Anuj Bhuwania

The Indian higher judiciary has acquired an increasingly important role in India’s public discourse in the last few decades. The Supreme Court and the state High Courts have emerged as enormously powerful judicial institutions in the aftermath of the Internal Emergency of 1975-77. The principal means through which these judicial powers have been mobilized and enacted is the jurisdiction of Public Interest Litigation (PIL). This book studies the political role that PIL has come to play in contemporary India. It revisits the circumstances and manoeuvres that led to the rise of PIL and traces its political journey since then, arguing that the enormous powers that PIL confers upon the appellate judiciary stems from its populist character.

Based on empirical research, it shows how PIL grants the appellate courts enormous flexibility in procedure allowing them to manoeuvre themselves into positions of overweening authority. It focuses on the most intensive laboratory of PIL in recent times, the city of Delhi, and foregrounds the role that PIL has played in the radical reconfiguration of the city in the 21st century. While PIL cases are usually politically analysed solely in terms of their effects, whether beneficial or disastrous, this book locates the political challenges that PIL poses in its very process: arguing that its fundamentally protean nature stems from its mimicry of ideas of popular justice.

Courting the People examines PIL as part of a larger trend towards legal informalism in post-Emergency India. Casting a critical eye at these institutional reforms that aimed to adapt the colonial legal inheritance to ‘Indian realities’, this book looks at the challenges posed by self-consciously culturalist juridicial innovations like PIL to ideas of fairness in adjudication as well as democratic politics.

In the first decade of the 21st century, the Delhi High Court presided over the most comprehensive and ruthless slum removal campaign that the city had seen in a generation. In this paper, I examine how the procedural departures made possible by India’s unique Public Interest Litigation (PIL) jurisdiction enabled
it to function as a slum demolition machine. While much of the critique of the Indian appellate courts’ interventions in urban governance has focused on its ideological predilections relying principally on a dissection of judgments, I argue that
such discursive analysis serves only a limited purpose in helping us understand this phenomenon. I contend, on the other hand, that to understand this phenomenon of the court-led remaking of the city in its materiality, the procedural departures of
Public Interest Litigation, which the Delhi High Court took to its limit in this period, have to be understood and foregrounded.

This article studies the politics of Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in contemporary India. PIL is a unique jurisdiction initiated by the Indian Supreme Court in the aftermath of the Emergency of 1975-77. I locate the history of PIL in India’s postcolonial predicament, arguing that a constitutional framework that mandated a statist agenda of social transformation provided the conditions of possibility for PIL to emerge. The enormous powers of PIL stem from its populist character, which allows the appellate courts great flexibility in being able to manoeuvre themselves into positions of overweening authority. With little or no procedure to regulate it, it is increasingly difficult to locate PIL within the conventional rubric of adjudicatory practice. With fundamental departures from legal norms that further empower the courts, the essay argues that PIL has emerged as the vanishing point of jurisprudence. The judicial populism of PIL allows for a radical instability that continually pushes the limits of what a court can do.

Surinder Jodhka brings new perspectives to the scholarship on caste and helps understand how this social institution has evolved and transformed itself in modernizing India. By empirically looking at the lived reality of caste, he reveals to what extent it is a constitutive element of everyday politics.

By passing orders not grounded in the law or meaningful relief, the Supreme Court transformed the migrant-workers issue from a widespread violation of citizens’ rights—for which the government is directly responsible—into an amorphous humanitarian tragedy