ACJ Bloomberg Programme

 

"Human dignity in the time of Article 21: The long satyagraha for the constitution-as-Commons in India"
 
I am honoured to speak in memory of Mr. TG Narayanan today.  In keeping with his keen engagement with resistance politics and his practice of what I call ‘insurgent’ journalism during India’s quest for freedom – as also his commitment to peace, justice and non-violence exemplified in his work with Gandhi and beyond, and his status as a ‘connected critic’ (Paul and Dowling 2019) – I focus today on a particular aspect of ‘deprivation’ – the deprivation of life and liberty (Article 21 rights) and the dignitarian struggles in free India.  We are today, at a time when lapdog journalism is ascendant, more than ever before in need of journalists who are connected critics and insurgent in their approach to and understanding of social justice (see Burra 2020).  I thank the Asian College of Journalism for this opportunity to share my thoughts in these troubled times.
Connected Histories: Let us speak of Palestine!
We live in a time where the term ‘connected histories’ carries urgent calls to resistance and collective action in defence of constitutional values in the here and now. Within and across territorial boundaries, borders and fences.  I begin with a reference to Mr. TG Narayanan’s final stint after his career in journalism – his role in the founding of the Indian Council of World Affairs and his work as a diplomat of the United Nations, deeply invested in the question of peace in the world order.  If the Cold War,  Nuclear Disarmament and peace treaties between the superpowers were of urgent concerns during his time that saw his close involvement (Paul and Dowling 2019), today, the most urgent questions of peace and global justice must focus on Gaza, Palestine and the indefensible actions of the State of Israel. I begin therefore,  with a prefatory note that reflects my disciplinary location as a human rights ethnographer and as someone committed to exploring ideas of justice across the world. No discussion on contemporary history can begin today without an unwavering condemnation of Israel’s violent policy of apartheid, its bombardment of Gaza and its ‘domicide’ (Rajagopal 2024), genocide and war of extermination of the Palestinian people, and its active perpetuation and exacerbation of settler colonisation – now no longer confined to Gaza. What we have been witness to over the past fourteen months is an unprecedented and catastrophic resurgence of supremacist, racist empire, occupation, colonisation, genocide, infrastructural destruction, and impunity on an unimagined scale financed by the western superpowers whose own genocidal histories have now paled in comparison to what we witness even as we gather here. I stand here committed to the demand for immediate and total ceasefire, sanctions against Israel and its prosecution for war crimes and crimes against humanity – we now have an ICC ruling to this effect (International Criminal Court 2024), prior to that the proceedings of the International Court of Justice(2024) and through it all the delegitimization of UN agencies, especially the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that has seen mounting losses and obstacles in their daily work of bringing succour to Gaza; and demand the right of return, the end of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, and the right to reparations for the Palestinian people. I draw this commitment from my commitment to the Indian constitution encapsulated in the Preamble. This is our present. This is a defining moment in contemporary history. Palestine is our lens to a new historical sensibility and humane futures. As the Palestinian people urge us to do, let us shift the axis from the theology of empire, supremacist occupation and dispossession towards a convivial theology of fellowship, dignity and hope.
And in India we must think of Manipur and the irreparable harms visited on the peoples of the state over the past 18 months with guarantees of civic and state impunity for perpetrators of mass crime and collective violence (Human Rights Watch 2024; Rangad et. al. 2023).
I present today some general observations that draw on my ongoing work with cases and materials pertaining to civil liberties history from the state of Andhra Pradesh (Kannabiran 2025a & 2025b) – on the subject of the deprivation of life and personal liberty under the constitution.
Revisiting legacies of constitutional convivialities
It is apt to begin a conversation on dignity and hope with a reference to the ways in which Dr. B.R. Ambedkar imagined fraternity and belonging in India.  I begin with the reminder that equality, life, liberty, freedom of faith and conscience and freedom from exploitation and discrimination – the entire constitutional architecture – flows from the articulation of the rights of minorities that must be non-negotiable.  Dr. Ambedkar suggested in the Constituent Assembly that candidates from the majority community should secure a minimum number of votes from minorities in their constituencies leading B. Shiva Rao to remark: “This would have amounted to a minority exercising a sort of veto on the majority communities…”(Rao 1968: 755-56).  Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, from Syeda Hameed’s account anticipated Dr. Ambedkar’s idea on the right to veto, when in 1940 he declared: “Any constitution that is framed in future for India, must contain the fullest guarantees for the protection of the rights and interests of minorities.  What are the necessary safeguards…? This judgment rests with the minority not with the majority [and]…therefore, must be formulated by their consent, not by majority vote”(in Hameed [1997] 2014: xv) .  Shaunna Rodrigues (2020: 126) traces the ways in which Maulana Azad articulated “ethical, moral and theological arguments emerging from, among other sources of Indian traditions, Islam, on the nature, justification and critique of a unified rule of law for a diverse people,” re-inscribing the boundaries of the political, challenging British imperialism and pointing to the plural foundations of self-rule and constitutionalism in independent India.
In my ongoing work, I attempt to build a bridge between the intellectual history of Indian constitutionalism, histories of insurgent interpretation of the constitution and the ideas of the scholars of the commons.  In proposing the conceptualisation of the constitution as a commons I look at belonging and ownership, foregrounding collective action and civic engagement as providing the tools for constitutional interpretation (Kannabiran 2020, 2021, 2022). It is, at this moment, the spirit of constitutional morality (not its narrow legalistic prescription) that guides an interpretation of its protections, its use and abuse. I will not have the time in this lecture to dwell at any length on the idea of the ‘constitution-as-commons’, but will attempt to lead up to it.
I begin with questions: Why is it necessary for us to focus on convivialities in India today?  Why do we need to think of recuperation by invoking the constitution-as-commons? The simple answer is to resist and counter the politics of maiming. I draw from Jasbir Puar’s (2017) work in the context of Palestine and expand its scope in the context of contemporary India. I raise questions to do with post-truth regimes, economic violence, sexual violence, and pandemic (mis) governance – within the larger context of Hindu majoritarianism. I point to the clusters around which impunity – state and civic impunity – fold the secular into the majoritarian religious nationalist as the only expression of the ‘sacral’ narrowly defined through homogenized denominational identities.
 
The Politics of Maiming
The deathly coils of the politics of maiming in India articulate caste, community, conscience, ethnicity and gender as reified un-historical identities disregardful of their dense intersections, heterogeneity and plural articulations across history. The experience of Manipur over the past year and a half – continuing exacerbated and unresolved in the present – is a daily reminder of the profound harms inflicted by the politics of maiming.  
We could examine the politics of maiming in contemporary India in several parts – today I reflect briefly on theocratic frameworks of rule before turning to the deprivation of liberty by the carceral state under Hindutva.
(a) Theocratic Frameworks of Rule
Here I draw on Professor Mohan Gopal’s lecture on theocratic frameworks of constitutional jurisprudence under Hindutva (Sharma 2023).  Dominant, majoritarian discourse on citizenship in contemporary India draws selectively and reductively from ‘ancient traditions’ and ‘interruptions’ by ‘Muslim rule’ folding myth, history, religion, state practice and social hierarchies together in the construction of hierarchies of citizenship in the present.  This finds echoes in constitutional courts in cases that touch upon citizenship, religion and belonging in a range of different ways, in effect undermining the constitutional commitment to equal citizenship with sororal, non-binary, gender fluid sororal fraternity and justice as core values.  It also finds curricular articulation through the disembowelment of school textbooks in 2023 and the erasure of Muslim presence and rule – homogenized across dynasties and regions through constructions of the ‘dark ages’.  Hindu mythological traditions, now narrated in linear monotone, are conflated with counter-historical imaginings of pasts completing the erasure of multiplicity, plurality and syncretism on several levels across several religious orientations and vernacular traditions even within what is broadly described as Hindu – take for instance, AK Ramanujan’s essay ‘300 Ramayanas’ (Ramanujan 2006).Professor Gopal has pointed to the rise in the theocratic framework in constitutional jurisprudence in India today and the steady normalisation of Hindutva majoritarianism through courts.  We have recently witnessed the frenzied assertions (and performance) of religious faith of the former CJI – the less said the better. This is also true of legislative bodies –witness the opulent Hindutva consecration of the new Parliament building in May 2023, and the installation of the sengol with ochre robed bare chested Hindu male priests, presumably Brahmin, cradling the Prime Minister as a symbol of a new ‘Hindu’ Bharat.  This performance of ritual in the new Parliament and his consecration of the building of the temple in Ayodhya – both at state expense (and we know now, an act of ‘divine revelation’)– are identical in form, content and purpose.  This convergence and this performance encapsulates several levels of the politics of maiming.
We see this turn at work in direct ways (to do with denominational concerns at the individual, group and institutional levels) and in vicarious ways (not necessarily in cases directly to do with religious identity or institutions – sexual violence, economic violence, for instance).  
The bleeding of theocratic frameworks into constitutional conversations, I argue, is an act of wounding – the infliction of ontological harms with existential crises – that  results in the othering of the Muslim, Dalit, Adivasi, Buddhist, Christian, Sikh, Trans-queer, Communist, Atheist – those that do not ‘belong’ to the ‘Hindu fold’ – self-avowedly patriarchal, patrilineal, heterosexist, misogynist, homophobic and transphobic. These communities are thereby outside the theocratic re-territorialisation of the nation (the New Bharat as they now say), creating a crisis in the imaginations of justice under an anti-colonial constitution that in its very framing interrogates multiple colonisations within and without. Spatiocide, to use Palestinian sociologist Sari Hanafi’s description (2004) from another context translates the ontological harms into existential consequences at multiple levels that erode the fundamental guarantees against the deprivation of life and liberty – through definitions of national-antinational, citizen-infiltrator, through securitised barricades that surveil entry and exit (checkpoints now within neighbourhoods and cities), through the ousting of Muslims especially from the idea of India by law -- the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 and through disappearing the territory of the only Muslim majority state, Kashmir, in 2019, where the state was reduced to two union territories directly under the administration of the national government demonstrating yet another aspect of occupation. The use of bulldozers (Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Nuh-Haryana) to raze the homes and commercial establishments of minorities to rubble is a second manifestation of spatiocide – demolition/bulldozing is raw, state violence. Balakrishnan Rajagopal (2024) has used the term Domicide in the context of Palestine, which is also immediately relevant to the actions of Bulldozer Sarkar in India (Liang 2023) – now under censure by the Supreme Court through its recent judgement (Patnaik 2024). In February 2019, the Supreme Court order of the eviction of lakhs of people whose claims as forest dwellers had been rejected under Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006(FRA)(Kannabiran 2020, 2022) is yet another instance of judicially sanctioned spatiocide --the area marked for eviction for the most part fell under Schedule V and Schedule VI specially protected under the Constitution (Kannabiran 2016).  This is but one instance of spatiocide with reference to Adivasi homelands. Spatiocide is also visible in the ascendance of the weaponised corporation in coital embrace with the government and the dispossessions it executes with impunity (de-scheduling of forests for example, but even as we speak, the Adani crimes).
The rise of the theocratic framework and its consolidation in state formation is an unprecedented aspect of the politics of maiming – although it must also be recognised that even this has a long history of uncountable minor cuts and seepages that admitted the deluge finally.  
          (b) The Carceral State under Hindutva
I have argued elsewhere that the genealogy of civil liberties petitioning and organising must be constructed though regional/local experiences:  For the Hyderabad state it must include two aspects that pertain to the Police Action of 1948: the unfair trials, harsh sentencing, and extra judicial murder of communists immediately after independence; and the mass, genocidal violence against Muslims and the erasure of this history. I have elaborated on this twin track in another longer essay in press and will not have the time today to dwell on it further (Kannabiran 2025a, forthcoming).
Suffice it to say that the inaugural animus towards communists and Muslims that was witnessed in Hyderabad state during police action in 1948 are  dovetailed today into anti-terror laws (TADA, POTA and UAPA).  These laws invoke ‘security of state’ concerns witnessed in the war on communists in the foundational violence.  They fold security of state into ‘law and order’ and ‘public order’ – in ways that are violative of basic standards of fair trial, and the right to life and personal liberty under the constitution. It has not gone unchallenged. There has been a civic resistance and a growing movement for civil liberties in the decades since independence challenging the deprivation of life and liberty of dissenters and survivors. And yet, the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 (and the recent utterly regrettable assertion of the divine (Hindu) hand in the scripting of the 2022 judgment (Thapar 2024)), the Bombay riots, and the Gujarat Holocaust in 2002 (and its continuing depredations witnessed in the struggles of Bilkis Bano), all followed two decades of post Emergency civil liberties mobilisation in defence of political dissenters, and two and a half decades of Dalit civil liberties mobilisation against mass caste atrocities – the Keezhvenmani massacre of 1968 marking the turning point in the public mobilisation around caste atrocities in independent India – as we see through the work and writing of Mythili Sivaraman (2013) and Joan Mencher (1974), and the deeply troubling judicial discourse around caste violence.  After the 2019 amendments to UAPA, it has become a weapon to target individual dissenters, especially political dissenters and those belonging to minority communities, especially Muslim, serving the larger aims of the Hindutva authoritarian state.  
Preventive Detention law exemplifies our national ‘life of contradictions’(Ambedkar, Constituent Assembly, 25 November 1949) that is also birthed in this foundational moment.  Although Article 22 of the Constitution of India is titled ‘Protection against arrest and detention in certain cases’, it is in fact a constitutional provision that authorises governments to preventively detain persons without mandatory observance of minimum safeguards as required under commonly understood principles of the rule of law.  A constitutionally sanctioned suspension of the fundamental right to life and personal liberty passed through a quiescent constituent assembly and the first provisional parliament, validated by the Supreme Court in the first challenge it faced in the case of AK Gopalan (Gopalan 1956)– with  uncharacteristic equivocation from all notables ranging from Dr. Ambedkar to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel to Chief Justice Patanjali Sastri.
Anguished equivocation is equivocation, nonetheless—this twinning of anguish and equivocation reverberates through the history of this lawless law, both in parliaments and judicial benches, reinforcing the use of coercive force by the state with impunity. At the time when Justice Fazl Ali’s dissent in Gopalan v. State of Madras was reinstated by the 2017 Supreme Court in Puttaswamy, preventive detention had proliferated under the aegis of the constitutional courts in the country with an escalation of arrests and prolonged detention under the spiralling list of laws – state and central – that by now authorised preventive detention with scant regulations.  Of the laws framed by Parliament and state legislatures for preventive detention for reasons of defence, foreign affairs, security of India, maintenance of public order, security of state and supply of essential commodities and services,  it was the maintenance of public order, a vague and floating category that accounted for the largest number of cases (Ansari 1986).  The process was now the punishment.  
Civic and state impunity bring with them the realization that maiming is a process, not an episode or an event, and is unrelenting and exacting. It travels out to engulf proximate bodies and proximate social locations. I wish to draw attention to the escalation of civic violence and civic impunity for dominant Hindu mobs engaging in violence in states ruled by the BJP – UP, Uttarakhand, and now Manipur; Karnataka saw the banning of the hijab, with the high court supporting the ban, and anti-Muslim violence during the term of the BJP government.  Also the brutal murder of committed public intellectuals – Professor Kalaburgi and Gauri Lankesh (in a long line of assassinations).  State impunity is nowhere as telling as in the deaths of Father Stan Swamy and Prof. GN Saibaba – deaths as a result of gross mistreatment in custody.  How much more graphic can the description of the deprivation of life and liberty get, and how much more urgent the need to focus on this aspect of deprivation?  The equivocation of the courts is a crucial aspect of fortifying and legitimizing the weaponized carceral state – there are a few valuable exceptions, but painfully few.
Dr. Ambedkar’s statement is prescient:
‘I feel that the Constitution is workable; it is flexible and it is strong to hold the country together, both in peace ... and in war ... . Indeed, if I may say so, if things go wrong under the new Constitution, the reason will not be that we had a bad Constitution. What we will have to say is that man was vile’ (B.R. Ambedkar, 4th November 1948).
We bear witness to weak and timid courtly overtures on personal liberty, impunity, state responsibility and in quelling targeted assault and collective violence.
The Long Satyagraha of Civil Liberties
It is important to deliberate on these contradictions and draw on critiques of state exceptionalism that have emanated from conscientious resisters, rather than focussing on the reasoning offered by courts alone. For instance, the case of AK Gopalan may be best viewed through the lens of the civil libertarian challenge premised on human dignity to arbitrary government.  A core aspect of this challenge was to push courts to interpret the new constitution in transformative ways, and urge courts and governments alike to disrupt colonial habits of law enforcement and colonial ideas of the rule of law.  It was only insurgent petitioning and political action that could create and sustain the possibilities of this disruption in a newly independent nation.  
There have been small yet significant victories that swell the justice cascade, as for instance the striking down of detention orders issued under the AP Preventive Detention Act, 1970 as being violative of the constitutional guarantee under Article 22(5), and under Article 19(1)(d) by the AP High Court in the case of  the detention of the Digambara poets Nikhileshwar, Cherabandaraju and Jwalamukhi (Yadava Reddy vs. State of AP).  In the words of Justice O. Chinnappa Reddy who delivered this ground breaking judgment in the AP High Court, it set right a ‘retrograde step’ and prevented ‘the detaining authority from making capricious or mechanical orders…It was absolutely essential for the detaining authority to found the order on clear and relevant grounds’ (Reddy [2008]2023: 36).Or the 2024 case of Md Rahim Ali @ Abdur Rahim vs State of Assam and Ors, where the Supreme Court (a Bench of Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Ahsanuddin Amanullah), restoring the citizenship of a Muslim man in Assam after 12 years observed: ‘nothing has come on record to indicate even an iota of evidence against him, except for the bald allegation that he had illegally migrated to India…It is also not known as to who, if any person, had alleged that the appellant had migrated to India …’ The court asked whether ‘Section 9 (termination of citizenship) of the Citizenship Act empowers the executive “to pick a person at random, knock at his/her/their door, tell him/her/they/them ‘We suspect you of being a foreigner”’. So also the recent judgment on bulldozers.  We will find a scattered insurgent jurisprudence across courts of different jurisdictions across the country (See Noorani 2012).  The importance of these victories is not diminished by the fact that later cases in the same courts on matters of preventive detention or citizenship or any other issue of life and liberty did not/may not build on this jurisprudence.  After all the Puttaswamy decision remains a benchmark despite a slew of judgments by the Supreme Court since, whittling down the right to personal liberty and fair trial to absurd levels. Nor must we expect that judges will be consistent with their own prior rulings – we have seen this too.  What is important is that in specific clusters of cases, petitioners and their lawyers have succeeded in shining the torch on the significance of liberties and dignity, and have persuaded judges to walk their path.  And that is the reason for hope.
Embedded in these affirmations is the question of equal citizenship and its enunciations in resistance, demosprudence, state repression and civic oppressions – all inevitably expressed through demands for an insurgent jurisprudence on the part of courts in every jurisdiction – from trial courts, through high courts to the Supreme Court.  The goal is the accomplishment of a shared commitment to the spirit of the constitution and its relation to citizenship, dignity, fraternity and state practice.  This notwithstanding the fact that the ‘strong’ and ‘workable’ constitution that Dr. Ambedkar speaks of above, is rendered in the likeness of ‘a curate’s egg – good only in parts’ (to borrow Justice Nariman’s expression from Puttaswamy), on the question of personal liberty, Article 21, which sits next to and overshadowed by the inexorable presence of preventive detention, Article 22.  For, it can scarcely be forgotten that Article 21 is ‘designed to assure the dignity of the individual as a most cherished human value which ensures the means of full development and evolution of a human being’ (Justice Nariman in Puttaswamy).  How and on what basis might we piece together memories that render the Constitution ‘workable’, ‘flexible’ and ‘strong’ – in ways that its preambular iridescence lights up pathways to ‘hold the country together’ at a time when dominant political discourse reduces and degrades politics to the fractured banality of shards – ‘tukdetukde’ narratives.  
Accounts of civil liberties and human rights in contemporary India focus on the ways in which legislation, jurisprudence and state action have historically entrenched practices of impunity, and on the regimes of radical evil of the carceral state in times of Hindutva.  It is widely acknowledged in scholarship on the constitution that parliaments and legislatures have over seven decades enacted counter-constitutional and therefore ‘lawless’ laws; it is also widely acknowledged that courts have taken easy resort to judicial harmony by standing with political power through a manifestly unjust jurisprudence that passes as constitutional.  The latter, through omission or commission has played a pivotal role in priming the ground to allow impunity as state practice to grow deep roots even while both sing paeans to the glory of the ‘world’s largest democracy’.  
I approach the question of fundamental rights and civil liberties, focusing on questions of law deeply riven with contradictions – it is in that internal rupture that we may glimpse a ‘eutopic’ possibility (Geetha 2021: 270), despite the treacherous troughs in the journey.  We could, extending V. Geetha’s account of Dr. Ambedkar’s imagining of a third time – the ‘eutopic’ – argue that civil libertarians were taking a leaf out of Ambedkar’s work, in their persistent challenge to the certitudes of the political of all hues – even while finding new and imaginative pathways for the reasoning he proffered.  This resilience of resistance is rooted in the interiorities and unassailability of human dignity, which, in Lata Mani’s words‘ is an integral aspect of our very being’ (Mani 2011: 24).  This, I argue, enables a deep reckoning with this troubling history and helps think of obstacles to civil liberties as surmountable and reversible.  I have not attempted here to provide a comprehensive account of lawfare and caselaw, but instead have indicated a pathway to give voice to silences as a way of making headway in decolonising our present.
Thinking about the constitution-as-commons
My purpose is to keep the focus on what is not lost of the constitutional spirit and our aspirations for liberty as a peoples – despite the power of courts and governments to take easy resort to counter-constitutional moves.  In this I attempt an insurgent account of the civil libertarian attempt at destabilising power and forging communities of resistance – multiple, plural, diverse -- oriented towards creating a good and just world not in the distant future, imagined, not as a utopia, but in the here and now.  
How might we think of dignity as a moral and a constitutional value? –a lens through which we may understand the loss of liberty and the significance of ‘communicative freedom’ and the ‘right to have rights’  (Benhabib 2011) under the constitution – this takes us back to concerns that were at the core of Mr. TG Narayanan’s philosophy. This discussion on dignity draws importantly on intellectual traditions on the sub-continent, and on post-Holocaustian standards in international law, notably the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and consequent, connected standards and reconnects with my opening remarks on the constitution-as-commons.
While the constitutional articulation of ‘dignity’ in the Constituent Assembly happens at the precise moment that the UDHR is also being assembled around this very value, Upendra Baxi(2014: 429) argues that the Indian enunciation, far from being mimetic of Euro-American enunciations, was inspired by the many conceptions that circulated within and between the many struggles around dignitarian concerns against colonisations of different orders on the sub-continent. What might be the trajectories of recall?
Remembering must begin with the insurgent spirit of struggle: the ulgulan led by Birsa and the memory of Birsa’s ulgulan (Ranjan 2022), the santhalhul, and Komuram Bheem’s leadership of the Gond struggle for Jal, Jangal, Jameen (Poyam 2016) – words and the memory of the struggle powering Adivasi resistance to this day; satyagraha which for Gandhi provided one articulation: to protest against the colonial oppression of indigo farmers in Champaran (Amin et. al. 2022)or to protest the imposition of salt taxes in Dandi for instance. For B.R. Ambedkar satyagraha was meant to ‘establish our natural rights as citizens and human beings’ by dismantling the vested interests of ‘Caste Hindus’ in an iniquitous caste order  – the Mahad Satyagraha to assert the right to common waters and the struggle for temple entry in Nasik for instance (Gopal 2024; Teltumbde 2023).Maulana Azad provided an elaboration of the ontological basis of the constitution of India in the Islamic principles of Tawhid – the oneness of God (not defined on the basis of homogeneity of all Muslims and their separation from all Hindus, but rather in terms of plural belief systems and alternative universalisms, if one may call it that) – as constitutive of his imagining of Self-Rule (Rodrigues 2020; also see Ahmad 1978). Jaipal Singh Munda (2017) spoke of the need to recognise the claims of Adivasis as a people, cautioning us early on that it was not what was written in the constitution but how it was worked to protect minorities that mattered.  Each of these moves was part of a much longer, deeper politics of organising, collective struggle and theorizing of the possibilities for a eutopic present and futures for the emergent nation.
All of this, replaying in the mass protests before us today, although they may seem like ‘small voices’ (after Ranajit Guha (2002)) before the juggernaut of the post-truth state, forces us to rethink the dialectical relationships between religion, caste, state and citizenship in the very conceptualization of the constitution – and reach a common ground of mutual respect, convivial living and care that fosters the idea of ‘a peoples’.  The ideas of ‘We the People’, liberty and swaraj may be revalorized in robustly inclusivist terms that reject assimilation and subordination through a retrieval of memory of vernacular moral traditions of building a shared humanity.  Fraternity-dignity, a core twin value in the preamble builds upon a rich history of subaltern resistance and spiritual traditions that speak to ideas of fellowship and compassion. These are imaginings that sprang forth from the belly of injustice at different moments in subcontinental history – as articulations of pathways to recuperation and renewal contextualised in relation to the Hindu majoritarian present and the ways in which Hindutva ideological formations have shaped discourses around civil libertarian constitutionalism – most importantly the ways in which our understanding of ‘dignity’ and dignitarian wrongs/harms – regimes of ‘maiming’ – have been articulated in independent India.  
The bulwark of the argument on the fundamental right to privacy set out in Puttaswamy rests on the juridical articulation of the moral value of ‘dignity’ as a foundational aspect of the constitution of India. In a context where the deprivation of life and liberty – preventive detention, arbitrary arrests, denial of fair trial – through the impunity guaranteed statutorily in anti-terror laws, and democidal violence enact ‘rituals of humiliation’, to use Sunder Boopalan’s(2017) words, and impose indescribable wrongs, what are the specific ways in which petitioners, lawyers, activists, communities in struggle and communities under siege have thwarted (or attempted to thwart, or compensated for) such treatment through the power of dignitarian assertions?  The logbooks of citizen resistance in and outside courts against arbitrary states assemble stories of such assertions that open out to view the ‘life of contradictions’ that we entered into as a nation.  Pointing out that Dr. Ambedkar was ‘the only Indian thinker to speak of contradictions’, Upendra Baxi delineates six types of contradictions that prompt deep reflection: ‘value contradictions; normative contradictions; institutional contradictions; material contradictions; cultural/civilizational contradictions; economic contradictions’ (Baxi 2025, forthcoming). We see the various dimensions of these contradictions play out in the arenas of civil liberties. Within courts this is most often expressed through judicial equivocation and jurisprudential dissociation – we-know-this-to-be-unjust-but-we-will-not-rule-on-it – that from the basis of judicial decision making in countless cases.
My attempt is a call to memory and a critique that illuminates paths not taken, recovering ground from the shards that affirm freedom, fraternity and dignity, in a time of deep crisis. The purpose is to develop a cogent assemblage of citizenship that builds on histories of anti-colonial/anti-majoritarian struggles, assertions of the unassailability of human dignity that persist despite the rolling juggernaut of burgeoning exception.
Upendra Baxi has argued that the ‘political unconscious’ of the Indian constitution as it was drafted and passed was post-liberal with conscious departures from the received traditions of western liberal constitutionalism (Baxi 2025, forthcoming). It is, in his view, the mis-application of liberal principles of interpretation to a post-liberal text that makes for the deep contradictions in constitutional interpretation. This insurgent thought is a way finder for the present-futures, especially in the ways in which dignity is constitutive of this unconscious.  The unparalleled enactment of ‘constitutional criminal law’ as Baxi describes Article 17, for instance, creates a valuable normative standard of non-derogability with the principle of non-retrogression written into it – the violence starting with Kizhvenmani demonstrates not the absence of law or the erasure of violence, but the guarantee of civic and state impunity in the shadow of constitutional protections.
The affirmation of the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 sits at the core of the basic structure of the constitution—in the light of which the enforceability of preventive detention under Article 22 may be re-evaluated. The constitutional protections for Schedules V and VI and Article 370 (till 2019) provide the substantive normative check on the unceasing appropriations of homelands. The judicial discourse on the death penalty that narrates it as an exceptional feature – the rarest of the rare – in a rule of law democracy, is an argument that must extend to force the abatement of extrajudicial and custodial murders by the state with no legal redress, which is in fact the death penalty by other means, since the officers almost never face prosecution and much less, conviction for crimes committed in the name of law.
The paradoxes remain, but therein also the hope – in the challenges that conscientious resisters of different hues pose to governments and courts, and in the tenacity of ordinary citizens in reclaiming convivial spaces and building difficult conversations and socialities.  In the efforts to revisit our troubled pasts, we assemble insights of a moral firmament that speak to the spirit of the constitution, reject its aberrations (using arguments of severability and non-retrogression), and provide a dignity compass for just, compassionate governance, state formation and citizen engagement.

REFERENCES AND CASES
Ahmad, Imtiaz (1978). Caste and Social Stratification Among Muslims in India.  Manohar.
Amin, Shahid, Tridip Suhrud, MeghaTodi (2022). Thumb Printed: Champaran Indigo Peasants Speak to Gandhi.  Vol.1. New Delhi: National Archives of India and Ahmedabad: Navjivan Trust.
Ansari, Iqbal (1986). Preventive Detention: Its Incompatibility with the Rule of Law.  In Desai, A.R. (ed) Violation of Democratic Rights in India.  Vol. I. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, pp. 96-102.
Baxi, Upendra (2014). The Place of Dignity in the Indian Constitution. In Duwell, Marcus, et al. eds. 2014. The Cambridge Handbook of Human Dignity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 429-436.  
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Selected Cases:
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ADM, Jabalpur vs. Shivakant Shukla (1976) 2 SCC 521.
International Court of Justice. 186 - Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. Document Number  
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In Re: Directions in the matter of demolition of structures.  13 November 2024.
Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, AIR 1978 SC 597.
Md Rahim Ali @ Abdur Rahim vs State of Assam and Ors. [2024] INSC 511.
National Investigation Agency vs Zahoor Ahmad Shah Watali AIR 2019 SC 1734.
Union of India vs. K.A. Najeeb AIR 2021 SC 712.
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Romila Thapar &Ors. vs. Union of India &Ors. AIR 2018 Supreme Court 4683.
Sidhique Kappan vs. State of Uttar Pradesh Crl.A. No.-001534-001534 / 2022, order dated 09.09.2022.. Supreme Court of India.
 
Kalpana Kannabiran is a sociologist and legal scholar based in Hyderabad, India.  Over the past three decades, she has co-founded and worked with Asmita Resource Centre for Women (1991-2021), was part of the founding faculty of NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, where she taught sociology and law (1999-2009), and retired as Professor and Regional Director, Council for Social Development, Hyderabad (2011-2021). She is currently Distinguished Professor, Council for Social Development, New Delhi and has completed a three-year term as Civil Society Advisory Governor (Asia Region), Commonwealth Foundation, London, January 2020—December 2022.   

Professor Kannabiran received her PhD in sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and an LLM from Postgraduate College of Law, Osmania University.  She was Rockefeller Humanist-in-Residence at the Women’s Studies Program, Hunter College, City University of New York in 1992-93, and is recipient of the VKRV Rao Prize for Social Science Research (2003) and the Amartya Sen Award for Distinguished Social Scientists (2012) for her work in the field of law.   

Between 2007 and 2008, she was member of the Expert Group on the Equal Opportunity Commission, Government of India and the Expert Group on Legal Education Reform in Kerala, Government of Kerala, both chaired by the late Professor NR Madhava Menon.  

Kalpana Kannabiran has published widely across the fields of law, gender and sexuality studies, and sociology.  Her widely acclaimed book Tools of Justice: Non-Discrimination and the Indian Constitution (Routledge, 2012) was the first to open out a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, intersectional exploration of the fundamental right to non-discrimination in India.  A compilation of her public writing in The Hindu, The Wire, and Scroll is published as Law, Justice and Human Rights in India: Short Reflections (Orient Black Swan, 2021).  She has translated and edited The Speaking Constitution: A Sisyphean Life in Law by K.G. Kannabiran (HarperCollins 2022), and has edited Law, Justice and Society: Selected Works by Upendra Baxi, Volume 3: Law and Society (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2025).

Mr. T.G. Narayanan (1911–1962) was a journalist with The Hindu during the war years. He was known for his coverage of the Bengal famine, the war on the Imphal front and his interviews with India’s freedom fighters. His writings on the famine were one of the earliest instances of investigative journalism. His coverage and analysis were recorded in a book “Famine over Bengal” and published by the Book Company of Calcutta. After Indian independence, Narayanan joined the UN in New York and at the time of his death was the deputy and personal representative to UN Secretary General, Dag Hammaskjoeld, on Nuclear Disarmament at the 18-nation talks in Geneva. The T. G. Narayanan Memorial Lecture on Social Deprivation has been instituted at the Asian College of Journalism by his son Dr. Ranga Narayanan.