Home > Articles posted by Gautam Bhatia
FEATURE
on Jun 5, 2023
141 views 6 mins

When the case was carried in appeal by the State to the Supreme Court, the Court did something extraordinary and wholly extra-legal: as an interim measure, while it considered the appeal, it passed an order stating that the High Court’s judgment was “not to be treated as precedent”. As I had written at the time, […]

FEATURE
on Jun 5, 2023
167 views 8 mins

This post is not concerned with the merits of the judgment, although it is worthwhile to note that it is one of the few judgments on personal liberty and the CrPC that actually takes seriously the power imbalance between the State and the individual, and attempts to remedy that by insisting on giving procedural safeguards […]

FEATURE
on Jun 5, 2023
76 views 8 mins

The High Court found against the Appellants/Petitioners, on the bases that they had indicated their willingness to comply with the school rules (which included mandatory mass), and that they had not established that mandatory mass amounted to an impingement of their own freedom of belief. The Court of Appeal – consisting of Kiage, Tuiyott, and […]

FEATURE
on Apr 11, 2023
123 views 18 mins

Various Commissions like the National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution and the Puncchi Commission have called for constitutional amendments to prescribe a time limit by which the Governor has to give his assent. However, no action has been taken in furtherance of these recommendations. The failure of legislative intervention necessitates judicial intervention by laying down standards […]

FEATURE
on Apr 3, 2023
92 views 9 mins

Queer Lawfare, according to the authors, is a strategy where rights and/ or laws are tactically employed to advance politically contested goals with regards to the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community. In the words of Siri Gloppen, Adrian Jjuuko, Frans Viljoen, Alan Msosa, the term “lawfare” used in the book describes the following:        The […]

FEATURE
on Apr 2, 2023
104 views 13 mins

Others, including this blog, have already explained the Court’s two opinions. Therefore, in this piece, I will skip discussing the basic facts and issues outlined in the case. This post, moreover, does not seek to excavate reasoning I thought latent in the two opinions. Instead, I want to bring an argument about the ECI’s functioning into […]

FEATURE
on Mar 1, 2023
82 views 14 mins

The facts of the case went back to 1992. They related to State violence against a set of protesters, collectively referred to as “mothers of political prisoners” (the reference is self-explanatory), and who were the Appellants before the Supreme Court. Appellants submitted that for a period of many months in 1992, they were subjected to […]

FEATURE
on Mar 1, 2023
114 views 6 mins

Ramesh Chandra Sharma vs State of UP arose out of the Greater Noida Authority’s decision to pay differential compensation rates for certain land that it had acquired under the old Land Acquisition Act. The Authority divided landholders into “Pushtaini” and “Ghair-pushtaini.” Pushtaini landholders were those who had acquired the land before the establishment of the […]

FEATURE
on Jan 31, 2023
362 views 15 mins

The roots of the controversy lie in the patriarchal structures of our world. It is an incontrovertible fact that in most societies, men hold a disproportionate share of immovable property (for the gendered skew in Kenya, see here). The reasons for these are both historical (dating back to times when women were legally barred from […]