Nandini Sundar | University of Delhi (original) (raw)
Papers by Nandini Sundar
Development and Change, 2024
From the mid-20th century onwards, diverse groups-whether formerly enslaved populations or victim... more From the mid-20th century onwards, diverse groups-whether formerly enslaved populations or victims of mass atrocities-have demanded reparations as part of a wider struggle for justice. However, in the current global climate of right-wing resurgence, both the recognition of victimhood and demands for justice are in danger of being subverted and hijacked. These developments create additional obstacles to addressing genuine reparations demands. This manifests in at least three ways. First, there is a selective application of victimhood status and recognition, often along old fault lines of race or religion. In this way, the oppression of some groups is no longer recognized as a legitimate object of reparations; indeed, their claims to justice are seen as unfair demands against dominant groups. Second, we see the blatant continuation of the very practices that the reparations movement has sought to establish as wrongs. Third, not content with negating existing demands for reparations from below, powerful groups are going a step further and, as part of supremacist projects, asserting their own right to reparations. In doing this, they use the language and moral claims of reparations and decolonization that have emerged through the global reparations movement. This article seeks to illustrate these developments through the examples of India and Israel, including the demand for 'restoration' of sacred sites to Hindus and Jews. I am very grateful to Andrew Fischer, Ndongo Samba Sylla, Sreerekha Sathi and Annina Kaltenbrunner for their detailed comments and help in revising this article. It's a rare privilege to have such engaged editors. I am also grateful to all the participants in the Development and Change workshop on 'The Political Economy of Global Reparations in the 21st Century' (28-29 September 2023) for a stimulating discussion. And as always, I thank Siddharth Varadarajan for his intellectual and editorial help.
Journal of Right Wing Studies, 2023
Twenty-first-century elected right-wing regimes share many similarities apart from being led by "... more Twenty-first-century elected right-wing regimes share many similarities apart from being led by "authoritarian populists" who centralize power in themselves and represent ethnic or religious majorities at the expense of other citizens. Since higher judiciaries are key to ensuring executive accountability and the separation of powers in a liberal democratic constitutional setup, they are on the front lines of authoritarian attempts at institutional capture. Unlike earlier dictatorships that suspended existing constitutional protections or imposed martial law, current authoritarian regimes maintain a semblance of legality and constitutionalism while in practice attempting to remake the judiciary in their own image. This phenomenon has been variously termed "autocratic legalism," "abusive constitutionalism," and "populist constitutionalism." In this article, I look at how the Indian Supreme Court (SC) has responded to executive incursions under the Narendra Modi regime since 2014. Even today, the court continues to deliver important democracy-enhancing judgments, breaking away from India's colonial inheritance in matters like criminalizing same-sex relationships and adultery. However, the last decade is strongly marked by two features: first, an unwillingness to hear major constitutional issues that might challenge the regime; and second, judgments that serve as an advertorial for the regime, reinforcing an antiminority ideological orientation, justifying the government's actions, and promoting Modi's personality cult. By outsourcing several political decisions to a seemingly disinterested and neutral judiciary, the Modi government has been far more successful than it would have been if it had imposed those decisions purely by legislative majority. In turn, by addressing a variety of political issues as purely procedural matters and not addressing them as constitutional questions, the courts have collaborated in the delegitimization of dissent and reinforced the claims of the Modi regime.
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2023
The framing of the Indian Constitution (1946-50) was a pivotal moment in the history of indigenou... more The framing of the Indian Constitution (1946-50) was a pivotal moment in the history of indigenous communities (colloquially adivasis, officially scheduled tribes) and their relationship with the state. This essay makes three interventions. First, I contest the prevailing emphasis in Indian history and sociology on seeing indigenous politics as primarily in opposition to state institutions and laws. Instead, drawing on representations from indigenous organisations to the Constituent Assembly (CA), I highlight an earlier trajectory of engagement with law-making and state institutions. Second, I show how tribes saw the making of the constitution as an opportunity to be recognised as both equal citizens and distinct communities and offered real alternatives in constitutional design and ideas of democracy. What is particularly interesting is how, despite the different constitutional histories of countries with indigenous populations, there is common core to the demand for ‘constitutional recognition’ involving cultural, political and resource autonomy. Third, through a close reading of CA and committee deliberations, I show how personalities, processes and contingencies and not abstract rational deliberations alone shaped constitutional design. Here, I add to the literature locating the ‘force of law’ in the procedural movement of files.
On May 3, 2017, the police picked up Hadiyam Hadma,1 a former village headman and human rights ac... more On May 3, 2017, the police picked up Hadiyam Hadma,1 a former village headman and human rights activist, near his village. Initially, the police denied holding him in their custody, forcing his wife to file a writ of habeas corpus in the Chhattisgarh High Court. The police then held a press conference in which Hadma was made to " confess " to participating in an attack by cadres of the Communist Party of India (CPI) (Maoist) (henceforth the Maoists)2 on security forces a few weeks earlier, in which twenty-five government paramilitary soldiers had been killed. Hadma was taken to the High Court under heavy police escort. After he had been hung upside down for days, blindfolded, and shot at, it was scarcely surprising that he told the Court he had voluntarily " surrendered " and come to the police for protection. Hadma is now in indefinite police custody. Like Hadma, hundreds of ordinary villagers across central India caught up in the conflict between the state and Maoists have been shown as having " surrendered. " Despite repeated reports in the media exposing the surrenders as fake,3 the practice goes on. Staged surrenders help the police avoid opprobrium for mass arrests, fudge the rehabilitation money offered under the state's surrender policy, adopt carrot and stick policies with villagers to induce compliance (they are told they can go home after surrendering so long as they cooperate with the police), and divide insurgent village communities. If " surrenders " are the seemingly benign face of counterinsurgency, democracy plays the same role at a larger level, where the " choice " exercised in an election is used to delegitimize other kinds of non-electoral choices, including which political party or ideology to support and how to live. This article examines the aporias of democracy, drawing on Derrida's aporias of justice.4 For Derrida, legal indeterminacy constitutes the aporetic aspect of justice: once a case is decided it either revalidates the existing rule, or establishes a new rule, but at the moment of deciding or delivering justice it is neither just nor unjust. Going further back, just as in its founding moment law is neither legal nor illegal for Derrida, democracy in its founding moment is neither democratic nor undemocratic, especially insofar as it also brings together and binds the entity in whose name it rules.5 The same paradox underlies state violence, law, and democracy, starting with Hobbes's argument that the state's monopoly on violence is legitimate because it enables people to live in security, and thus enables democracy; it underlies as well Benjamin's distinction between law making and law preserving violence.6 It is in moments when it claims to represent the ruled that the political system most
This article explores the way in which the Indian state and the incipient Maoist state in central... more This article explores the way in which the Indian state and the incipient Maoist state in central India mimic while repudiating each other. As against theories of sovereignty which see it either as authored from below (contract theory) or scripted from above (domination), or irrelevant to the extent that subject and state are co-constituted by regimes of power (cf. Foucault), I argue that in civil war, the display and practical exercise of statehood and sovereignty is critical. However, this is primarily aimed not at putative citizens but at the enemy. I look at the way in which the Indian state impersonates guerilla tactics in order to fight the Maoists, and the way in which the Maoists mimic state practices of governmentality. Each side identifies its own ‘citizens’ through uniforms, lists of people killed, and inscribes its ‘territory’ with memorials to its martyrs. For the presumed citizens of these mimetic states, however, it is precisely these markers of identity and legibility which make them more vulnerable. Membership of parallel regimes holds out both promise and precarity.
Economic and Political Weekly, Jan 23, 2010
Civil Wars in South Asia: State, Sovereignty, Development, 2000
Economic and Political Weekly, Dec 22, 2001
Economic and Political Weekly, Apr 17, 2004
Economic and Political Weekly, Aug 8, 1998
References Dhavan, Rajiv and Jacob Alice (1978): Selection and Appointment of Supreme Court Judge... more References Dhavan, Rajiv and Jacob Alice (1978): Selection and Appointment of Supreme Court Judges, Tripathi. Griffith, JAG (1977): Politics of the Judiciary, Fontana/Collins. Law Commission of India (1958): 14th Report, Ministry of Law, Government of India. Cases ADM Jubbalpur ...
Eleven papers are presented which evolved from a seminar held in New Delhi, India, from 9-12 Apri... more Eleven papers are presented which evolved from a seminar held in New Delhi, India, from 9-12 April 1997 as the culmination of an Economic and Social Research Council-funded Edinburgh University/Indian Council for Forest Research and Education research project on joint ...
Economic and political weekly
Since the publication of Malcolm Feeley’s 1979 classic, The Process is the Punishment, the idea t... more Since the publication of Malcolm Feeley’s 1979 classic, The Process is the Punishment, the idea that improved adjudicative processes necessarily lead to an increase in substantive justice has been questioned. In more recent work, Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency (2003) has argued that colonial legality in particular, relied on rules and laws as a form of rule. Post colonial legal systems, like that of India, are notorious for the costs they impose on those participating in the system, primarily but not only litigants, in terms of fees, delays, the alien nature of legal norms, or the unwillingness of the executive to implement court orders which go against them. This burden falls disproportionately on the poor. Paradoxically, however, there is an increasing juridification of social and political issues, with a range of disadvantaged groups resorting to the courts, asking for some right or protesting against some violation. This paper explores this paradox of increasing ...
Economic and political weekly
Economic and political weekly
Economic and political weekly
The Journal of Asian Studies, 1999
... Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10625/14427\. T... more ... Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10625/14427. Title: Dam and the nation : displacement and resettlement in the Narmada Valley. ...
Economic and Political Weekly, 2001
Development and Change, 2024
From the mid-20th century onwards, diverse groups-whether formerly enslaved populations or victim... more From the mid-20th century onwards, diverse groups-whether formerly enslaved populations or victims of mass atrocities-have demanded reparations as part of a wider struggle for justice. However, in the current global climate of right-wing resurgence, both the recognition of victimhood and demands for justice are in danger of being subverted and hijacked. These developments create additional obstacles to addressing genuine reparations demands. This manifests in at least three ways. First, there is a selective application of victimhood status and recognition, often along old fault lines of race or religion. In this way, the oppression of some groups is no longer recognized as a legitimate object of reparations; indeed, their claims to justice are seen as unfair demands against dominant groups. Second, we see the blatant continuation of the very practices that the reparations movement has sought to establish as wrongs. Third, not content with negating existing demands for reparations from below, powerful groups are going a step further and, as part of supremacist projects, asserting their own right to reparations. In doing this, they use the language and moral claims of reparations and decolonization that have emerged through the global reparations movement. This article seeks to illustrate these developments through the examples of India and Israel, including the demand for 'restoration' of sacred sites to Hindus and Jews. I am very grateful to Andrew Fischer, Ndongo Samba Sylla, Sreerekha Sathi and Annina Kaltenbrunner for their detailed comments and help in revising this article. It's a rare privilege to have such engaged editors. I am also grateful to all the participants in the Development and Change workshop on 'The Political Economy of Global Reparations in the 21st Century' (28-29 September 2023) for a stimulating discussion. And as always, I thank Siddharth Varadarajan for his intellectual and editorial help.
Journal of Right Wing Studies, 2023
Twenty-first-century elected right-wing regimes share many similarities apart from being led by "... more Twenty-first-century elected right-wing regimes share many similarities apart from being led by "authoritarian populists" who centralize power in themselves and represent ethnic or religious majorities at the expense of other citizens. Since higher judiciaries are key to ensuring executive accountability and the separation of powers in a liberal democratic constitutional setup, they are on the front lines of authoritarian attempts at institutional capture. Unlike earlier dictatorships that suspended existing constitutional protections or imposed martial law, current authoritarian regimes maintain a semblance of legality and constitutionalism while in practice attempting to remake the judiciary in their own image. This phenomenon has been variously termed "autocratic legalism," "abusive constitutionalism," and "populist constitutionalism." In this article, I look at how the Indian Supreme Court (SC) has responded to executive incursions under the Narendra Modi regime since 2014. Even today, the court continues to deliver important democracy-enhancing judgments, breaking away from India's colonial inheritance in matters like criminalizing same-sex relationships and adultery. However, the last decade is strongly marked by two features: first, an unwillingness to hear major constitutional issues that might challenge the regime; and second, judgments that serve as an advertorial for the regime, reinforcing an antiminority ideological orientation, justifying the government's actions, and promoting Modi's personality cult. By outsourcing several political decisions to a seemingly disinterested and neutral judiciary, the Modi government has been far more successful than it would have been if it had imposed those decisions purely by legislative majority. In turn, by addressing a variety of political issues as purely procedural matters and not addressing them as constitutional questions, the courts have collaborated in the delegitimization of dissent and reinforced the claims of the Modi regime.
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2023
The framing of the Indian Constitution (1946-50) was a pivotal moment in the history of indigenou... more The framing of the Indian Constitution (1946-50) was a pivotal moment in the history of indigenous communities (colloquially adivasis, officially scheduled tribes) and their relationship with the state. This essay makes three interventions. First, I contest the prevailing emphasis in Indian history and sociology on seeing indigenous politics as primarily in opposition to state institutions and laws. Instead, drawing on representations from indigenous organisations to the Constituent Assembly (CA), I highlight an earlier trajectory of engagement with law-making and state institutions. Second, I show how tribes saw the making of the constitution as an opportunity to be recognised as both equal citizens and distinct communities and offered real alternatives in constitutional design and ideas of democracy. What is particularly interesting is how, despite the different constitutional histories of countries with indigenous populations, there is common core to the demand for ‘constitutional recognition’ involving cultural, political and resource autonomy. Third, through a close reading of CA and committee deliberations, I show how personalities, processes and contingencies and not abstract rational deliberations alone shaped constitutional design. Here, I add to the literature locating the ‘force of law’ in the procedural movement of files.
On May 3, 2017, the police picked up Hadiyam Hadma,1 a former village headman and human rights ac... more On May 3, 2017, the police picked up Hadiyam Hadma,1 a former village headman and human rights activist, near his village. Initially, the police denied holding him in their custody, forcing his wife to file a writ of habeas corpus in the Chhattisgarh High Court. The police then held a press conference in which Hadma was made to " confess " to participating in an attack by cadres of the Communist Party of India (CPI) (Maoist) (henceforth the Maoists)2 on security forces a few weeks earlier, in which twenty-five government paramilitary soldiers had been killed. Hadma was taken to the High Court under heavy police escort. After he had been hung upside down for days, blindfolded, and shot at, it was scarcely surprising that he told the Court he had voluntarily " surrendered " and come to the police for protection. Hadma is now in indefinite police custody. Like Hadma, hundreds of ordinary villagers across central India caught up in the conflict between the state and Maoists have been shown as having " surrendered. " Despite repeated reports in the media exposing the surrenders as fake,3 the practice goes on. Staged surrenders help the police avoid opprobrium for mass arrests, fudge the rehabilitation money offered under the state's surrender policy, adopt carrot and stick policies with villagers to induce compliance (they are told they can go home after surrendering so long as they cooperate with the police), and divide insurgent village communities. If " surrenders " are the seemingly benign face of counterinsurgency, democracy plays the same role at a larger level, where the " choice " exercised in an election is used to delegitimize other kinds of non-electoral choices, including which political party or ideology to support and how to live. This article examines the aporias of democracy, drawing on Derrida's aporias of justice.4 For Derrida, legal indeterminacy constitutes the aporetic aspect of justice: once a case is decided it either revalidates the existing rule, or establishes a new rule, but at the moment of deciding or delivering justice it is neither just nor unjust. Going further back, just as in its founding moment law is neither legal nor illegal for Derrida, democracy in its founding moment is neither democratic nor undemocratic, especially insofar as it also brings together and binds the entity in whose name it rules.5 The same paradox underlies state violence, law, and democracy, starting with Hobbes's argument that the state's monopoly on violence is legitimate because it enables people to live in security, and thus enables democracy; it underlies as well Benjamin's distinction between law making and law preserving violence.6 It is in moments when it claims to represent the ruled that the political system most
This article explores the way in which the Indian state and the incipient Maoist state in central... more This article explores the way in which the Indian state and the incipient Maoist state in central India mimic while repudiating each other. As against theories of sovereignty which see it either as authored from below (contract theory) or scripted from above (domination), or irrelevant to the extent that subject and state are co-constituted by regimes of power (cf. Foucault), I argue that in civil war, the display and practical exercise of statehood and sovereignty is critical. However, this is primarily aimed not at putative citizens but at the enemy. I look at the way in which the Indian state impersonates guerilla tactics in order to fight the Maoists, and the way in which the Maoists mimic state practices of governmentality. Each side identifies its own ‘citizens’ through uniforms, lists of people killed, and inscribes its ‘territory’ with memorials to its martyrs. For the presumed citizens of these mimetic states, however, it is precisely these markers of identity and legibility which make them more vulnerable. Membership of parallel regimes holds out both promise and precarity.
Economic and Political Weekly, Jan 23, 2010
Civil Wars in South Asia: State, Sovereignty, Development, 2000
Economic and Political Weekly, Dec 22, 2001
Economic and Political Weekly, Apr 17, 2004
Economic and Political Weekly, Aug 8, 1998
References Dhavan, Rajiv and Jacob Alice (1978): Selection and Appointment of Supreme Court Judge... more References Dhavan, Rajiv and Jacob Alice (1978): Selection and Appointment of Supreme Court Judges, Tripathi. Griffith, JAG (1977): Politics of the Judiciary, Fontana/Collins. Law Commission of India (1958): 14th Report, Ministry of Law, Government of India. Cases ADM Jubbalpur ...
Eleven papers are presented which evolved from a seminar held in New Delhi, India, from 9-12 Apri... more Eleven papers are presented which evolved from a seminar held in New Delhi, India, from 9-12 April 1997 as the culmination of an Economic and Social Research Council-funded Edinburgh University/Indian Council for Forest Research and Education research project on joint ...
Economic and political weekly
Since the publication of Malcolm Feeley’s 1979 classic, The Process is the Punishment, the idea t... more Since the publication of Malcolm Feeley’s 1979 classic, The Process is the Punishment, the idea that improved adjudicative processes necessarily lead to an increase in substantive justice has been questioned. In more recent work, Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency (2003) has argued that colonial legality in particular, relied on rules and laws as a form of rule. Post colonial legal systems, like that of India, are notorious for the costs they impose on those participating in the system, primarily but not only litigants, in terms of fees, delays, the alien nature of legal norms, or the unwillingness of the executive to implement court orders which go against them. This burden falls disproportionately on the poor. Paradoxically, however, there is an increasing juridification of social and political issues, with a range of disadvantaged groups resorting to the courts, asking for some right or protesting against some violation. This paper explores this paradox of increasing ...
Economic and political weekly
Economic and political weekly
Economic and political weekly
The Journal of Asian Studies, 1999
... Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10625/14427\. T... more ... Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10625/14427. Title: Dam and the nation : displacement and resettlement in the Narmada Valley. ...
Economic and Political Weekly, 2001
Indian Economic and Social History Review, 1996
Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2000
Contributions To Indian Sociology, 2000
Contributions To Indian Sociology, 2000
Journal of Genocide Research, 2012
Transforming Anthropology, 2007
Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject by Saba Mahmood. Princeton, NJ, a... more Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject by Saba Mahmood. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press, 2005. xvii. 233 pp. (Cloth US$55.00; Paper US$17.95)
The Indian Government has repeatedly described Maoist guerillas as the ‘biggest security threat t... more The Indian Government has repeatedly described Maoist guerillas as the ‘biggest security threat to the country’, and Bastar in central India as the headquarters of the Maoists. This book examines what these labels have meant for some of India’s poorest citizens living through armed conflict, starting from 2005 when a government sponsored vigilante movement killed hundreds and drove thousands of villagers into camps to 2015-16 when nearly 200,000 paramilitary forces are slated to move in. It is not coincidental that Bastar has some of India’s biggest mineral reserves.
Based on extensive field visits, court testimonies, government documents, and an active participant role in the events that she writes about, Sundar tracks Indian democracy over a decade, chronicling the responses of political parties, the media, human rights activists and the judiciary to the ongoing crisis.