior to Supreme Court judges. It was not always so, as is clear from the case of Chief Justice M.C. Chagla of the Bombay High Court who passed up an opportunity to join the new Supreme Court of India. Published : Jan 22, 2014 12:30 IST March 27, 1948: Bombay High Court Chief Justice M.C. Chagla (sitting, extreme left) and Chief Justice of India Sir Harilal J. Kania (sitting, fourth from left) with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the Chief Justices of other High Courts at the Gymkhana Club in New Delhi when they met to discuss the draft Constitution of India. IN December 1949, the Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court, M.C. Chagla, did something that would be considered unthinkable today: he declined an offer to be elevated to the Supreme Court of India, preferring to remain a High Court Chief Justice. Against the backdrop of the recent events that have lowered the public image of the Supreme Court, Chagla’s decision reminds us that the Supreme Court of India should not be considered the best court in the country merely because it is India’s highest appellate court. In the winter of 1949, the Chief Justice of the Federal Court of India, Sir Harilal Kania, was preparing his court for a radical new beginning. For nearly a hundred years since 1858, India had been governed under a series of Constitutions enacted by the British Parliament. Despite becoming independent in 1947, India was still a British domini...

Abstract This paper examines the provisions of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) against the backdrop of the citizenship provisions of the Indian Constitution. It argues that contrary to popular belief, the discrimination against Muslim immigrants which seems to form a part of the CAA is not a phenomenon of relatively recent vintage. However, this paper also argues that the CAA is unconstitutional by today’s standards because the conditions which existed during the days of India’s dominionship, between August 1947 and January 1950, no longer exist today. It posits that the CAA is discriminatory for several reasons though not for the insidious, mala fide reasons that are usually attributed to the government in popular discourse. However, this paper also argues that India’s citizenship laws amplify the problems with the CAA, by casting the evidentiary burden of proof on Indians to prove their citizenship, by abandoning the principle of citizenship by birth, by failing to give judges of foreigners tribunals security of tenure, and by omitting a safe harbor for Muslim “dreamers” who illegally came to India as minors with their parents, by no fault of their own, and who have only known India to be their homeland since childhood. Keywords: Citizenship Amendment Act, National Register of Citizens, Indian Constitution, Secularism, CAA, NRC Suggested Citation: