Today we all know you as someone who won Jessup. But in your five years in Law School, what did you really prioritize?

I didn’t have any set priorities through the five years. Things sort of happened each year. I came as a blank slate, and things developed naturally. Which was good at times and very bad at times. I was introduced to mooting in my second year and I managed to moot with three very, very, very good people and that got me interested in it. The energy of the process was beautiful, and my legal education happened in the moot rooms. But that was a small part of college. Spending time with my friends with whom I became very close was a huge part. And then SF. I had chosen NLS because I knew of Strawberry Fields, and to be able to play whatever part in helping organise it was insane. Then there’s Surya and Chetta and Kaveri terrace. I’ve a feeling people think I was very methodological and planned and focused in law school- I don’t think I was.

That’s funny, SF is happening this weekend

I know man, I wanted to come. The Down Troddence is a band that we’ve been trying to get since my third year (and got once too). They have this one song called ‘Shiva’, which I’m sure they’ll play, which I’ve been blasting on my speakers for the last week. Dammit, I wish I’d come.

So were you also on a lot of committees?

Quantity over quality. I was on L-Tech in my first year, which was basically code word for going to the computer office and fixing stuff. There was no law and technology in it. After that I was on EMC, MCS and SIPLA. EMC was great for SF, MCS I joined because I thought I could try and help moot teams given how much help I’d gotten from my seniors and how helpful that was. SIPLA was a bit of a random one – I’m not sure exactly what I accomplished there.

How did you manage to balance your extra curricular with your academics? Were the two years of doing Jessup difficult?

Not difficult as such. It was all very exciting and fun, so the thought of it being difficult didn’t come across. I lucked out because the three people I did it with with the first time were fantastic (to say the least) and I was really enjoying it. They were tutoring and mentoring me in the most minute way possible, and now I realise that those few months were the core of my legal education. They also make me realise how much an effect careful, experiential learning has compared to years of taking exams and sitting in lectures and so on. The second year was similar, though the challenge was different. This time, the four of us were working more as a team, and learning the ropes as we went along. It was a hell of a lot of fun.

Point being that because I was enjoying things as much, the need for balance etc. didn’t realise arise in my mind. I had my friends around all the time, and so everything was hunky dory. As for other things, the classroom didn’t really interest me as such – there were subjects and teachers I was interested in but I never really read too much for class. So that was sorted. Maybe that’s one thing I didn’t do and so I had time for other things. Aside from that, extra curricular involved Surya, football, lots of music, terrace nights and my friends, whatever time was not spent in the moot or at Chetta, went there.

What motivated you to do it a second time?

I really enjoyed the process of mooting. It was essentially reading about an area of law and discussing it with friends (teammates) and trying to come up with good arguments, what was there not to enjoy. In my fourth year, I thought I would do it again, I’m not sure why. Perhaps I was lazy to try new things. A special challenger for Jessup was held, and four of us got together to form a team. There was no opponent. But we still didn’t make it. The judges said we were too shit. And then in fifth year I thought, bugger all, let’s just do it. Like most things, I didn’t really think it through or have any objective. I had to choose between joining EMC that year and doing the moot, and I sometimes regret that choice. SF that year was run by my friend Govind and it was phenomenal. But staying for free in Washington and arguing under glitzy chandeliers and free drinks came a close second.

I’m sure you’ve gotten this question a lot, but what do you think you did differently the second time? What’s the secret to winning?

You know, no one asks me about this stuff, so I don’t get this question a lot. This is the first time.

At the time I’m sure people were curious.

No, not really. When we came back everyone got drunk and then forgot about it. But, we didn’t do anything differently. We just enjoyed it and got lucky and that was all.

When you were in Law School, did you have any idea of where you wanted to end up, professionally?

No, I had absolutely no idea. I was playing around with the stuff we were doing in college, (moots and SF and friends) too much to think about what I would do afterwards. So I didn’t really pay that much attention or thought to it. Most of my friends were going to work in law firms, a few of them went into litigation, but for whatever reason, I didn’t consider them. It’s not that I wasn’t drawn to them, I just didn’t consider them too seriously. Like I said, it was very odd but I left college with a fairly blank mind. The thought of my mind was, “well, that was fun! now what?”

At what point did you decide that you wanted to pursue higher studies?

After college I had joined a judge at the Delhi High Court, Justice Ravindra Bhat, whom I had interned with while in college. Working with him was the most fantastic experience. I worked with him for a little more than one year. I applied for the Rhodes Scholarship then, not because of any quest to pursue higher studies but because I thought two years of a funded stay in a completely new place can only be helpful. Learning goes much beyond higher studies and I didn’t have this articulated as precisely then, but the basic idea was that.

When I joined Justice Bhat, I didn’t really have any ambitions of pursuing “higher studies” or anything of that sort. I was quite clueless. I joined him because I interned with him in my fourth year and as a person, he was amazing and his chamber seemed like an open place. When I was leaving college, he was the only light of hope I could see!

But I thought the idea of getting money to go stay outside India for two years, in a completely different environment, could only help. I didn’t have any academic inclinations. I enjoyed travelling. If it was possible to get a stipend and go to a completely new place then that was the best way to travel. That was basically why I did it. There was also a darker side to it, which was that I felt like Delhi (aside from Justice Bhat and some other work I was doing) was too claustrophobic, college had been too amazing an experience, and I really wanted to see what else existed to match it or exceed it. It was classic post college blues, but luckily, I had the chance to explore further.

So tell me a little bit about what you did at Oxford – what did you study there?

You can pick four subjects but you can attend the classes for any number. I picked human rights, equality law, private law and fundamental rights, and philosophical foundations of the common law, and attended seminars for a few others. Again, I didn’t have any specialisation or know what my “thing” was, like many others. I had many questions about politics, economy and governance, so I picked four subjects that I thought looked interesting in that direction.

The four courses were about 10% of what I learnt at Oxford, the environment, my friends, my college (Balliol), the clubs, associations, open lectures, travels in and around Europe were the other 90% of my learning. 99% (I like percentages it seems) of everything I saw or did in Oxford felt new, and somehow limiting myself to the four subjects seemed incongruous.

With so much input and so many new things, I was often very lost. It was scary sometimes because it seemed like everyone knew what they were doing while I was bumbling around. Luckily, I had enough people around me who were also exploring, and more importantly, I kept running into amazing experiences and people, so the learning continued. But, to be honest, I also had some very dark and doubtful moments – those nihilist phases where nothing makes sense and all you want is comfort, not exploration. I learnt a lot from those moments.

What were you hoping to get out of these courses? Did you see it more as an opportunity to learn for learning’s sake or did you ever consider it as a stepping-stone for your professional life?

You need to have an objective for something to be a stepping-stone. I didn’t really have anything further in mind to step towards.

After I graduated from college, the one year that I was with Justice Bhat, the learning was massive. Most of my legal education, the applied part of it, where I could channel my knowledge and skills into some real practical application came by talking to him or by working with him. His knowledge of the law, his understanding of the practical parts, of the political parts, of every other factor that goes into the process was amazing. In that one year, I had some inkling that the legal process is one way of doing things but obviously there are a thousand other ways of influencing the outcome that you want. It’s not just litigation. Just because you are a lawyer doesn’t mean you have to do litigation. Justice Bhat was very supportive in whatever exploration I wanted to do in that one year. He allowed me to roam around Delhi and do a little bit of my own work as well while I was with him.

At the same time, when I went to Oxford, I went purely with the intention of first, travelling, and second, to see what else exists. Luckily I didn’t have objectives, because my learning would have been more limited. I realized in that one year with Justice Bhat that I know very little and there was much more to know. Oxford was a complete shot in the dark. I was looking for a way to engage with the world that satisfied both my want to explore and also to do something positive. The courses that I chose seemed interesting. I didn’t have any idea whether I would use these for a job or for further studies or anything of that sort.

The same story applies for the second year in Oxford, only with a little more intensity. The second year I chose a thesis on something I was well-versed in (by way of theory, which I try to stay as far from as possible now), and enjoyed, and thought was relevant – the issue of how to play your part in large structural wrongs. Broad wrongs like climate change or something like that. At the time, a lot of my friends and I were talking about these really big things that are happening in the world but I felt helpless because I didn’t really have any control over anything. I found myself talking in a lot of big principles but not really doing anything. It was alright to talk, but if it wasn’t followed up with action, I felt it was inauthentic. That was my thesis topic for the second year, which was easy enough because you have to write 30,000 words over the course of one year, and you have a stipend. So that allows you 90% of the time to explore other areas, to do whatever else you like as well. So I was able to use that time to travel more, and, more locally. The more I was learning at Oxford, the more I felt like I wanted to lose myself, because I found my head filling up with ideas and information and thoughts and it was all very distracting from the simple, clear existence I had till then. Ignorance was bliss, but at the same time, I didn’t want knowledge to be confusing and distracting. Travelling locally to new places allowed me to do that – it was a beautiful way of travelling I discovered then (through Workaway), because you discover a whole new part of yourself when you’re in an alien environment with no trappings of your past self. The opposite of a Cox and Kings planned holiday basically.

So Oxford wasn’t a stepping stone in my professional life. It was a phase in my learning journey. That sounds like a good one liner I can use somewhere. Thank you Quirk.

If there’s one aspect of the Oxford teaching experience that NLS should emulate, what would it be?

I don’t think there is any point in comparing Oxford to NLS. Obviously there are some good practices that any university should adopt and Oxford has many of them. Basic institutional things like setting up associations and clubs and providing more administrative support and having a more rigorous academic discipline. Even tutoring, for example, where in addition to lectures you have either one-on-one or three-on-one sessions in addition to the lectures, which allow for a strong engagement. In my experience, they were two different worlds. And that makes sense, because Nagarbhavi is not England! To teach the same things would be redundant.

On a tangential note, one of the things that struck me was that Oxford still has the exam system at the post grad level. You did your four subjects the entire year and at the end of it, it would all boil down to one three hour exam and your grade would be dependent on that. These things are taken very seriously. For a fair number of people, the entire process became about the exams. Learning was still exam-structured. That was something that got to me slightly. In terms of the institutional set-up, there is a lot that NLS can learn from Oxford. But in terms of the content, or the style of teaching, that is something that has to be extremely unique. When I look back, I’m actually very curious about how or why so much of the content in Oxford law has made its way into the NLS curriculum, the social circumstances, the history, the environment are so different, that it seems that this blind pickup and drop of content is quite harmful in terms of our learning. The content must allow us to make sense of our surroundings and not provide a static set of information or ideology, that at least would’ve been very helpful for me in law school.

This is a huge question though about what are the best learning practices. I’m more actively involved in this area now in my work, so perhaps I’ll have a chance to say more in the future with more certainty.

Did you ever or do you envision a career in international law?

I wanted to at one point, but that vanished quite quickly. I did some international law work while at Oxford. I was representing the government in an investment treaty arbitration. It was practical, applied international law work. It was very interesting to see how that world works, to see how the law comes into operation in that area and to what extent international law is or is not useful and how it plays out domestically in terms of how the media sees it and how it’s all structured.

Justice Bhat is actually responsible for me dropping international law. He got me too interested in many other things and the idea of international law was a little rarefied at that point so I decided to drop it. Now, because I was working with a law firm for this government case I see that there are so many opportunities opening up for someone who is interested in practical international law work from India. So that field is open. I didn’t have that perspective or that vantage point earlier, but that’s not why I decided to move away. My top priority at that point, actually, and it was up until two weeks ago, was only to travel. That was really all I wanted to do, everything was somehow or the other structured around that. Along the way I found some very interesting debates, people, ideas, and projects, and I’m not trying to fuse all these things together in my work.

(Customary Cute Celebrity Photo.)

Where did you end up after Oxford?

In the dump. I did a mish mash of things. Right after Oxford I returned from London to Delhi by road with Geetha, my Jessup partner amongst other things. I couldn’t finish that fully, though Geetha went further than me and did a solo trip through Iran, which I think deserves a Quirk headline. Then I came back to India. I took about four months off to reflect on whatever travelling I had done and the learnings I had (which was again not an easy process, I had a classic “foreign return” phase, where I found myself commenting on India’s and Delhi’s cleanliness and what not …) Two major experiences here that I wanted to make sense of were a teaching job in Jamaica, which was one of the most sublime experiences, and some farm work in Morocco, those few months were so beautiful that I wanted to recreate something similar back in India.

After I took some time off to reflect on that, I had a little travel time again in south India. At this time, I met some amazing people (Norma and Calude Alvarez of Goa Foundation fame, Darshan Bhat who runs Creatnet Education in Delhi), who were inspiring bolts from the blue. In was also Auroville briefly visiting an experimental farm called ‘Solitude’, which is a permaculture farm. That again was a treat. Then I spent some time with Geetha, my above mentioned friend, near Kochi in a small beautiful temple town. You were asking earlier, what was different between the two Jessups, it helps when you like and ultimately end up going out with your moot partner. That makes work much simpler. I also had this very basic, but long time, interest in meditation so that’s why I went to Tiruvannamalai, which is where the Ramana Maharshi ashram is and the Vipassana centre. That’s also what drew me to Auroville.

By the end of all this, I was thoroughly confused but convinced that there is phenomenal beauty in this world. So I sat down and racked my brain about all the things that I’d done in the last three years, what excited me, what didn’t excite me. Based on that, I’ve picked up a few projects right now till April.

What are those projects? What are you working on?

When I came back to Delhi, I met this phenomenal man, Darshan Bhat, who runs an organisation called Createnet Education. He helps different kinds of people – businesses, school principals, any other group of people – to structure their thoughts clearly to achieve the outcomes that they want to achieve. I’m currently working with him, on work surrounding the idea of ‘learning how to learn’. How do you process all the massive amounts of information that you receive, to be internally clear and to achieve the goals that you want to achieve. This made all the sense in the world to me, because my learning in NLS, the High Court, Oxford and travelling (and everything else in the middle really) was that essentially experiences are created internally, by a translation of external output. So, if you are, as I was, trying to create a certain experience, or make sense of certain input, you have to work on the internal world.

In the context of college for example – you get a lot of information from your teachers, discussion groups, and committees. You have to process all that input and see what makes sense for you, which will be very different from what makes sense for the next person. Based on your background, experiences, so on and so forth. So that process of learning, which can happen in many different ways (and is, in my experience, happening all the time, everywhere), is what I work on right now.

Practically, I’m designing four courses. The first two are for law students and law professors respectively to help each group fine-tune the learning process in their own contexts. For students, it’s to help them answer (in experiential ways) what they are learning, how they are learning and if this learning is useful or not. Self-directed learning, simply. For the second group, it’s to ask, “you may be teaching, but are the students learning?” The second two courses are focussed on self-enquiry, to help participants understand themselves better. This is self-directed learning about oneself! Where you are the subject, object, teacher and student.

What ties all these courses together is the idea of self-inquiry and deconditioning ourselves, which is least in my experience critical to learning. This is my current work, its something that I’m just starting out and learning the ropes but it’s all super exciting!

Do you have any advice for present students at NLS?

No. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in the four years since graduation, its that the learning process is a 100% unique to each person. That is essentially what I am trying to do now with the courses I spoke about, and with my own learning in my daily life. If I give any advice, it’s essentially just a reflection of my own experience at law school – yours would probably be very different.

This is going to be a really shitty interview, right? There’s going to be a lot of pauses and dot dot dots everywhere.

No don’t worry; I’ll edit it to make it sound as coherent as possible.

You can put a footnote: “He was very incoherent but Quirk has editorial guidelines to make everyone look presentable”

I spent my last six months of law school on exchange in the Netherlands and this post is sort of an unsolicited recommendation letter for it i.e. for exchange in general, I wouldn’t want to take responsibility for Dutch weather. While I realise that not everyone can go on exchange not only because of the limited choices available but also as there are systemic issues that prevent students from availing of this opportunity but for those for whom the stars align – GO! 

Exchange programmes are quite the norm in Europe with the Erasmus programme funding intra-continental exchanges of European students. In fact Erasmus is so integral to their college education that European students refer to ‘exchange’ as the ‘Erasmus experience’. Some universities even mandate that students spend at least one semester abroad. The importance that is attached to exchanges as not only a form of cultural exchange but also a part of personality development is seen in other countries too. For obvious reasons this is not the case in India. The idea of ‘finding yourself’ is laughable. As you all know, activities that do not have a direct instrumental effect on ‘CVs’ and ‘job prospects’ are not universally encouraged by parents and university authorities. It is perhaps connected to the notion that travel is a break or a vacation and not an exercise to be pursued in itself because of the value it can add to your life. It doesn’t help that it can be prohibitively expensive without scholarship. But I digress, in this post I want to talk about how this fits into law school life.  

Essentially, exchange kicks you out of the law school rhythm you’ve formed after four years and drops you into a new environment. This results in exposure to new things- think of your first year in law school, where constantly being exposed to different things led to it being perhaps the year with the most being learnt in law school (See Spadika’s description of first year-http://www.nlsquirks.in/reflections-of-a-soon-to-be-alumnus/). On exchange you’ll be figuring out a new system of education, travelling, meeting people from different countries, living more independently, adapting to different cultural norms and learning about a new region of the world. The intensity of the change in environment and the freedom to navigate it on one’s own terms, makes you incredibly self-aware. While any new experience will give you a steep learning curve, I think having this experience in college is significant as the number of months you will have will be the maximum possible, the demands on your time few and the consequences of experimenting and messing up will be minimal. 

Moreover, it also gives you that over used concept in law school – perspective. After four years in law school, you would generally have been exposed to most of the major things law school has to offer and by the time you actually go on exchange you could have a fair idea of what you would like to do immediately after college and for the lucky ones, for a longer period of time. If you’re still unclear, being exposed to new and different areas of law, methods of teaching, legal issues and opportunities will help more in the process of deciding than staying in law school. And for those who are clear on how they want to shape their careers- the thought process you applied in law school might not necessarily apply in the world in large- stepping out of law school to test your reasons will make you surer of them and I think you’ll be better for it. 

I think one element of exchange that enables the above two things is flexibility. In law school, while theoretically there is enough time to pursue non-NLS mandated interests or activities; we all know that it’s not how it plays out. 4 hours of class, 6 days a week, a set-in-stone project and exam schedule; add to it the very human inclination to procrastinate and a trimester just whooshed past. On exchange, while you may not necessarily have more time (your choice in university will influence how much time you have to devote to curricular work); in general you will definitely have more flexibility to shape those months in line with your priorities and interests.

For me, my desire to go on exchange stemmed from a wish I had since school to backpack across Europe for a few months. So going into the exchange, most of my ideas of how it was going to play out were shaped by the desire to see the maximum possible; I didn’t really have any expectations of it being of any other value. As the months went by though, I was struck by how true all the platitudes about exchange and travel being a transformative experience was. I can’t offer one particular instance because they were so many- the rambling conversations with flatmates, studying courses you actually enjoyed, biking in all kinds of weather (be it snow, hail or something in between), the relentless mundanity of cooking for yourself daily, traveling on a shoestring budget in unfamiliar places, making friends (even if only for a day) in hostels around the world and countless others. All of this cumulatively was not only tonnes of fun but also led to many firsts while at the same time enabling me to look at my own life with fresh eyes.  

So why give up your last few months in law school? Potentially miss your last univ week? Voluntarily increase your interaction with the exam department? Turn up in July to give exams that you missed? To quote Jhumpa Lahiri, “Before it’s too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it.”

]]> http://www.nlsquirks.in/exchange-offer-best-deals/feed/ 0 http://www.nlsquirks.in/a-case-for-a-common-entrance-test-for-nlsiu/ http://www.nlsquirks.in/a-case-for-a-common-entrance-test-for-nlsiu/#respond Sat, 23 Apr 2016 17:50:23 +0000 https://nlsquirks.wordpress.com/?p=1121 Continue readingA Case for a Common Entrance Test for NLSIU]]>

In the first trimester of Law School, I was crying on a friend’s shoulder in an autorickshaw, disappointed at my average performance in the university debate rounds. As somebody who believed myself to be a good debater, it was crushing to be shown my place in the university pool. My friend’s reaction though took me of guard. Concerned about me, and wanting to reassure me, he asked me why I kept feeling the need to prove I was good at extra-curricular activities. Was it because I had entered Law School through the SC quota, and I felt the need to prove I was as good as everyone else? He said, “Don’t worry, everyone already thinks you’re one of us. You don’t have to prove anything.” It was meant to restore my confidence. He was trying to be a good friend. It felt like a hard kick in the gut. My AIR had happened to be enough to qualify sans the quota as well. Therefore, I was not an usurper. The implication was that I ‘deserved’ to be at NLS. The implication was that others didn’t by virtue of getting in through the quota. That was my first real encounter with caste at Law School. That if your diction and pop culture qualified, you were one of us. It is one of the sharpest memories of my life. Not just what was said, but what was unsaid, and how it made me feel.

I am extremely aware of the position of privilege I enjoy. I went to an Anglican Christian school for three years which is among the top 5 in the country, was born to two highly educated parents, and have never faced economic hardship in my life. However, I am fully aware that skipping one generation, my ancestors weren’t allowed to sit inside a classroom, their shadows would pollute people if they walked past and that they worked with their hands and animal hide. I am aware that my mother belonging to an upper caste had to face tremendous social sanction and repercussions for marrying outside her caste twenty five years ago, a decision which many people in our generation still don’t have the courage to take. The caste system excluded people from the lower caste from gaining access to Sanskrit, Hindu education at top schools fifty years ago. Christian missionaries willingly took in everyone if you were willing to learn English and say ‘Amen.’ Then, English became the language of the market. My father went to a Christian school. And I benefitted in a twisted way from this discrimination. As somebody who sang in a Christian church choir as a child, I never fully understood how discrimination worked, until my grandmother read Ambedkar to me. And I didn’t appreciate its power till I met people in Law School.

At the outset I want to say that of all the things I am grateful for, having studied at NLS is among the highest. I had the opportunity to study under some amazing professors, develop useful skills, and forge friendships that will last forever. It taught me to question everything and express myself unabashedly. The place will always be a part of who I am which is why I feel that it is important that I am able to critique it with as much honesty as possible. Anything else would do the institute disservice.

As the supposedly top Law School in the country, an institute which has produced some fantastic human rights lawyers, and created an amazing vision to improve the quality of legal representation in India, as a student body at large, we’re a disproportionately apolitical bunch. Yes, the Law and Society Committee and the Legal Services Clinic and now IDIA have always gone out of their way to ensure that questions of inclusion, diversity, religion and politics are brought to the mainstream but there’s always an alternative vibe to it. I was particularly impressed by LawSoc’s activity for incoming freshers about recognising their privilege. We say that NLS allows everyone a space to pursue what they want. Yes, the spaces exist. However which spaces are the most crowded provide an interesting insight into our conscience. We need to stop pretending that people go to Allen and Overy partner talks and a screening of Jai Bhim in similar numbers. We are content to politicise mess coupons, but turn a blind eye to who is picking up our trash.

One of my immediate seniors was unpopular because he would keep discussing questions of caste on 19(1)(A), on ugstudents, and through his committee. I know several people who thought his activism was shrill, and unnecessary because caste was not an issue that affected NLS. Of course, NLS was that temple of education which honours merit over anything else; of students who got in on merit and worked hard to win the moots, debates, scholarships and jobs. So on several occasions, I have witnessed certain classmates emanate a “what else do you expect?” schadenfreude-like attitude when people who got in on the quotas have failed courses, lost years. As if, that is what happens when you don’t deserve to be here. That never happened when somebody who from the general category fell behind or failed courses. A junior, who was unaware of my caste status, once vociferously told me once that the best way to reign in NLS’ falling standards was to abolish the quota system, those people are bringing us down, that’s why our India Today ranking was in jeopardy. Another junior tried to explain to his classmates how we should advocate positive eugenics because let’s face it certain castes were just more intelligent and capable than others. An extremely successful senior told people over the mess table how she would “never date somebody who was an SC.”

To be fair, I haven’t encountered a single instant wherein any member of the faculty or administration has even exerted the tiniest of micro-aggressions towards students belonging to any of the backward classes, and in that, NLS might be a free space. However, as a student body, I don’t think we’re as guiltless as we would like to believe in our Chetta debates on organic change. The first instance when I felt that students were genuinely squirming about their privilege and thinking about caste was during P. Sainath’s single credit course on development, dissent and the media. His classes, I believe, genuinely forced people to think about law and society outside the sanitized and academic distance we are used to. One of the juniors did insist to Mr. Sainath in earnest after class that the caste system was useful as it helped organise society. But, P. Sainath is a celebrated, sophisticated English journalist who is listened to. Would people still have been willing to listen if the same questions had been asked by a Dalit journalist with vernacular experiences? It’s something to think about.

The advocates of meritocracy across the world have a very identical criticism of affirmative action. This is true for many white US students I have spoken to regarding African-American representation at US universities. They will always point out how certain people who have availed of the reservation system are extremely rich, drive around in fancy cars and don’t need the quota at all and that the criterion for affirmative action should be financial alone. We know there’s a very similar attitude at NLS as well. Pointing out individual examples as though caste has ceased to exist and it’s just another scam being pulled by the powerful. I agree that lack of opportunity due to dearth of funds from your primary schooling immediately excludes you from access to higher education and a chance to better your economic prospects. However, reducing it to this discussion assumes that one can buy themselves out of caste. That might be a gift of a capitalist economy which cares about your output and contribution to the economy over your lineage. However, the manner in which caste pervades our personal lives, the people who we make friends with, the people we marry, the people we idolise or give recognition to. Much of our lean-in feminism focusing on climbing the corporate ladder, does so while standing on the shoulders of domestic help from lower castes, perpetuating the same system of oppression with no attempts at reconciling these contradictions.

I am not qualified or intelligent enough to come up with a solution to our dilemma when it comes to representation in higher education. As campuses across the country begin to finally have conversations about caste following the horrific suicide of Rohith Vemula, a tragedy we all must take blame for as a system, it could be a moment for our alma mater to reflect seriously or it could be another missed opportunity like hundreds before it. The point of this piece is to highlight, from my personal observation that caste pervades the NLS student body more than we are willing to admit. First, by our silences and lack of engagement with the issue of caste within NLS and outside it, because this engagement offers no rewards or connections which can be vetted on your master CV. Second, because through our casual comments on meritocracy and hard work, we try to delegitimize and demoralise the presence of a section of the student body which is also legally entitled to the same educational experience as everyone else. •

In a bus and on my way to Pune to meet friends at FTII on the 100th day of their strike, I was reading the English translation of Govind Pansare’s ‘Shivaji Kon Hota‘ (‘Who was Shivaji?’). The book was written in an easy, conversational style, where Pansare weaved from his admiring analysis of Chhatrapati Shivaji to taking potshots at latter day goons from 96-caste Marathas who stake their claim at his legacy. But, what I was entirely unprepared for, was the excerpt from a letter written in 1669 by Shivaji to Aurangzeb on the matter of the Jaziya tax. Shivaji, the man in whose name the worst violence has been inflicted upon minorities in Maharashtra, reminded Aurangzeb that the Quran called Allah ‘Rabb ul alamin‘ [The Lord of All Men], and not ‘Rabb ul musalmeen’ [The Lord of Muslims], and went on to say that to show bigotry (by Aurangzeb) for any man’s own creed and practices was equivalent to altering the words of the Holy Book.[1]

To be honest, I was angered by my own ignorance of the language of this letter until I came across it yesterday, given, particularly, that I was a student of the Maharashtra Board until I joined law school. That the memory of Shivaji, a ruler who employed numerous Muslims in his army and administration, and who fiercely maintained respect for the followers of Islam, should have be trampled over by Sanghi political outfits is not surprising. Indeed, it is easy to falsely portray the legacy of a man who was, simply put, a Hindu king surrounded by many Muslim rulers. What really begins to fuck with you is how easily these lathi-carrying, chaddi-donning, garden-variety fascists are usurping the legacy of radicals like Bhimrao Ambedkar and Bhagat Singh.

For years, now, Hindutva platforms in India have portrayed these two men on their pantheon of luminaries during religious events. I will try to be as trite as possible here – after decades of political work in which he engaged with other leaders in the Hindu community as a part of the struggle to unshackle the Untouchables of India, Ambedkar converted, and led the conversion on October 15, 1956, of lakhs of Dalits, out of Hinduism. “I renounce Hinduism, which is harmful humanity and impedes the advancement and development of humanity because it is based on inequality, and adopt Buddhism as my religion”, declared Ambedkar.

It is actually easier to make a point about Bhagat Singh when it comes to religion, generally. On being chided that it was his arrogance that blinded him from the existence of God, Singh wrote an essay famously titled Why I am an Atheist, where he declared calmly,  “I know, in the present circumstances, my faith in god would have made my life easier… But I do not want the help of any intoxication to meet my fate. I am a realist.”

Even so, chaddi-wallahs think they can get away with usurping the memories of these two men and using them to further their communal agenda.

We Need to Know

This brings me to why I felt I had to write this note. I would have prefaced this with ‘We need to remember‘, but that would presume we knew certain things to begin with. Let’s not even go into whether Sanatani Hinduism sold by the Sanghis is legitimate or not. What I do want to talk about is the terrifying fact that most people like you and I are not aware of – Hindu, the Sangh may or may not have been from its inception. Patriotic, it surely was not.

I remember that in my second year at law school, I came across some ICHR publications titled ‘Towards Freedom’ –  a collection of meticulously researched books where news clippings and excerpts from reports of the British police over the years of the freedom struggle had been collated. Leafing through them, I came across the story of how the publishing of this series had been stopped during the years of the Vajpayee government; a lot has been written about why the publications were halted, the most obvious being that these books revealed the ‘role’ of the RSS during the struggle for India’s independence – the organisation’s most conspicuous contribution was its sheer absence from the struggle.

A report of the British Intelligence Bureau, dated June, 1946, quotes a senior RSS leader Dada Bhai declaring that the Sangh‘s struggle was not against the British but against the Muslims. RSS founder Golwalkar’s speech during the 1945 Dussehra celebrations at Nagpur quotes him as defining India’s independence as ‘Hindu rule and the protection of Hinduism and Hindu rights‘.

If we are surprised by the fact that today, the Union Minister for Culture declares that Indian education system shall be purified of its English influences and that it is not in our culture for women to step out in the dark, it is only because we are shamefully ignorant of how complex our history is, as a country. But I write this, because I feel we crossed that point in time long ago, when we could afford to be this ignorant. Today, it is desperately important for us to acknowledge that India, for the chaddi-wallah, was never the nation that was won on August 15, 1947, and will never be the republic that was founded on January 26, 1950.

We need to know, and acknowledge, that we are being ruled today by a confederation of loosely co-ordinated organisations centred around the RSS and these are people who have proven themselves capable of a most single minded, vicious campaign of defining what it is to be an Indian. Worryingly, they have become very competent at it.

Not too long ago, I was having a chat with a friend of mine, who refuses to be as unsettled as I am by the pace at which the political circumstances around us are being transformed. I am not talking simply about the fact that Modi has come into power a year ago and numerous churches and mosques have been defaced, Muslims wapasi-ed to ghar, and Heads of institutions like FTII and Nehru Museum changed and Subramaniam Swamy is suggested as the Vice-Chancellor for the Jawaharlal Nehru University. We must understand that the Sangh has been at it patiently for over seventy years, and what we’ve seen in the last twelve months is their coming of age. Are you and I going to remain naive and behave like the three-day meetings of Union Cabinet ministers with Sangh leaders does not constitute a brazen threat to the Constitutional directive that the Government answers solely to the People of India?

Last week, then, I met some friends in FTII on the 100th day of their strike. The media, as is its wont, mischaracterised their struggle as a challenge solely to the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan, when in fact their battle addresses something more terrifying. As you would know, along with Chauhan, four other paragons of sangh mediocrity were also appointed, included one Mr. Narendra Pathak. What you may not know is that Mr. Pathak was the State President of the ABVP, whose goons beat up the students of FTII in 2013 for screening a documentary named Jai Bhim, Comrade.

We Need to React

This is the message of the Sangh government. They will appoint as your college administrator the man who presides over the organisation that beats you up for screening documentaries. They will write out of textbooks the advise that Ambedkar gave to his followers, that of rejecting Hinduism – his 19th vow amongst the 22 he demanded during the historic conversion to Buddhism. They will thrash a Muslim man for travelling with a Hindu woman.[2] They will publicly accuse a woman of prostitution, who dares to question the many inane ideas of Narendra Modi.[3] They will shut down NGOs and try and jail the women and men who struggle for justice.[4] They shall deny the fact that even Hindus eat meat, they shall tell us what Hindus eat.[5] They shall project Bhagat Singh as one of their own- Bhagat Singh, who said to the Hindus, that their ancestors were ‘shrewd, who tried to find out theories strong enough to hammer down all the efforts of reason and disbelief‘. They are testing us, student community in India, we who are young and constitute the future of this nation, trying to find out if we have the spine to say ‘Enough!‘ as they ride rough-shod over our fundamental rights.

The danger in the confidence engendered by the lie that our nation is 3 millenia old is pressing – our nation does most definitely lay a claim to a history that is centuries old, but India is only 69 years old. And 69 years is a very small period of time in the evolution of a nation-state like India – the United States was on the verge of its own existential questions, leading to the Civil War, by the seventieth year after the drafting of its  Constitution. The Sangh understands this – the numerous reported and innumerable unreported instances of the societal violence unleashed by it since 2014  is the first time a government from Delhi has proclaimed a naked attack on the Idea of India. “We are not saffronising India, the people have given us the mandate”, they say.[6] Thirty one percent of the electorate of India, 17 crore individuals, do not even constitute thirty percent of the population of India. A mandate from 17 crore Indians, out of 125 crore, can never mean the mandate to throw out the Constitution and establish a police state hell bent on denying the values enshrined in our Constitution. As of today, the few students of FTII are, if not the sole, definitely the most defiant response to this violence. Ours are extremely political times, we would be too naive to believe that we can remain apolitical and distant from these happenings. For you and I, it shall not be long before we are compelled to choose where we stand in the long march of history.

[1]M.J. Akbar, A Mirror to Power  (2015); R. Gandhi, Revenge and Reconciliation: Understanding South Asian History (1999).

[2] Mangalore Moral Police at it Again: Muslim Man Beaten Up for Talking to Hindu Woman (Firstpost, August 25, 2015.)

[3] Shruti Seth’s Plea… (Indian Express, July 5, 2015).

[4]Greenpeace India’s Registration Cancelled (The Hindu, September 4, 2015); FCRA Violation Case: CBI Moves Supreme Court for Teesta Setalvad’s custody (DNA, September 25, 2015).

[5] Meat Ban in Mumbai… (Hindustan Times, September 13, 2015)

[6] It pains me when the West encroaches upon our Culture… (Indian Express, September 11, 2015).

A recurring theme in conversations with lawyers who oppose the death penalty, and who have been involved in defending convicts from capital punishment, has been their aim of making the death penalty procedurally impossible to inflict. Stated simply, this goal is to ensure that the State cannot, in fact, execute a person without considerable difficulty, finally rendering the death penalty itself unviable, and therefore, undesirable.

This goal was evolved as a response to the fact that the judiciary has refused to declare the death penalty unconstitutional, and the fact that there is little legislative will to do away with the punishment. The goal, if achieved, would work to ensure that the state discovers that there is no procedurally acceptable way of imposing the death penalty, and therefore ensure that such sentences are not carried out. As the final assault, the uselessness of the penalty on the statute book would be discovered, and the penalty dropped completely as even a theoretical possibility. Of course, this method was fraught with dangers, the prime one being the State becoming much more efficient at imposing the penalty, following the procedure as provided, and rendering the entire argument fallacious.  But given the limitations that have been outlined above, this was all these lawyers had. This short comment argues that the case of Yakub Memon shows the limitation of the strategy that was adopted by death penalty abolitionist lawyers, and the way the state has circumvented the entire argument points in a dangerous direction, where instead of increased efficiency and compliance, procedure is violated completely.

Let’s call the argument of the abolitionist lawyer the impossibility thesis. To be fair, this line of reasoning has had considerable success till very recently, aided by a judiciary which has successively increased procedural requirements for the taking of life by the state but always shied away from declaring the penalty unconstitutional. Of course the genesis of the impossibility thesis may not be accurately identified. However, Bachan Singh and Machhi Singh ensured that the death penalty was recognised judicially as a class of punishment of its own and to be imposed only in the “rarest of rare” cases. The constitution bench of the Supreme Court in rendering S.303 of the IPC unconstitutional was another victory, ensuring that the death penalty could not be mandatorily imposed under ordinary criminal law. Of course, the Indian Supreme Court was aware of what was happening throughout the world on matters of capital punishment, mostly the SCOTUS, which having rendered the death penalty, as practiced, unconstitutional in Furman in 1972, allowed the penalty to be restored in 1976 in Gregg v. Georgia.

The impossibility thesis scored another major victory in the case of Triveniben v. State of Gujarat, where delay on death row was recognised as a factor on which the death penalty could be commuted by the judiciary. That case was referred to a constitution bench because lower strength benches had differed in the precise effect of such delay, T.V. Vatheeswaran v. State of Tamil Nadu declaring even a delay of two years to be unduly long delay entitling the prisoner to commutation.

The impossibility thesis has been based largely on the procedural safeguards that a prisoner on death row is entitled to. The Constitution having guaranteed consideration for mercy at the hands of the executive, a prisoner could apply for the same and if there was delay in the rejection of such a petition, the prisoner could approach the judiciary on that ground. As thinking on the death penalty evolved globally, the Indian judiciary adopted several other safeguards as well, such as insanity at the time of execution being a ground to commute the sentence, recognition of the death  row syndrome etc. Finally, the impossibility thesis saw what can be called its greatest victory in the case of Shatrughan Chauhan v. Union of India, where the Supreme Court commuted fifteen death sentences on several grounds.

However, some cases have increasingly displayed that the reaction to making the death penalty more difficult to execute has been, in part, to ensure that the procedures which are guaranteed by law are not followed and the prisoner is executed. As the death penalty is irreversible and final, there is nothing which can be done once the actual execution is carried out. The cases where procedural violations have deliberately been carried out by the state leading up to an actual execution are all examples of terror related cases. One saw the same happening in the case of Ajmal Kasab, where the Maharashtra Prison Manual was violated and top ministers of the state had gone on record to say that the penalty has been carried out in secrecy precisely to ensure that Kasab could not approach the courts. Again, in the case of Afzal Guru, one may point out to factors in the actual execution that were violated. In the case of Yakub Memon, the execution showed that there are procedural violations committed, and which were condoned by the judiciary. In fact, this case displayed how determined the government was that the sentence be carried out on the same day as fixed by a legally flawed death warrant. It may, in a perverse way, be called efficient to reject the mercy petition on the same day it was referred to the Home Ministry, and by the Governor, minutes after the dismissal of his petition before the Supreme Court on 29th July. Leaving aside the procedural rules violated, such as the Mercy Petition Rules notified by the Home Ministry, which mandate a period of at least fourteen days after the rejection of any mercy petition before the sentence can be carried out, one may see that government action has been to ensure that the prisoner cannot take advantage of his ordinary rights under Article 32. Whether Yakub would have challenged the rejection of his mercy petition on the grounds on which executive action can be challenged, one does not know. But it cannot be said that he was not entitled to challenge it. Of course, fidelity to the law, as laid down by the Supreme Court itself, should have ensured that the letter of the law be followed. However, the entire state machinery ensured that it was not.

It seems therefore, that the impossibility thesis has been outwitted by a system where procedural safeguards may be discarded at will by the government in power to ensure that the penalty is carried out. The only justification coming from the other side seems to be that this case involved an instance of terror. But I would caution against celebrating the defeat of the impossibility thesis as any triumph for brilliant legal thought. It is in fact, quite the reverse. It is a deliberate blindness to an instance of illegality.•