Podcasts about Constituent assembly

Today, “left” and “right” are the main labels we use to categorise political views, but their origins go back over two centuries. To understand, we have to go back to the French Revolution in 1789. That spring, France's King Louis XVI convened a meeting known as the Estates General, bringing together representatives from three groups, or “Estates”: the clergy, the nobility, and the Third Estate, which represented the common people. A few months later, in July, this assembly became the Constituent Assembly. Where did it all begin? Are there other kinds of political oppositions besides left and right? In under 3 minutes, we answer your questions! To listen to the last episodes, you can click here: ⁠What is the European Political Community, the continent's intergovernmental organization?⁠ ⁠Who are the Moonies, the church with ties to Japanese politicians?⁠ ⁠Which swing states could decide the US election result?⁠ A podcast written and realised by Amber Minogue. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The story of the Indian National Movement is often told from the accounts of great leaders like Gandhi, Nehru or Patel. However, India's freedom struggle was a great cause that had attracted many young and bright minds of India at the time—Sarojini Naidu, Asaf Ali, Syed Hossain, and friends. The shared cause built many friendships—some survived the test of time, some did not; but their personal exchanges draw a vivid picture of the freedom struggle. इतिहास अक्सर राजा या बड़े नेताओं के नज़रिये से लिखा जाता है। लेकिन आज का एपिसोड नायकों की कहानी नहीं, बल्कि सह-नायकों की कहानी पर आधारित है। ये ऐसे लोग हैं जो भारत की आजादी की लड़ाई में मुख्य नेता नहीं थें, पर वे अपने आप में महत्वपूर्ण किरदार ज़रूर थें। हमारे मेहमान एम्बेसडर टी.सी.ए. राघवन जी अपनी किताब Circles of Freedom में इन सहनायकों की बातचीत और दोस्ती के ज़रिये 1913 से 1947 के समय पर कुछ प्रकाश डालते हैं। एम्बेसडर टी.सी.ए. राघवन सिंगापुर और पाकिस्तान में भारत के हाई कमिश्नर रह चुके हैं ।पुलियाबाज़ी पर आजादी की राह सीरीज़ पर हम उन्नीसवीं सदी की शुरुआत से लेकर भारत की आजादी तक के भारत को समझने की कोशिश करते हैं। आज की पुलियाबाज़ी इस सीरीज में एक और कड़ी है।We discuss:* Introducing the circle of friends* Sarojini, the Boss-woman* Asaf Ali and friends' thoughts on Nationalism* The importance of Khilafat movement for elite muslims* Mass movements and communal tensions* Moderates to Radicals* Was separate electorate the original sin?* What did the friends think about a separate nation?* Opposing ideas of the national movement* Ideas about Pakistan* The impact of partition* Aruna and Asaf Ali's marriagePuliyabaazi is now available on Youtube with video.Read:Circles Of Freedom :Friendship, Love And Loyalty in the Indian National Struggle by T.C.A. RaghavanThe People Next Door: The Curious History of India-Pakistan Relations by T.C.A. RaghavanWe welcome articles/blogs/experiences from our readers and listeners. If you are interested in getting your writing featured on Puliyabaazi, please send us your submissions at puliyabaazi@gmail.com. Check out this article for submission guidelines.More in Azaadi ki Raah series:1857 की लड़ाई का आँखों देखा हाल. An Eyewitness Account of the 1857 War.आज़ादी की राह: मैसूरु 1799 से 1947 तक। Mysore State during the British Rule ft. Siddharth Rajaभारतीय संविधान कैसे बना? Unpacking the Workings of Constituent Assembly ft. Achyut ChetanIf you have any questions for the guest or feedback for us, please comment here or write to us at puliyabaazi@gmail.com. If you like our work, please subscribe and share this Puliyabaazi with your friends, family and colleagues.Website: https://puliyabaazi.inGuest: @tca_raghavanHosts: @saurabhchandra @pranaykotas @thescribblebeeTwitter: @puliyabaaziInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/puliyabaazi/Subscribe & listen to the podcast on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Castbox, AudioBoom, YouTube, Spotify or any other podcast app. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.puliyabaazi.in

This lecture by Madhavan K. Palat, Secretary of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund and editor of the forthcoming comprehensive online edition of the Nehru Archives, explores the complex and often paradoxical dimensions of Nehru's engagement with democracy. Nehru presented himself as a liberal and a socialist. Yet, while he did not explicitly identify as a conservative, he frequently employed Burkean and traditionalist arguments to legitimize Indian democracy. At the same time, he repeatedly warned that democracy risked self-destruction through the emergence of a democratic dictatorship or the tyranny of the majority. Palat examines how Nehru derived the ethos of democracy from traditional panchayats and 19th-century nationalist movements, asserting that democracy had become the yugadharma—the defining moral order—after Independence. Nehru insisted that democracy had to be dynamic, propelled by movements but grounded in stable institutions. When conflicts inevitably arose between these two forces, he consistently prioritized movement, seeing it as a continuation of nationalist mobilization, while institutions embodied the legacy of the Constituent Assembly and its Constitution. Yet, Nehru never saw the Constitution as a sacred text. Democracy, he believed, could only be safeguarded through democratic practice, not constitutional rigidity—a stance that effectively repudiated the idea of a “Basic Structure” doctrine. Seeking to deepen democracy, Nehru championed Panchayati Raj, arguing that democracy required a broad, pyramid-like foundation to prevent its collapse. However, as Palat highlights, Nehru's vision was fraught with ambiguities. He viewed panchayats as both democratic and bureaucratic extensions, expressed dismay over the rise of opportunists in the electoral system, and feared that democracy was breeding an elective aristocracy and oligarchy. Nehru lamented the absence of a two-party system in India but keenly observed an ideological dichotomy between Congress and Hindutva, presciently suggesting that these ideologies could evolve into distinct parties. While Nehru valued moral ideals, his inspirations—Buddha, Ashoka, Akbar, and Gandhi—were not unequivocal democrats. Gandhi, though a democratic mobilizer, was autocratic in his methods. Nehru himself emerged as the most consistent symbol of democratic idealism but rejected the notion of a personality cult as vulgar and absurd. Palat's lecture delves into Nehru's ambivalence towards democracy: he despised its tendency to favor mediocrity yet feared that inspiration and charisma often led to right-wing politics, which he deplored. Nehru's political philosophy lay in reconciling contradictions and embracing ambiguities, favoring the pragmatism of a conservative over the ideological rigidity of a socialist. By drawing on his extensive work with the Nehru Archives, Palat offers fresh insights into Nehru's thought and legacy, portraying him as a leader navigating the complex interplay of ideals and realities with remarkable dexterity, even as he remained a figure defined by paradoxes and inconsistencies. Presented by: National Law School Of India University, Bangalore   In this episode of BIC Talks, Madhvan K Palat will deliver a talk. This is an excerpt from a conversation that took place in the BIC premises in January 2025. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favorite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast, Audible, and Amazon Music.

In the aftermath of the parliament's vote to abolish the Qajar dynasty, Reza Khan and his team lay the groundwork for his ascension to the throne and his official coronation as the new king. The post Book Two – Ep.2: Constituent Assembly appeared first on The Lion and The Sun Podcast.

UCC was debated more in the Constituent Assembly than in Uttarakhand. Why it's a problem

This is the Catchup on 3 Things by The Indian Express and I'm Flora Swain.Today is the 26th of November and here are the headlines.75 Years of the Indian ConstitutionOn Tuesday, President Droupadi Murmu and Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankhar marked 75 years of the Indian Constitution's adoption. President Murmu quoted Dr Rajendra Prasad, highlighting that the Constitution's success depends on how it's implemented. Vice-President Dhankhar reminded Parliamentarians of Dr B R Ambedkar's warning to prioritize the nation over party interests. Murmu praised the Constituent Assembly's efforts, noting how its deliberations shaped India's unity. She acknowledged key figures like Dr Prasad, Ambedkar, and B N Rau, calling the Constitution the country's 'holiest text.'India's Concern Over Arrest in BangladeshIndia expressed deep concern over the arrest of Hindu leader Krishna Das Prabhu in Bangladesh on Tuesday. Prabhu, a prominent member of ISKCON and the Bangladesh Sammilito Sanatan Jagaran Jote group, was detained at Dhaka airport, facing charges of sedition after leading a rally in Chattogram. He's accused of disrespecting Bangladesh's national flag. India urged the Bangladeshi government to ensure the safety of Hindus and all minorities in the country, calling for Prabhu's immediate release.Maharashtra Government ResignationMaharashtra CM Eknath Shinde resigned on Tuesday, marking the end of the 14th Assembly's term. Shinde, along with deputy CMs Fadnavis and Pawar, met Governor C P Radhakrishnan at Raj Bhawan. As caretaker CM, Shinde will oversee the formation of a new government. The BJP-led Mahayuti coalition won a clear mandate in the Assembly elections, securing 230 out of 288 seats. Ajit Pawar was also elected leader of the NCP, setting the stage for key decisions in the coming days.Violent Protests in PakistanIn Pakistan, violent protests erupted on Tuesday after supporters of jailed former PM Imran Khan clashed with security forces. Six people were killed, including four paramilitary personnel, and over 100 injured. The protests, calling for Khan's release, spiraled out of control, prompting the government to deploy the army in Islamabad. With 'shoot at sight' orders in place, the nationwide demonstrations, led by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf supporters, have challenged Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif's government, showing no signs of abating.World Chess Championship: Game 2In the World Chess Championship, Gukesh and Ding Liren faced off in Game 2 on Tuesday after Ding claimed victory in the first game. Gukesh, playing with black pieces, started strong in the first game but faltered in the middle, ultimately resigning after 42 moves. Ding now leads 1-0 in this best-of-14 series. In Game 2, Gukesh faces a 30-minute time disadvantage as Ding picks up the pace, leaving his chair for strategic consultations. The race to 7.5 points continues.This was the Catch Up on 3 Things by The Indian Express.

Today, “left” and “right” are the main labels we use to categorise political views, but their origins go back over two centuries. To understand, we have to go back to the French Revolution in 1789. That spring, France's King Louis XVI convened a meeting known as the Estates General, bringing together representatives from three groups, or “Estates”: the clergy, the nobility, and the Third Estate, which represented the common people. A few months later, in July, this assembly became the Constituent Assembly. Where did it all begin? Are there other kinds of political oppositions besides left and right? In under 3 minutes, we answer your questions! To listen to the last episodes, you can click here: What is the European Political Community, the continent's intergovernmental organization? Who are the Moonies, the church with ties to Japanese politicians? Which swing states could decide the US election result? A podcast written and realised by Amber Minogue. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

स्वतंत्रता दिवस के अवसर पर ‘आज़ादी की राह' के इस ख़ास एपिसोड पर हम समझते हैं हमारे संविधान सभा के कामकाज के बारे में। संविधान सभा का गठन कैसे हुआ? सभा में निर्णय कैसे लिए जाते थे? बाबासाहेब आंबेडकर ने संविधान सभा में क्या भूमिका निभाई? क्या हमारे संविधान को एक कोलोनियल संविधान कहा जा सकता है? इन सब दिलचस्प सवालों पर विस्तार से चर्चा प्रोफेसर अच्युत चेतन के साथ। On this Independence Day special, we dive into the inner workings of the Constituent Assembly with Prof. Achyut Chetan. We explore the historical backdrop against which the Constituent Assembly was formed. We unpack the decision-making processes and the key contests and compromises in the Assembly, and discuss the provocative question of whether our constitution bears a colonial influence. Join us in this conversation to understand why studying the making of the Indian Constitution is not just an academic exercise but a crucial key to appreciating the essence of our democratic framework.Prof. Achyut Chetan is Professor of English at Sido Kanhu Murmu University, and author of Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic. We discuss:* The historical context in which the Constituent Assembly was formed* Representation in the Constituent Assembly* Role of Dr. Ambedkar* Decision making in the Constituent Assembly* Can our Constitution be called colonial?* Key contests and compromises* Why we should study the making of the ConstitutionMore in Azaadi ki Raah series:आज़ादी की राह #4: चलो याद करें संविधान की महिला रचयिताओं को। Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic ft. Achyut Chetanआज़ादी की राह #3: स्वदेशी बनाम खुले व्यापार की १५० साल पुरानी बहस। Historical Debate on Swadeshi vs Free Tradeआज़ादी की राह #2: मैसूरु 1799 से 1947 तक। Mysore State during the British Rule Ft. Siddharth Rajaआज़ादी की राह #1: भारत के सटीक नक़्शे कैसे बनें? The Himalayan task of mapping IndiaIf you have any questions for the guest or feedback for us, please comment here or write to us at puliyabaazi@gmail.com. If you like our work, please subscribe and share this Puliyabaazi with your friends, family and colleagues.Website: https://puliyabaazi.inHosts: @saurabhchandra @pranaykotas @thescribblebeeGuest: @achyutchetanTwitter: @puliyabaazi Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/puliyabaazi/Subscribe & listen to the podcast on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Castbox, AudioBoom, YouTube, Spotify or any other podcast app. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.puliyabaazi.in

Minendra Rijal is a distinguished former member of the Nepali Congress party's Central Working Committee, who served as the Minister of Information and Communications during Sushil Koirala's prime ministership. Elected to parliament from Morang-2 in the 2017 elections, he played a key role in developing the mixed electoral system that enhanced social and gender diversity in the Constituent Assembly. In this episode, he shares his insights on the free market, the political and economic turmoil in Nepal, and discusses the nation's economy in depth.

In celebration of Earth Day, Ellina Yin speaks with Mari Margil about climate solutions happening around the world and how we can bring some of them home. This episode is from our unreleased archives and was originally recorded March of 2022. Mari Margil is the Executive Director of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER).  She works with civil society, governments, as well as Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities in the U.S., Ecuador, the Philippines, Nepal, and elsewhere, to advance Rights of Nature frameworks. She consulted with Ecuador's Constituent Assembly, helping to draft the world's first Rights of Nature constitutional provisions in 2008. Margil received her Master's degree from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and is a co-author of The Bottom Line or Public Health, Exploring Wild Law: The Philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence, and Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change. Her writing has also been featured in publications including The Guardian, YES! Magazine, Earth Island Journal, Mongabay, Democracy Journal, World Policy Journal, and Common Dreams, and her work has been featured in the New York Times, and The New Yorker.  Episode Notes: Public Comment Remix by mias Santa Clara County Reid-Hillview Airport Study The New Constitution Project Democracy in the United States Orange County Florida Charter Amendment Update --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/onlyinsj/message

Chilean writer and activist Pablo Abufom spoke at UCLA on February 23, 2024 about how the October 2019 social revolt in Chile propelled Gabriel Boric to power, created a Constituent Assembly to write a new Constitution, but was then defeated, with reactionary neo-fascist forces now ascendant. Pablo Abufom was deeply involved in the social protest movement of October 2019, and has been on this podcast many times to discuss and analyze the revolt, the failure of the constitutional process, and the demobilizing effects of the pandemic.In this talk, Pablo attempts to explain larger political and social phenomena on a global scale from the Latin American experience. Why did the wave of revolts between 2018 and 2020 fail to go further, and what accounts for the rise of neo-fascism everywhere, most recently in Argentina?Pablo asks what can we learn from the Latin American revolts of the last five years and admits it is a tragic question; we ask it after being defeated or at least after the revolts were paralyzed by the power of ruling elites amid Covid-19. Cesar Bowey Castillo adds to the discussion with his analysis of the 2021 Colombian uprising, looking at how the various fragments of the working class and urban poor mobilized there. Suzi comments on Pablo's understanding of how the struggle for a dignified life moved people into the streets spontaneously, what did or did not emerge in terms of organizational forms, and how he sees that perennial, historical question of leadership and political mediation.Jacobin Radio with Suzi Weissman features conversations with leading thinkers and activists, with a focus on labor, the economy, and protest movements. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Surendra Pandey and Maya Gurung made history as Nepal's first legally married same-sex couple, marking a significant milestone as the first in South Asia to officially record a same-sex marriage. Sunil Babu Pant, the founder of Nepal's pioneering LGBT organization ‘The Blue Diamond Society', a monk, human rights activist, has also served as a former member of the Constituent Assembly.

After the Storming of the Bastille, the French Revolution shifts into high gear. The Constituent Assembly quickly abolishes feudal reforms and promotes the foundation of a new government with a document: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. 1790 is a quieter year, but under the surface, divisions harden as the Paris political clubs metamorphosize into modern political parties. Meanwhile, the Assembly faces unexpected backlash when it passes the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, a law that converts all Catholic clergy into civil servants employed by the state. All of this culminates in the famous Flight to Varennes, an ill-fated attempt by the royal family to escape France altogether. The consequences for France – and for humanity – are yet to be seen. Dan's interview with Ro Martin on the Stoned Genius podcast: https://spotify.link/wZdJiSEY4Db SUBSCRIBE TO RELEVANT HISTORY, AND NEVER MISS AN EPISODE! Relevant History Patreon: https://bit.ly/3vLeSpF Subscribe on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/38bzOvo Subscribe on Apple Music (iTunes): https://apple.co/2SQnw4q Subscribe on Any Platform: https://bit.ly/RelHistSub   Relevant History on Twitter/X: https://bit.ly/3eRhdtk Relevant History on Facebook: https://bit.ly/2Qk05mm Official website: https://bit.ly/3btvha4 Episode transcript (90% accurate): https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRO_5dI2Ubxpe-wJOFRnZbWesgwAVzm_uIbxLho0pZOaHtm24okuTMexhjNIBmc5DUxBTZxka3qbMOY/pub Music credit: Sergey Cheremisinov - Black Swan

On Wednesday, 20 September this year, Nepal's current constitution completed eight years since its promulgation, the first under a Constituent Assembly. Nepal correspondent Ganesh Acharya spoke to Constitutional law expert Doctor Bipin Adhikari about the country's present and future in politics. - यो वर्ष बुधवार, २० सेप्टेम्बरको संविधान दिवससँगै नेपालको वर्तमान मूल कानूनले आठ वर्ष पूरा गरेको छ। संविधान सभा मार्फत पहिलो पटक बनाइएको उक्त संविधान बारे पछिल्लो समयमा टीका टिप्पणी भइरहँदा, नेपालमा "नेतृत्वको चुनौती" रहेको संविधानविद् तथा काठमाडौँ विश्वविद्यालयका प्राध्यापक डाक्टर बिपिन अधिकारीले बताएका छन्। सङ्घीयता र संशोधन लगायत दोहोरो नागरिकताका विषयमा डाक्टर अधिकारीले नेपाल संवाददाता गणेश आचार्यसँग गरेको कुराकानी सुन्नुहोस्।

While G20 dinner invite in the name of ‘President of Bharat' has triggered row, Centre had earlier asserted in court that ‘there is no change in circumstances to consider any change in Article 1'.

Bishnu Prasad Rimal is the Deputy General Secretary of CPN-UML. He is the former member of Constituent Assembly and has become Chief Advisor to the PM twice.

In this episode, we delve into the era of Crown Rule in India, spanning from 1858 to 1947, a period that ushered in profound changes and ultimately led to India's independence. Starting after the 1857 revolt when the British government assumed direct control over India, we explore key acts and events that shaped this transformative era. We begin with the Government of India Act of 1858, which abolished the British East India Company's rule and vested authority directly with the British government. This act introduced the title of Viceroy of India, with Lord Canning becoming the first Viceroy. The Board of Control and Court of Directors were dissolved, and the Secretary of State for India took charge of Indian administration. A Council of India was formed to assist the Secretary of State. Next, we examine the Indian Councils Act of 1861, aiming to increase Indian representation in legislative councils. The act empowered the Viceroy to nominate Indians as non-official members in the expanded council. Legislative powers were decentralized, and new legislative councils were established. The Portfolio system allowed the Viceroy to issue ordinances in emergencies. Continuing the pursuit of greater Indian representation, the Indian Councils Act of 1892 further empowered non-official members in legislative councils. The councils gained the authority to discuss budgets and address questions to the executive. The pivotal Indian Councils Act of 1909, known as the Morley-Minto Reforms, aimed to enhance Indian involvement in the legislative process. It increased the number of members in the Central Legislative Council and introduced communal representation, providing separate electorates for Muslims. The Government of India Act of 1919, known as the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, brought significant changes to the Indian political system. Central and Provincial subjects were separated, introducing bicameralism and direct elections. The franchise was granted based on property, tax, or education, and Indians were associated with the executive councils. However, elected members' role remained advisory, and oppressive measures stifled Indian voices. The Government of India Act of 1935 marked a crucial step towards Indian self-governance. It established an All India Federation and introduced provincial autonomy and dyarchy at the Centre. The franchise was extended, and new institutions were created. Despite its significance, the act fell short in guaranteeing citizens' rights. The Indian Independence Act of 1947 marked the end of British rule in India and granted independence to India and Pakistan as separate dominions. It empowered the Constituent Assemblies to frame their constitutions. The title of Viceroy was dropped, and India became an independent and sovereign state. The culmination of these acts and events shaped India's destiny, leading to the end of British rule and the beginning of India's independence. The Constituent Assembly evolved into the Parliament of Independent India, shaping the nation's course. The act allowed princely states to choose between joining either dominion or becoming independent, curbing secession tendencies and unifying the nation. In conclusion, the period of Crown Rule in India was a transformative chapter in Indian history, marked by struggles, reforms, and ultimately the realization of India's long-awaited freedom from British colonial rule. #UPSC #IASprep #civilserviceexam #IASexamination #IASaspirants #UPSCjourney #IASexam #civilservice #IASgoals #UPSC2022 #IAS2022 #civilservant #IAScoaching #UPSCmotivation #IASmotivation #UPSCpreparation #IASpreparation #UPSCguide #IASguide #UPSCtips #IAStips #UPSCbooks #IASbooks #UPSCexamstrategy #IASexamstrategy #UPSCmentorship #IASmentorship #UPSCcommunity #IAScommunity #UPSCpreparation #IASpreparation #UPSCguide #IASguide #UPSCtips #IAStips #UPSCbooks #IASbooks #UPSCexamstrategy #IASexamstrategy #UPSCmentorship #IASmentorship #UPSCcommunity #IAScommunity --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theiascompanion/message

संविधान के बारे में बात करते वक़्त हम अक्सर भूल जाते है कि भारत की संविधान सभा में कई औरतें भी शामिल थि जिन्होंने हमारे संविधान की रचना में एक महत्वपूर्ण योगदान दिया था।  इस हफ़्ते की पुलियाबाज़ी में हमारी कोशिश रही कि हम उन महिलाओं के योगदान को समझें और याद करें।  आज की पुलियाबाज़ी पर हमारे साथ जुड़ते है प्रोफेसर अच्युत चेतन जिन्होंने इस विषय पर अपना संशोधन किया है। प्रोफेसर अच्युत चेतन को सुनते वक़्त हम तो बेहद मंत्रमुग्ध हो चुके थे, ज़रूर ही ये बातचीत आपको भी दिलचस्प लगेगी।   The women in India's Constituent Assembly had played an important role in shaping our Constitution. However, their contribution has often been ignored or forgotten over the years. This Puliyabaazi is our attempt to remember them and understand the role that they had played in framing our Constitution. On this week's Puliyabaazi, we talk to Prof. Achyut Chetan who has extensively researched this topic for his book ‘Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic'. Do listen to this very important conversation. We were spellbound by the knowledge and nuance with which Prof. Achyut explained the topic. We hope that you will find it insightful too.  **** Further Reading  ***** Prof. Achyut Chetan's Book:  Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic: Gender Politics of the Framing of the Constitution  https://amzn.eu/d/d2IVwjv Articles on this topic  https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/our-founding-mothers-how-women-contributed-to-constitution-building-8478240/ Constitution Assembly Debates  https://www.constitutionofindia.net/ *** More Puliyabaazi ***** संविधान सभा में महिलाओं का योगदान। Women in the Constituent Assembly https://youtu.be/k8NRVb2eP1s नारीवादी आंदोलन। The many waves of Feminism https://youtu.be/GX_roJzhCRU क्या भारतीय संविधान विशिष्ट वर्ग के लिए है? Is the Indian Constitution elitist?  https://youtu.be/2HSA25HpMOY*****************Website: https://puliyabaazi.in Write to us at puliyabaazi@gmail.com  Hosts: @saurabhchandra @pranaykotas @thescribblebee  Puliyabaazi is on these platforms: Twitter: @puliyabaazi  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/puliyabaazi/ Subscribe & listen to the podcast on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Castbox, AudioBoom, YouTube, Spotify or any other podcast app.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Democracy in Question? is brought to you by:• Central European University: CEU• The Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: AHCD• The Podcast Company: Novel Follow us on social media!• Central European University: @CEU• Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: @AHDCentreSubscribe to the show. If you enjoyed what you listened to, you can support us by leaving a review and sharing our podcast in your networks!  DiQ S6 EP7Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani on Israel: Democracy on the DefensiveGlossaryWhat is the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition?(02:11 or p.1 in the transcript)The Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition is a social movement on the party and outside the parliamentary system, whose goal is to influence the public agenda, with the intention of bringing about a comprehensive change of Israeli society and its various institutions. The initiative to establish the movement came from second and third generation men and women of the Jews of Arab and Eastern countries. They come from all parts of the country and represent different levels of Israeli society. The active nucleus of the movement includes academics, workers, businessmen, clerks, teachers, artists and intellectuals, community activists, students, social and cultural organizations, residents of towns, townships, and neighborhoods. The Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow was founded in March 1996 by 40 women and men. In December 1996, following a series of discussions, the movement was formally established by 100 members, who constituted the Constituent Assembly. Since then, this body has expanded and it functions as the council of the movement, in which the fundamental decisions binding the movement are made. At the founding conference, the secretariat of the movement, which operates under the decisions of the movement's council, was appointed. In addition, the Committee of the Spokespersons and the Audit Committee was elected. All officials were elected in secret elections and committed to equal representation of women and men in all elected institutions of the movement. It was decided that the elections for all institutions of the movement would be held once a year. source What was the February 26, 2023 Hawara pogrom?(05:24 or p.2 in the transcript)Following the murder of two Israeli brothers in the West Bank on Feb. 26, 2023, a mob of around 400 Israelis attacked the Palestinian town of Hawara. They torched dozens of homes and cars, leaving one dead and hundreds wounded before being stopped by Israeli security forces. Though some government leaders – including the head of the parliament's National Security Committee – praised the mob or called for the state itself to erase the town's existence, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned them for “taking the law into their own hands.” Others – including the top Israeli military commander Major General Yehuda Fuchs in the West Bank – used even stronger language, calling the attack a “pogrom,” as did a statement against the attack by the Israeli Historical Society, signed by some of Israel's most renowned historians. According to historian John Klier, a pogrom is “an outbreak of mass violence directed against a minority religious, ethnic or social group [that] usually implies central instigation and control, or at minimum the passivity of local authorities.” source Who was Meir Kahane?(06:08 or p.2 in the transcript)Meir Kahane was an American-born Israeli political extremist and rabbi who campaigned for self-protection of Jews. Kahane joined a paramilitary, right-wing youth movement in 1946. He was ordained an Orthodox rabbi in 1957 after studies at Mirrer Yeshiva in New York. In 1968 he formed the militant Jewish Defense League (JDL), attracted followers with the post-Holocaust slogan “Never Again,” and sent armed patrols of young Jews into Black neighborhoods. After being imprisoned for conspiring to make bombs, Kahane moved to Israel in 1971. There Kahane formed the Kach Party and stirred nationalist fervor against Arabs, whom he campaigned to remove (violently, if necessary) from Israel and all Israeli-occupied areas. He won a seat in the Israeli Knesset (parliament) in 1984, but his term ended when Israel banned the Kach Party for its antidemocratic and racist beliefs. Back in New York, Kahane was shot to death by a naturalized American of Egyptian descent. source What was the 2014 Gaza War?(08:17 or p.3 in the transcript)On July 8, 2014, Israel launched a large-scale military operation using aerial and naval firepower against a variety of targets associated with Hamas and other militant groups. After more than a week of bombardment failed to halt the rocket attacks, Israeli land forces entered the Gaza Strip on a mission to destroy tunnels and other elements of the militants' infrastructure. Israel withdrew its land forces from the Gaza Strip in early August, declaring that their mission had been fulfilled. Israeli air strikes continued, as did rocket and mortar attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip. In late August, after nearly two months of fighting, Israeli and Palestinian leaders reached an open-ended cease-fire. In exchange for Palestinian adherence to the cease-fire, Israel agreed to allow more goods into the Gaza Strip, to expand the fishing zone off the coast of the Gaza Strip from 3 to 6 miles (5 to 10 km), and to enforce a narrower security buffer in the areas adjacent to the Israeli border. Overall, the conflict was one of the deadliest between Israelis and Palestinians: 70 Israelis and more than 2,100 Palestinians were killed in the fighting. sourceWhat was the 1967 Six-Day War?(30:15 or p.7 in the transcript)Six-Day War, also called June WarorThird Arab-Israeli WarorNaksah was brief war that took place June 5–10, 1967, and was the third of the Arab-Israeli wars. Israel's decisive victory included the capture of the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, Old City of Jerusalem, and Golan Heights; the status of these territories subsequently became a major point of contention in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Six-Day War also marked the start of a new phase in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians since the conflict created hundreds of thousands of refugees and brought more than one million Palestinians in the occupied territories under Israeli rule. Months after the war, in November, the United Nations passed UN Resolution 242, which called for Israel's withdrawal from the territories it had captured in the war in exchange for lasting peace. That resolution became the basis for diplomatic efforts between Israel and its neighbors, including the Camp David Accords with Egypt and the push for a two-state solution with the Palestinians. source

इस महिला दिवस के मौके पर हम बात करते है हमारी संविधान सभा में महिलाओं के योगदान पर। हमारी संविधान सभा में १५ महिलाएं भी शामिल थीं, पर इस विषय पर ज़्यादा बातें नहीं होतीं।  तो इस हफ़्ते हमारी कोशिश रही की हम इस विषय पर चर्चा करें।  तो आप भी शामिल हो जाइये इस पुलियाबाज़ी में।   On the occasion of Women's day, we discuss the contribution of the eminent women who were a part of India's Constituent Assembly. What were the issues that they focused on? What were their stance on many debates that took place in the Constituent Assembly. Do listen in.  #IWD2023 #WomensDay #Constitution  #India  For More: Constitution Assembly Debates https://www.constitutionofindia.net/ Article | Our founding mothers: How women contributed to Constitution building https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/our-founding-mothers-how-women-contributed-to-constitution-building-8478240/ Puliyabaazi playlist on Ambedkar: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRvXciEh5eJ3bmkdKPvYgt9_8w-3J8-n_&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE Write to us at puliyabaazi@gmail.com  Hosts: @saurabhchandra @pranaykotas @thescribblebee  Puliyabaazi is on these platforms: Twitter: @puliyabaazi  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/puliyabaazi/ Subscribe & listen to the podcast on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Castbox, AudioBoom, YouTube, Spotify or any other podcast app.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

EP. Br#007 This episode is part of PEI's coverage of the 2022 General Elections. For our pre-election analyses, please read our policy brief and/or listen to EP. BR#005 - The Brief: Anurag Acharya and Avinash Karna on Inclusion, Coalitions, and the Power Dynamics behind General Elections 2022 As the results of the 2022 General Elections slowly trickle in, there are some interesting trends that are taking shape. To begin with, the voter turnout, reported to be 61 percent by the Election Commission of Nepal, has been lower than those from earlier elections, which analysts are taking as a signal that more people may be beginning to tune out from this democratic process. Number-wise, the initial results indicate that while the Nepali Congress will secure the largest number of seats, the UML has been able to hold its ground in second place. Perhaps the most unexpected outcome is the better-than-expected performance of the Rastriya Swatantra Party, an entity formed only several months before the elections. What is clear, however, is that the end result of this election is a hung parliament, leaving a lot of room for horsetrading among the political parties at the expense of stability and good governance. In today's episode, PEI colleague Saurab Lama sits with noted political commentator Bishnu Sapkota to discuss the significance of the 2022 elections, the low voter turnout, the early results, and the implications for the political parties. The two discuss the better-than-expected performance of the Rastriya Swatantra Party and also of the pre-election movements such as the #nonotagain. The two end on the topic of a hung parliament and its implications for the future of policymaking in Nepal. Bishnu Sapkota is a noted columnist and political commentator. He taught at Nepal's Tribhuvan University for nearly a decade prior to getting into international development work. He managed a national dialogue program called Nepal Transition to Peace (NTTP) during Nepal's crucial phases of Maoist insurgency through the 2006 People's Movement, ensuing ethnic upheavals, the Constituent Assembly, and finally promulgation of the new constitution in 2015. The NTTP forum was an inclusive national dialogue platform by major political parties, government, and civil society. He led UNDP/Nepal's Conflict Prevention Program between 2014-2015. He is currently based in Cambodia with an international organization, working in the sector of democracy and governance. Mr. Sapkota is also affiliated as an Asia Fellow to the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, USA. Over the past decade, he has given talks and presentations on Nepal's peace process experiences at a number of international conferences and platforms.

In 2020, Chilean voters demanded a new constitution to replace the one written in 1980 under the military dictatorship.  But in 2022, Chilean voters rejected the new constitution drafted by political independents elected to a  gender-balanced and indigenous-inclusive assembly.  Why? What was in the constitution that many described as the most progressive constitution written to date?  And what does the vote say about the prospects for constitutional reform in Chile and beyond?Samuel Issacharoff is Bonnie and Richard Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU School of law and the author of Fragile Democracies: Contested Power in the Era of Constitutional Courts (2015). His research ranges from civil procedure to American and comparative constitutional law. He is one of the pioneers in the law of the political process, and is a co-author of the Law of Democracy casebook.Sergio Verdugo is an Assistant Professor of Law at the IE Law School in Spain, where he teaches Constitutional Law and Human Rights Law. He is also an Editor of the International Journal of Constitutional Law (ICON) and the Secretary General of the International Society of Public Law (ICON-S). Before joining the IE University, he was the Director of the Center for Constitutional Justice of the Universidad del Desarrollo School of Law, Chile. Camila Vergara is a critical legal theorist, historian, and journalist from Chile and author of Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic.She is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Cambridge.  Her writings about social movements and the constitutional process in Chile have appeared in New Left Review and Jacobin. Read Sergio's post on I-Connect Blog, The Paradox of Constitution-Making in Democratic SettingsRead Camila's article in New Left Review, Chile's Rejection.Read the proposed new constitution for Chile. 

Meaning of the term Constituent Assembly

Chitranshul Sinha is an advocate on record of the Supreme Court of India and a partner in Dua Associates, Advocates and Solicitors, who primarily practises in the courts of New Delhi. He occasionally writes articles for leading publications on topics related to law. The Indian Penal Code was formulated in 1860, three years after the first Indian revolt for independence. It was the country's first-ever codification of offences and penalties. But it was only in 1870 that Section 124A was slipped into Chapter VI ('Of Offences against the State'), defining the offence of 'Sedition' in a statute for the first time in the history of common law. When India became independent in 1947, the Constituent Assembly expressed strong reservations against sedition as a restriction on free speech as it had been used as a weapon against freedom fighters, many of whom were a part of the Assembly. Nehru vocally opposed it. And yet, not only has Section 124A survived, it has been widely used against popular movements and individuals speaking up against the establishment. Where did this law come from? How did it evolve? And what place does it have in a mature democracy? Concise, incisive and thoughtful, The Great Repression: The Story of Sedition in India (India VIking, 2019) by Chitranshul Sinha tells the story of this outdated colonial-era law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Chitranshul Sinha is an advocate on record of the Supreme Court of India and a partner in Dua Associates, Advocates and Solicitors, who primarily practises in the courts of New Delhi. He occasionally writes articles for leading publications on topics related to law. The Indian Penal Code was formulated in 1860, three years after the first Indian revolt for independence. It was the country's first-ever codification of offences and penalties. But it was only in 1870 that Section 124A was slipped into Chapter VI ('Of Offences against the State'), defining the offence of 'Sedition' in a statute for the first time in the history of common law. When India became independent in 1947, the Constituent Assembly expressed strong reservations against sedition as a restriction on free speech as it had been used as a weapon against freedom fighters, many of whom were a part of the Assembly. Nehru vocally opposed it. And yet, not only has Section 124A survived, it has been widely used against popular movements and individuals speaking up against the establishment. Where did this law come from? How did it evolve? And what place does it have in a mature democracy? Concise, incisive and thoughtful, The Great Repression: The Story of Sedition in India (India VIking, 2019) by Chitranshul Sinha tells the story of this outdated colonial-era law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Chitranshul Sinha is an advocate on record of the Supreme Court of India and a partner in Dua Associates, Advocates and Solicitors, who primarily practises in the courts of New Delhi. He occasionally writes articles for leading publications on topics related to law. The Indian Penal Code was formulated in 1860, three years after the first Indian revolt for independence. It was the country's first-ever codification of offences and penalties. But it was only in 1870 that Section 124A was slipped into Chapter VI ('Of Offences against the State'), defining the offence of 'Sedition' in a statute for the first time in the history of common law. When India became independent in 1947, the Constituent Assembly expressed strong reservations against sedition as a restriction on free speech as it had been used as a weapon against freedom fighters, many of whom were a part of the Assembly. Nehru vocally opposed it. And yet, not only has Section 124A survived, it has been widely used against popular movements and individuals speaking up against the establishment. Where did this law come from? How did it evolve? And what place does it have in a mature democracy? Concise, incisive and thoughtful, The Great Repression: The Story of Sedition in India (India VIking, 2019) by Chitranshul Sinha tells the story of this outdated colonial-era law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Chitranshul Sinha is an advocate on record of the Supreme Court of India and a partner in Dua Associates, Advocates and Solicitors, who primarily practises in the courts of New Delhi. He occasionally writes articles for leading publications on topics related to law. The Indian Penal Code was formulated in 1860, three years after the first Indian revolt for independence. It was the country's first-ever codification of offences and penalties. But it was only in 1870 that Section 124A was slipped into Chapter VI ('Of Offences against the State'), defining the offence of 'Sedition' in a statute for the first time in the history of common law. When India became independent in 1947, the Constituent Assembly expressed strong reservations against sedition as a restriction on free speech as it had been used as a weapon against freedom fighters, many of whom were a part of the Assembly. Nehru vocally opposed it. And yet, not only has Section 124A survived, it has been widely used against popular movements and individuals speaking up against the establishment. Where did this law come from? How did it evolve? And what place does it have in a mature democracy? Concise, incisive and thoughtful, The Great Repression: The Story of Sedition in India (India VIking, 2019) by Chitranshul Sinha tells the story of this outdated colonial-era law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Chitranshul Sinha is an advocate on record of the Supreme Court of India and a partner in Dua Associates, Advocates and Solicitors, who primarily practises in the courts of New Delhi. He occasionally writes articles for leading publications on topics related to law. The Indian Penal Code was formulated in 1860, three years after the first Indian revolt for independence. It was the country's first-ever codification of offences and penalties. But it was only in 1870 that Section 124A was slipped into Chapter VI ('Of Offences against the State'), defining the offence of 'Sedition' in a statute for the first time in the history of common law. When India became independent in 1947, the Constituent Assembly expressed strong reservations against sedition as a restriction on free speech as it had been used as a weapon against freedom fighters, many of whom were a part of the Assembly. Nehru vocally opposed it. And yet, not only has Section 124A survived, it has been widely used against popular movements and individuals speaking up against the establishment. Where did this law come from? How did it evolve? And what place does it have in a mature democracy? Concise, incisive and thoughtful, The Great Repression: The Story of Sedition in India (India VIking, 2019) by Chitranshul Sinha tells the story of this outdated colonial-era law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Chitranshul Sinha is an advocate on record of the Supreme Court of India and a partner in Dua Associates, Advocates and Solicitors, who primarily practises in the courts of New Delhi. He occasionally writes articles for leading publications on topics related to law. The Indian Penal Code was formulated in 1860, three years after the first Indian revolt for independence. It was the country's first-ever codification of offences and penalties. But it was only in 1870 that Section 124A was slipped into Chapter VI ('Of Offences against the State'), defining the offence of 'Sedition' in a statute for the first time in the history of common law. When India became independent in 1947, the Constituent Assembly expressed strong reservations against sedition as a restriction on free speech as it had been used as a weapon against freedom fighters, many of whom were a part of the Assembly. Nehru vocally opposed it. And yet, not only has Section 124A survived, it has been widely used against popular movements and individuals speaking up against the establishment. Where did this law come from? How did it evolve? And what place does it have in a mature democracy? Concise, incisive and thoughtful, The Great Repression: The Story of Sedition in India (India VIking, 2019) by Chitranshul Sinha tells the story of this outdated colonial-era law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rohan J. Alva is a counsel practicing in the Supreme Court of India. He earned his LLM from Harvard Law School, where he focused on constitutional law, which he read for on numerous scholarships including as a Tata Scholar and on a Harvard Law School Scholarship. Prior to starting his counsel practice, he was a professor at Jindal Global Law School, where he was awarded the Excellence in Research Award. He has also been Visiting Faculty at NLSIU, Bengaluru. His writings have been published in internationally respected journals including Statute Law Review (Oxford University Press), and Hong Kong Law Journal. Alva's first book Liberty After Freedom: A History of Article 21, Due Process and the Constitution of India (HarperCollins India, 2022) explores the origins of what is today considered the most important fundamental right in the Indian Constitution - the right to life and personal liberty guaranteed by Article 21. This is the article which in recent years made the right to privacy as well as the decriminalization of homosexuality possible. Without a doubt, Article 21 has had the most outsized influence on the progressive development of rights in India. But the story of how this important right was birthed is deeply controversial and its passage in the Constituent Assembly divided opinion like no other feature of the Constitution. Liberty After Freedom explores the intellectual beginnings of this paramount fundamental right in an attempt to decode and unravel the controversies which raged at the time the Constitution was being crafted. Written in lucid prose and drawing extensively on the Constituent Assembly debates as well as a wide array of scholarly literature, it questions long-held beliefs and sheds new and important light on the fraught history of due process and Article 21. It is an indispensable book for the legal community and for everyone interested in the genesis of the Constitution. Alok Prasanna Kumar is Co-Founder and Lead, Vidhi Karnataka. Sarayu Natarajan is the Founder of Aapti Institute. In the past, she has worked in management consulting and the venture fund industry before the plunge into researching politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Rohan J. Alva is a counsel practicing in the Supreme Court of India. He earned his LLM from Harvard Law School, where he focused on constitutional law, which he read for on numerous scholarships including as a Tata Scholar and on a Harvard Law School Scholarship. Prior to starting his counsel practice, he was a professor at Jindal Global Law School, where he was awarded the Excellence in Research Award. He has also been Visiting Faculty at NLSIU, Bengaluru. His writings have been published in internationally respected journals including Statute Law Review (Oxford University Press), and Hong Kong Law Journal. Alva's first book Liberty After Freedom: A History of Article 21, Due Process and the Constitution of India (HarperCollins India, 2022) explores the origins of what is today considered the most important fundamental right in the Indian Constitution - the right to life and personal liberty guaranteed by Article 21. This is the article which in recent years made the right to privacy as well as the decriminalization of homosexuality possible. Without a doubt, Article 21 has had the most outsized influence on the progressive development of rights in India. But the story of how this important right was birthed is deeply controversial and its passage in the Constituent Assembly divided opinion like no other feature of the Constitution. Liberty After Freedom explores the intellectual beginnings of this paramount fundamental right in an attempt to decode and unravel the controversies which raged at the time the Constitution was being crafted. Written in lucid prose and drawing extensively on the Constituent Assembly debates as well as a wide array of scholarly literature, it questions long-held beliefs and sheds new and important light on the fraught history of due process and Article 21. It is an indispensable book for the legal community and for everyone interested in the genesis of the Constitution. Alok Prasanna Kumar is Co-Founder and Lead, Vidhi Karnataka. Sarayu Natarajan is the Founder of Aapti Institute. In the past, she has worked in management consulting and the venture fund industry before the plunge into researching politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Rohan J. Alva is a counsel practicing in the Supreme Court of India. He earned his LLM from Harvard Law School, where he focused on constitutional law, which he read for on numerous scholarships including as a Tata Scholar and on a Harvard Law School Scholarship. Prior to starting his counsel practice, he was a professor at Jindal Global Law School, where he was awarded the Excellence in Research Award. He has also been Visiting Faculty at NLSIU, Bengaluru. His writings have been published in internationally respected journals including Statute Law Review (Oxford University Press), and Hong Kong Law Journal. Alva's first book Liberty After Freedom: A History of Article 21, Due Process and the Constitution of India (HarperCollins India, 2022) explores the origins of what is today considered the most important fundamental right in the Indian Constitution - the right to life and personal liberty guaranteed by Article 21. This is the article which in recent years made the right to privacy as well as the decriminalization of homosexuality possible. Without a doubt, Article 21 has had the most outsized influence on the progressive development of rights in India. But the story of how this important right was birthed is deeply controversial and its passage in the Constituent Assembly divided opinion like no other feature of the Constitution. Liberty After Freedom explores the intellectual beginnings of this paramount fundamental right in an attempt to decode and unravel the controversies which raged at the time the Constitution was being crafted. Written in lucid prose and drawing extensively on the Constituent Assembly debates as well as a wide array of scholarly literature, it questions long-held beliefs and sheds new and important light on the fraught history of due process and Article 21. It is an indispensable book for the legal community and for everyone interested in the genesis of the Constitution. Alok Prasanna Kumar is Co-Founder and Lead, Vidhi Karnataka. Sarayu Natarajan is the Founder of Aapti Institute. In the past, she has worked in management consulting and the venture fund industry before the plunge into researching politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Rohan J. Alva is a counsel practicing in the Supreme Court of India. He earned his LLM from Harvard Law School, where he focused on constitutional law, which he read for on numerous scholarships including as a Tata Scholar and on a Harvard Law School Scholarship. Prior to starting his counsel practice, he was a professor at Jindal Global Law School, where he was awarded the Excellence in Research Award. He has also been Visiting Faculty at NLSIU, Bengaluru. His writings have been published in internationally respected journals including Statute Law Review (Oxford University Press), and Hong Kong Law Journal. Alva's first book Liberty After Freedom: A History of Article 21, Due Process and the Constitution of India (HarperCollins India, 2022) explores the origins of what is today considered the most important fundamental right in the Indian Constitution - the right to life and personal liberty guaranteed by Article 21. This is the article which in recent years made the right to privacy as well as the decriminalization of homosexuality possible. Without a doubt, Article 21 has had the most outsized influence on the progressive development of rights in India. But the story of how this important right was birthed is deeply controversial and its passage in the Constituent Assembly divided opinion like no other feature of the Constitution. Liberty After Freedom explores the intellectual beginnings of this paramount fundamental right in an attempt to decode and unravel the controversies which raged at the time the Constitution was being crafted. Written in lucid prose and drawing extensively on the Constituent Assembly debates as well as a wide array of scholarly literature, it questions long-held beliefs and sheds new and important light on the fraught history of due process and Article 21. It is an indispensable book for the legal community and for everyone interested in the genesis of the Constitution. Alok Prasanna Kumar is Co-Founder and Lead, Vidhi Karnataka. Sarayu Natarajan is the Founder of Aapti Institute. In the past, she has worked in management consulting and the venture fund industry before the plunge into researching politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Suzi talks to Pablo Abufom and Oscar Mendoza to get their analysis of the monumental defeat in Chile on Sunday, September 4, when Chileans went to the polls to approve or reject a new progressive Constitution, born in response to the massive social protest movement and revolt in October 2019. The demand that grew out of that movement was for a new Constitution to replace the reactionary Pinochet constitution imposed in a fraudulent plebiscite in 1980. A Constituent Assembly was elected, representing the most diverse sectors of the population, specifically excluding the traditional political class. Sadly it was rejected, in fact trounced. Pablo Abufom and Oscar Mendoza each analyze the scope and meaning of the ‘rechazo' or rejection, and look at what happens next.Jacobin Radio with Suzi Weissman features conversations with leading thinkers and activists, with a focus on labor, the economy, protest movements. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this podcast, Kushal speaks with Gautam R. Desiraju about his latest book " Bhārat: India 2.0 ". This book is a detailed journey from the proceedings of the Constituent Assembly to the formulation of the Indian Constitution of 1950 followed up by a number of amendments. What has been the impact of all of this and what are the solutions that one can apply to get over these inherent problems are all discussed in this podcast. Follow Them: Twitter: @GautamDesiraju Book: https://www.amazon.in/dp/9390961157/ #BhāratIndia 2.0 #IndianConstitution ------------------------------------------------------------ Listen to the podcasts on: SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/kushal-mehra-99891819 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1rVcDV3upgVurMVW1wwoBp Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-c%C4%81rv%C4%81ka-podcast/id1445348369 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-carvaka-podcast ------------------------------------------------------------ Support The Cārvāka Podcast: Become a Member on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKPxuul6zSLAfKSsm123Vww/join Become a Member on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/carvaka UPI: kushalmehra@icici To buy The Carvaka Podcast Exclusive Merch please visit: http://kushalmehra.com/shop ------------------------------------------------------------ Follow Kushal: Twitter: https://twitter.com/kushal_mehra?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KushalMehraOfficial/? Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecarvakapodcast/?hl=en Koo: https://www.kooapp.com/profile/kushal_mehra Inquiries: https://kushalmehra.com/ Feedback: kushalmehra81@gmail.com

The Indian Constitution is a result of debates and deliberations by the Constituent Assembly over three years between 1946 to 1959. As a barely formed nation, what were the issues that bothered our leaders and intellectuals and how did they debate these issues. These debates are a reflection of the idea of India as a nation and the country's aspirations  On the occasion of the 75th year of Independence, we at Suno India are releasing a podcast series on the raging Constituent Assembly debates and the Constitution–Contested Nation. It is researched and hosted by the Equals Project. The Equals project is an initiative that helps bring awareness about constitutional history and process by which constitution was written.  In this episode, Suno India's Menaka Rao hosting speaks with Shruti V, the founder of Equals Project.See sunoindia.in/privacy-policy for privacy information.

Happy Independence Day!- Pranay Kotasthane and RSJThis newsletter can often seem pessimistic about India. That isn’t true, though. Every year, on Independence Day, we remind ourselves and our readers why we write this newsletter. This is how we ended the Independence Day edition of 2020:“What we have achieved so far is precious. That’s worth reminding ourselves today. We will go back to writing future editions lamenting our state of affairs.We will do so because we know it’s worth it.”  This year we thought it would be fun (?) to run through every year since 1947 and ask ourselves what happened in the year that had long-term repercussions for our nation. This kind of thing runs a serious risk. It can get tedious and all too familiar. Most of us know the landmark events of recent history and what they meant for the nation. Maybe. Maybe not. We’ve given an honest try (of over 8000 words) to see if there’s a different way of looking at these familiar events and their impact on us. Here we go.1947 - 1960: Sense Of A Beginning 1947Perhaps the most significant “What, if?” question for independent India surfaced on 17th August 1947 when the Radcliffe Line was announced. The partition of the Indian subcontinent has cast a long shadow. What if it had never happened? What if Nehru-Jinnah-Gandhi were able to strike a modus vivendi within a one-federation framework? These questions surface every year around independence.The indelible human tragedy of the partition aside, would an Akhand Bharat have served its citizens better? We don’t think so. We agree with Ambedkar’s assessment of this question. In Pakistan or the Partition of India, he approaches the question with detachment and realism, concluding that the forces of “communal malaise” had progressed to such an extent that resisting a political division would have led to a civil war, making everyone worse off. The partition must have been handled better without the accompanying humanitarian disaster. But on the whole, the partition was inevitable by 1947.“That the Muslim case for Pakistan is founded on sentiment is far from being a matter of weakness; it is really its strong point. It does not need deep understanding of politics to know that the workability of a constitution is not a matter of theory. It is a matter of sentiment. A constitution, like clothes, must suit as well as please. If a constitution does not please, then however perfect it may be, it will not work. To have a constitution which runs counter to the strong sentiments of a determined section is to court disaster if not to invite rebellion.” [Read the entire book here]1948What if Mahatma Gandhi wasn’t killed that year? How would the course of our history change? Gandhi spoke like an idealist and worked like a realist. He was possibly the most aware of the gap between the lofty ideals of our constitution and the reality of the Indian minds then. He knew the adoption of the constitution was only half the work done. He’d likely have devoted the rest of his life to building a liberal India at the grassroots level. His death pushed a particular stream of right-wing Hindu consciousness underground. We still carry the burden of that unfinished work.1949The Constituent Assembly met for the first time in December 1946. By November 26th 1949, this assembly adopted a constitution for India. Even a half-constructed flyover in Koramangala has taken us five years. For more context, Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly began work on 10th August 1947, and their first constitution came into force in March 1956, only to be abrogated two years later. India’s founding fathers and mothers were acutely aware that they were elite, unelected, and unrepresentative of the median Indian. They dared to imagine a new nation-state while grappling with that period's harsh economic, social, and political realities. Their work should inspire us to strengthen, improve, and rebuild—but never to give up on—the Republic of India.For more, check out the miracle that is India’s Constitution in our Republic Day 2021 special edition.1950We have written about our Constitution a number of times. It is an inspiring and audacious document in its ambition to shape a modern nation. It has its flaws. Some consider it too liberal; others think it makes the State overbearing. Some find it too long; others feel it comes up short. This may all be true. However, there is no doubt our constitution has strengthened our democracy, protected the weak and continues to act as a tool for social change. It is our North Star. And a damn good one at that. 1951Few post-independence institutions have stood the test of time as the Finance Commission (FC), first established in 1951. In federal systems, horizontal and vertical imbalances in revenue generation and expenditure functions are commonplace. Closing the gap requires an impartial institution that is well-regarded by various levels of government and the people. The Finance Commission is that institution.It’s not as if it didn’t face any challenges. As a constitutional body established under article 280 of the Constitution, it was sidelined by an extra-constitutional and powerful Planning Commission until 2014. But we have had 15 FCs in total, and each key tax revenue-sharing recommendation has become government policy.1952Our Constitution adopted a universal adult franchise as the basis for elections. Every citizen was to be part of the democratic project. There was to be no bar on age, sex, caste or education. And this was to be done in one of the most unequal societies in the world. The ambition was breathtaking. To put this in context, women were allowed to vote in Switzerland only in 1971. Not only did we aim for this, but we also moved heaven and earth to achieve it in 1952. In his book India After Gandhi, Ram Guha describes the efforts of the government officials led by the first Election Commissioner, Sukumar Sen, to reach the last man or woman for their ballot. The elites may lament vote bank politics or cash for votes scams and question the wisdom of universal franchise. But we shouldn’t have had it any other way. And, for the record, our people have voted with remarkable sophistication in our short independent history. 1953 For a new nation-state, the Republic of India punched above its weight in bringing hostilities on the Korean peninsula to an end. Not only did the Indian government’s work shape the Armistice Agreement, but it also chaired a Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission (NNRC) that was set up to decide the future of nearly 20,000 prisoners of war from both sides. This experience during the Cold War strengthened India’s advocacy of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).  1954Article 25 guaranteed the freedom of conscience and the freedom to profess, practice, and propagate religion to all citizens. But how does one define a religious practice? And can a practice under the garb of religion breach the boundary of individual rights or public morality? This is a familiar conflict zone in secular States and would inevitably show up in India because everything in India can be construed as a religious practice. Like Ambedkar said during the constituent assembly debates:“The religious conceptions in this country are so vast that they cover every aspect of life from birth to death…there is nothing extraordinary in saying that we ought to strive hereafter to limit the definition of religion in such a manner that we shall not extend it beyond beliefs and such rituals as may be connected with ceremonials which are essentially religious..."In 1954, the Supreme Court gave a landmark judgment on what constitutes a religious practice in what’s known as the Shirur Math case. It held that the term religion would cover all practices integral to that religion. Further, the Court will determine what practice will be deemed essential with reference to doctrines within that religion itself.This test of ‘essentiality’ in religion has kept the public, the legislature and the courts busy since (entry of women in Sabarimala, headscarf in Islam, to name two). The outcome has bent towards individual liberty in most contexts, but the ambiguity in the definition of essential means it could go the other way too.1955Another wild "What, if” moment that we like to recall relates to Milton Friedman’s visit to the Indian finance ministry in 1955. What shape would India’s economy have taken had his seminal document “A Memorandum to the Government of India 1955” been heeded?In this note, Friedman gets to the root of India’s macroeconomic problems—an overburdened investment policy, restrictive policies towards the private sector, erratic monetary policy, and a counterproductive exchange control regime. Being bullish about India’s prospects was courageous when most observers wrote epitaphs about the grand Indian experiment. But Friedman was hopeful and critical both.The Indian government, for its part, was humble enough to seek the advice of foreigners from opposing schools of thought. At the same time, it was too enamoured by the Soviet command and control model. In fact, many items from Friedman’s note can be repurposed as economic reforms even today.Here’re our points from Friedman’s note.1956The idea of One Nation, One ‘X’ (language, election, song, tax, choose any other) is both powerful and seductive. It is not new, however. Back in the 50s, there was a view that we must not strengthen any identity that divides us. So when the question of reorganisation of the colonial provinces into new states came up, an argument was made that it must be done on factors other than language. Nehru, ever the modernist, thought the creation of language-based states would lead us down the path of ethnic strife. The example of nation-states in Europe built on language in the 19th century and the two devastating world wars thereafter were too recent then. So, he demurred.Agitation, hunger strikes and deaths followed before we chose language as the primary basis for reorganising the states. It was perhaps the best decision taken by us in the 50s. As the years since have shown, only a polity assured of its heritage and identity will voluntarily accept diversity. The melding of our diversity into a single identity cannot be a top-down imposition. We should never forget this.1957India’s economic strategy of state-led industrialisation through deficit financing in pursuit of import substitution took off with the Second Five-Year Plan. Heavy industries needed imported machinery, inflating India’s import bill. Since the exchange rate was pegged to the British pound, it meant that Indian exports became pricier. This imbalance between rising imports and flagging exports was financed by running down the foreign exchange reserves. By 1957, India witnessed its first foreign exchange crisis. This event had a significant effect on India’s economy. Instead of devaluing the rupee, the government opted for foreign exchange budgeting - every investment in a project needed government approval for the foreign exchange required to buy foreign inputs. The immediate crisis in 1957 led to controls that worsened India’s economic prospects over the next 35 years.1958The government nationalised all insurance companies a couple of years earlier. India hadn’t gotten into a socialist hell yet, so this was a bit of a surprise. The proximate cause was a fraud that few private life insurers had committed by misusing the policyholders’ funds to help their industrialist friends. A run-of-the-mill white-collar crime that should have been dealt with by the criminal justice system. But the government viewed it as a market failure and moved to nationalise the entire industry. It would take another 45 years for private players to come back to insurance. Insurance penetration in India meanwhile remained among the lowest in the world.  Also, in 1958, Feroze Gandhi took to the floor of Lok Sabha to expose how LIC, the state insurer, had diverted its funds to help Haridas Mundhra, a Calcutta-based businessman. The same crime that private insurers had done.The government would repeat this pattern of getting involved where there was no market failure. The outcomes would inevitably turn out to be worse. Seven decades later, we remain instinctively socialist and wary of capital. Our first reaction to something as trifling as a surge price by Ola or a service charge levied by restaurants is to ask the State to interfere.1959“The longest guest of the Indian government”, the 14th Dalai Lama pre-empted the Chinese government’s plans for his arrest and escaped to India. Not only did India provide asylum, but it also became home to more than a hundred thousand Tibetans. Because of the bold move by the Indian government in 1959, the Central Tibetan Administration continues its struggle as a Nation and a State in search of regaining control over their Country to this day. This event also changed India-China relations for the decades to come.1960Search as hard as we might; we hardly got anything worth discussing for this year. Maybe we were all sitting smugly waiting for an avalanche of crisis to come our way. Steel plants, dams and other heavy industries were being opened. The budget outlay for agriculture was reduced. We were talking big on the international stage about peace and non-alignment. But if you had looked closer, things were turning pear-shaped. The many dreams of our independence were turning sour.The 60s: Souring Of The Dream1961The Indian Army marched into Goa in December 1961. The 450-year Portuguese colonial rule ended, and the last colonial vestige in India was eliminated. It took this long because Portugal’s dictator Antonio Salazar stuck to his guns on controlling Portuguese colonies in the subcontinent, unlike the British and the French. Portugal’s membership in NATO further made it difficult for the Indian government to repeat the operations in Hyderabad and Junagadh. Nevertheless, that moment eventually arrived in 1961. This was also the year when India’s first indigenous aircraft, the HAL HF-24 Marut, took its first flight. Made in Bengaluru by German designer Kurt Tank, the aircraft was one of the first fighter jets made outside the developed world. The aircraft served well in the war that came a decade later. It never lived up to its promises, but it became a matter of immense pride and confidence for a young nation-state.1962Among the lowest points in the history of independent India. We’ve written about our relationship with China many times in the past editions. The 1962 war left a deep impact on our psyche. We didn’t recover for the rest of the decade. The only good thing out of it was the tempering of idealism in our approach to international relations. That we take a more realist stance these days owes its origins to the ‘betrayal’ of 1962.1963ISRO launched the first sounding rocket in November 1963. Over the years, this modest beginning blossomed into a programme with multiple launch vehicles. The satellite programmes also took off a few years later, making India a mighty player in the space sector. 1964If you told anyone alive in 1964 that less than 60 years later, Nehru would be blamed for all that was wrong with India by a substantial segment of its population, they would have laughed you out of the room. But here we are in 2022, and there’s never a day that passes without a WhatsApp forward that talks about Nehru’s faults. It seems inevitable that by the time we celebrate the centenary of our independence, he would be a borderline reviled figure in our history. But that would be an aberration. In the long arc of history, he will find his due as a flawed idealist who laid the foundation of modern India. 1964 was the end of an era.1965As the day when Hindi would become the sole official language of the Indian Union approached, the anti-Hindi agitation in the Madras presidency morphed into riots. Many people died in the protests, and it led to the current equilibrium on language policy. The “one State, one language” project moved to the back burner, even as Hindi became an important link language across the country. The lesson was the same as in the case of the 1956 states reorganisation: melding our diversity into a single identity cannot be a top-down imposition.1966The two wars in the decade's first half, the inefficient allocation of capital driven by the second and third five-year plans, and the consecutive monsoon failure meant India was on the brink in 1966. The overnight devaluation of the Rupee by over 50 per cent, the timely help with food grains from the US and some providence pulled us back from it. The green revolution followed, and we have remained self-sufficient in food since.The experience of being on the brink taught us nothing. We still believe in the Pigouvian theory of market failure, where government policies are expected to deliver optimality.  Strangely, the idea that we reform only in crisis has only strengthened. There cannot be worse ways to change oneself than under the shadow of a crisis. But we have made a virtue out of it.1967This was the year when the Green Revolution took baby steps, and the Ehlrichian prediction about India’s impending doom was put to rest. But it was also the year when the Indian government made a self-goal by adopting a policy called items reserved for manufacture exclusively by the small-scale sector. By reserving whole product lines for manufacturing by small industries, this policy kept Indian firms small and uncompetitive. And like all bad ideas, it had a long life. The last 20 items on this list were removed only in April 2015. We wrote about this policy here. 1968In the past 75 years, we have reserved some of our worst public policies for the education sector. We have an inverted pyramid. A handful of tertiary educational institutions produce world-class graduates at the top. On the other end, we have a total failure to provide quality primary education to the masses. It is not because of a lack of intent. The National Education Policy (NEP) that first came up in 1968 is full of ideas, philosophy and a desire to take a long-term view about education in India. But it was unmoored from the economic or social reality of the nation. We often say here that we shouldn’t judge a policy based on its intentions. That there’s no such thing as a good policy but bad implementation because thinking about what can work is part of policy itself. NEP is Exhibit A in favour of this argument.1969 The nationalisation of 14 private-sector banks was a terrible assault on economic freedom under the garb of serving the public interest. The sudden announcement of a change in ownership of these banks was challenged in the courts, but the government managed to thwart it with an ordinance. Fifty years later, we still have low credit uptake even as governments continue to recapitalise loss-making banks with taxpayer money.1970The dominant economic thinking at the beginning of the 70s in India placed the State at the centre of everything. But that wasn’t how the world was moving. There was a serious re-examination of the relationship between the State and the market happening elsewhere. The eventual shift to a deregulated, small government economic model would happen by the decade's end. This shift mostly passed India by. But there were a few voices who questioned the state orthodoxy and, in some ways, sowed the intellectual seeds for liberalisation in future. In 1970, Jagdish Bhagwati and Padma Desai published their monograph, India: Planning for Industrialisation, which argued that our economic policies since independence had crippled us. It showed with data how central planning, import substitution, public sector-led industrial policy and license raj have failed. But it found no takers. In fact, we doubled down on these failed policies for the rest of the decade. It was a tragedy foretold. What if someone had gone against the consensus and paid attention to that paper? That dissent could perhaps have been the greatest service to the nation. It is useful to remember this today when any scepticism about government policies is met with scorn. Dissent is good. The feeblest of the voice might just be right.The 70s: Losing The Plot1971Kissinger visited China in July 1971 via Pakistan. Responding to the changing world order, India and the USSR signed an Indo–Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation in August of that year. India had become an ally of the USSR. Four months later, the India-Pakistan war pitted India and the USSR against Pakistan, China, and the US. The Indian strategic community came to internalise USSR as a super-reliable partner and the West as a supporter of India’s foes. It took another three decades, and the collapse of the USSR, for a change in this thinking. Even today, Russia finds massive support in the Indian strategic establishment. We had problematised this love for Russia here. 1972India won the 1972 war with Pakistan and liberated Bangladesh. India’s unilateral action stopped a humanitarian disaster. The victory was decisive, and the two parties met in Simla to agree on the way forward. This should have been a slam dunk for India in resolving festering issues on the international boundary, Kashmir and the role of the third parties. But international diplomacy is a two-level game, and Bhutto played that to his advantage. We explained this in edition 30. We paid a high price for giving away that win to Bhutto.1973The Kesavananda Bharti verdict of the Supreme Court rescued the Republic of India from a rampaging authoritarian. The basic structure doctrine found a nice balance to resolve the tension between constitutional immutability and legislative authority to amend the constitution. Bibhu Pani discussed this case in more detail here. 1974You are the State. Here are your crimes. You force import substitution, you regulate the currency, you misallocate capital, you let the public sector and a handful of licensed private players produce inferior quality products at a high cost, you raise the marginal tax rate at the highest level to 97 per cent, you run a large current account deficit, and you cannot control Rupee depreciation.Result?People find illegal ways to bring in foreign goods, currency and gold. And so was born the villain of every urban Bollywood film of the 70s. And a career option for a capitalist-minded kid like me. The Smuggler.But the State isn’t the criminal here. The smuggler is. And the State responded with a draconian law to beat all others. An act the knowledge of whose expanded form would serve kids well in those school quizzes of the 80s. COFEPOSA — The Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Act. A predatory state's defining feature is how it forces ordinary citizens to do unlawful activities. COFEPOSA was the mother of such laws. It has spawned many children. 1975This blank editorial by the Indian Express says it all. 1976We view our population as a core problem. The politicians, the public servants and the ordinary citizens share this view. We don’t want to acknowledge our governance deficit. Calling population a problem allows us to shirk the responsibility of running a functioning State. We have written about the flaw in thinking about the population as a problem on many occasions.How far could we go to control the population? Well, in 1976, during the peak of the Emergency, the State decided to sterilise male citizens against their wishes. This madness ended when the Emergency was lifted. But even today calls for population control keep coming back. 1977The first non-Congress union government was an important milestone for the Indian Republic. While Morarji Desai’s government did reverse the worst excesses of the Emergency rule, its economic policies were less successful. This period went on to witness a demonetisation in search of black money (2016 from the future says Hi!), and the same old counter-productive policies in search of self-reliance.1978Despite all available evidence that statist socialism was an abject failure, the Janata government that came to power decided to double down on it. One of the great ideas of the time was to force MNCs to reduce their stake in their Indian subsidiaries to below 40 per cent. A handful agreed, but the large corporations quit India. One of those who left was IBM in 1978. The many existing installations of IBM computers needed services and maintenance. In a delightful case of unintended consequences, this led to the nationalisation of IBM’s services division (later called CMC). Domestic companies started to serve this niche. Soon there were the likes of Infosys, Wipro and HCL building a business on this. CMC provided a good training ground for young engineers. And so, the Indian IT services industry got underway. It would change the lives of educated Indians forever.1979In a classic case of violating the Tinbergen rule, the Mandal Commission recommended that the reservation policy should be used to address relative deprivation. While the earlier reservations for oppressed castes stood on firm ground as a means for addressing unconscionable historical wrongs, the Mandal Commission stretched the logic too far. Its recommendation would eventually make reservation policy the go-to solution for any group that could flex its political muscles. We wrote about it here. 1980After ditching the Janata experiment and running out of ideas to keep Jan Sangh going, the BJP was formed. It wasn’t a momentous political occasion of any sort then. A party constitution that aimed for Gandhian socialism and offered vague promises of a uniform civil code and nationalism didn’t excite many. Everything else that would propel the party in later years was to be opportunistic add-ons to the ideology. The founding leaders, Advani and Vajpayee, would have been shocked if you told them what the party would be like, four decades later.The 80s: A Million Mutinies Now1981This year witnessed a gradual shift away from doctrinaire socialism in economic policymaking. “The Indira Gandhi government lifted restrictions on the expansion of production, permitted new private borrowing abroad, and continued the liberalisation of import controls,” wrote Walter Anderson. The government also “allowed” some price rises, leading to increased production of key input materials. The government also permitted foreign companies to compete in drilling rights in India. All in all, a year that witnessed changes for the better. 1982The great textile strike of Bombay in 1982 was inevitable. The trade unions had gotten so powerful that there was a competitive race to the bottom on who could be more militant. Datta Samant emerged intent on breaking the monopoly of RMMS on the city's workers. And he did this with ever spiralling demands from mill owners in a sector that was already bloated with overheads and facing competition from far eastern economies. There was no way to meet these demands. The owners locked the mills and left. Never to come back. The old, abandoned mills remained. The workers remained. Without jobs, without prospects and with kids who grew up angry and unemployed. The rise of Shiv Sena, political goondaism and a malevolent form of underworld followed. Bombay changed forever. It was all inevitable.1983The Nellie massacre in Assam and the Dhilwan bus massacre in Punjab represent the year 1983. Things seemed really dark back then. It seemed that the doomsayers would be proved right about India. Eventually, though, the Indian Republic prevailed. 1984Her Sikh bodyguards assassinated India Gandhi. The botched Punjab policy of the previous five years came a full circle with it. An unforgivable backlash against innocent Sikhs followed. A month later, deadly gas leaked out of a Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, killing and paralysing thousands. 1984 will rank among the worst years of our republic. There were two silver linings in retrospect. One, we would learn to manage secessionist movements better from the harrowing Punjab experience. Two, had Indira continued, would we have had 1991? Our guess is no.1985This was an eventful year in retrospect. Texas Instruments set up shop in Bangalore. It was to begin one of modern India’s true success stories on the world stage. This was also the year when the Anti-defection law transformed the relationship between the voter and her representative. Political parties became all-powerful, and people’s representatives were reduced to political party agents. We have written about this changing dynamic here. This was also the year when the then commerce minister, VP Singh, visited Malaysia. The visit was significant for India because it served as a reference point for Singh when he visited that country again in 1990, now as the Prime minister. Surprised by Malaysia’s transformation in five years, he asked his team to prepare a strategy paper for economic reforms. This culminated in the “M” document, which became a blueprint for reforms when the time for the idea eventually came in 1991.1986Who is a citizen of India?  This vexing question roiled Assam in the early 80s. The student union protests against the widespread immigration of Bangladeshis turned violent, and things had turned ugly by 1985. The Assam accord of 1985 sought to settle the state's outstanding issues,, including deporting those who arrived after 1971 and a promise to amend the Citizenship Act. The amended Citizenship Act of 1986 restricted the citizenship of India to those born before 1987 only if either of their parents were born in India. That meant children of couples who were illegal immigrants couldn’t be citizens of India simply by virtue of their birth in India. That was that, or so we thought.But once you’ve amended the definition of who can be a citizen of India, you have let the genie out. The events of 2019 will attest to that.1987Rajiv Gandhi’s ill-fated attempt to replicate Indira Gandhi’s success through military intervention in another country began in 1987. In contrast to the 1971 involvement, where Indian forces had the mass support of the local populace, the Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF) got itself embroiled in a bitter Sri Lankan civil war. Not only did this involvement end in a failure, it eventually led to Rajiv Gandhi’s brutal murder in a terrorist attack. The policy lesson internalised by the strategic community was that India must stay far away from developing and deploying forces overseas.1988Most government communication is propaganda in disguise. However, there are those rare occasions when government messaging transcends the ordinary. In 1988, we saw that rare bird during the peak era of a single government channel running on millions of black and white TV sets across India. A government ad that meant something to all of us and that would remain with us forever. Mile Sur Mera Tumhara got everything right - the song, the singers, the storyline and that ineffable thing called the idea of India. No jingoism, no chest beating about being the best country in the world and no soppy sentimentalism. Just a simple message - we might all sing our own tunes, but we are better together. This is a timeless truth. No nation in history has become better by muting the voice of a section of their own people. Mile Sur Mera Tumhara, Toh Sur Bane Hamara, indeed.  19891989 will be remembered as the year when the Indian government capitulated to the demands of Kashmiri terrorists in the Rubaiya Sayeed abduction case. It would spark off a series of kidnappings and act as a shot in the arm of radicals. 1990VP Singh dusted off the decade-long copy of the Mandal Commission report and decided to implement it. This wasn’t an ideological revolution. It was naked political opportunism. However, three decades later, the dual impact of economic reforms and social engineering has increased social mobility than ever before. Merit is still a matter of debate in India. But two generations of affirmative action in many of the progressive states have shown the fears of merit being compromised were overblown. The task is far from finished, but Mandal showed that sometimes you need a big bang to get things going, even if your intentions were flawed.1990 also saw the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits (KPs) from the valley. A tragedy that would bookend a decade of strife and violence in India. The only lesson one should draw from the sad plight of KPs is that the State and the people must protect minority rights. We’re not sure that’s what we have taken away from it. And that’s sad.The 90s: Correcting The Course1991With the benefit of hindsight, the 1991 economic reforms seem inevitable. But things could well have been different. In the minority government, powerful voices advocated in favour of debt restructuring instead of wholesale reforms. In the end, the narrative that these changes were merely a continuation—and not abandonment—of Nehru and Indira Gandhi’s vision for India carried the day. This political chicanery deserves some credit for transforming the life of a billion Indians. 1992Harshad Mehta scammed the stock markets. It wasn’t a huge scam. Nor did it hurt the ordinary Indians. Fewer than 1% invested in markets back then. Yet, the scam did something important. It set in motion a series of reforms that made our capital markets stronger and safer for ordinary investors. Notably, over the years, Mehta came to be seen as some kind of robber baron figure. Capitalism needed an anti-hero to catch the imagination of people. Someone who could reprise in the 90s the Bachchan-esque angry young man roles of the 70s. Mehta might not have been that figure exactly, but he helped a generation transition to the idea that greed could indeed be good.Also, Babri Masjid was brought down by a mob of kar sevaks in 1992. It will remain a watershed moment in our history. The Supreme Court judgement of 2019 might be the final judicial word on it. But we will carry the scars for a long time.1993The tremors of the demolition of the Babri Masjid were felt in 1993. Twelve bombs went off in Bombay on one fateful day. The involvement of the city’s mafia groups was established. The tragic event finally led to the government rescuing the city from the underworld. Not to forget, the Bombay underworld directly resulted from government policies such as prohibition and gold controls. 1994One of the great acts of perversion in our democracy was the blatant abuse of Section 356 of the constitution that allowed the union to dismiss a state government at the slightest pretext. Indira Gandhi turned this into an art form. S. R. Bommai, whose government in Karnataka was dismissed in this manner in 1988, took his case up to the Supreme Court. In 1994, the court delivered a verdict that laid out the guidelines to prevent the abuse of Section 356. It is one of the landmark judgments of the court and restored some parity in Union and state relationship.Article 356 has been used sparingly since. We are a better democracy because of it.1995India joined the WTO, and the first-ever mobile phone call was made this year. But 1995 will forever be remembered as the year when Ganesha idols started drinking milk. This event was a precursor to the many memes, information cascades, and social proofs that have become routine in the information age. 1996Union budgets in India are occasions for dramatic policy announcements. It is a mystery why a regular exercise of presenting the government's accounts should become a policy event. But that’s the way we roll. In 1996 and 1997, P. Chidambaram presented them as the FM of a weak ragtag coalition called the United Front. But he presented two budgets for the ages. The rationalisation of income tax slabs and the deregulation of interest rates created a credit culture that led to the eventual consumption boom in the next decade. We still carry that consumption momentum.1997The creation of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is an important public policy milestone for India. By no means perfect, the setting up of TRAI helped overturn a norm where government departments were both players and umpires. TRAI made the separation of “steering” and “rowing” functions a new normal. That template has been copied in several sectors thereafter, most recently in the liberalisation of the space sector. 1998India did Pokhran 2, which gave it the capability to build thermonuclear weapons. We faced sanctions and global condemnation. But the growing economy and a sizeable middle class meant those were soon forgotten. Economic might can let you get away with a lot. We have seen it happen to us, but it is a lesson we don’t understand fully.Also, in 1998, Sonia Gandhi jumped into active politics. The Congress that was ambling towards some sort of internal democracy decided to jettison it all and threw its weight behind the dynasty. It worked out for them for a decade or so. But where are they now? Here’s a question. What if Sonia didn’t join politics then? Congress might have split. But who knows, maybe those splinters might have coalesced in the future with a leader chosen by the workers. And we would have had a proper opposition today with a credible leader.1999This was a landmark year for public policy. For the first time, a union government-run company was privatised wholly. We wrote about the three narratives of disinvestment here. 2000We have a weak, extended and over-centralised state. And to go with it, we have large, unwieldy states and districts that make the devolution of power difficult. In 2000, we created three new states to facilitate administrative convenience. On balance, it has worked well. Despite the evidence, we have managed to create only one more state since. The formation of Telangana was such a political disaster that it will take a long time before we make the right policy move of having smaller states. It is a pity.The 2000s: The Best Of Times2001Not only was the Agra Summit between Musharraf and Vajpayee a dud, but it was followed by a terrorist attack on the Indian parliament. It confirmed a pattern: PM-level bilateral meetings made the Pakistani military-jihadi complex jittery, and it invariably managed to spike such moves with terrorist attacks. 2002There was Godhra and the riots that followed. What else is there to say?2003The Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management (FRBM) Act and the Civil Services Pension Reform are two policy successes with many lessons for future policymakers. We have discussed these on many occasions. 2004The NDA government called for an early election, confident about its prospects. India Shining, its campaign about how good things were, wasn’t too far from the truth. It is how many of us felt during that time. The NDA government had sustained the reform momentum of the 90s with some of the best minds running the key departments. Its loss was unexpected. Chandrababu Naidu, a politician who fashioned himself like a CEO, was taken to the cleaners in Andhra Pradesh. Apparently, economic reforms didn’t get you votes. The real India living in villages was angry at being left out. That was the lesson for politicians from 2004. Or, so we were told.Such broad narratives with minimal factual analysis backing them have flourished in the public policy space. There is no basis for them. The loss of NDA in 2004 came down to two states. Anti-incumbency in Andhra Pradesh where a resurgent Congress under YS Reddy beat TDP, a constituent of NDA. TDP lost by similar margins (in vote share %) across the state in all demographics in both rural and urban areas. There was no rural uprising against Naidu because of his tech-savvy, urban reformist image. Naidu lost because the other party ran a better campaign. Nothing else. The other mistake of the NDA was in choosing to partner with the ruling AIADMK in Tamil Nadu (TN) over DMK. TN was famous for not giving split verdicts. It swung to extremes between these two parties in every election. And that’s what happened as AIADMK drew a blank.Yet, the false lesson of 2004 has played on the minds of politicians since. We haven’t gotten back on track on reforms in the true sense. 2005The Right to Information Act and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act came into force in 2005. The “right to X” model of governance took root.2006In March 2006, George W Bush visited India and signed the Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement with Manmohan Singh. From facing sanctions in 1998 for Pokhran 2 to the 123 Agreement, this was a victory for Indian diplomacy and its rising status in the world. You would think this would have had bipartisan support among the political class in India. Well, the Left that was part of UPA and the BJP that worked on the deal when it was in power, opposed it. Many shenanigans later, the deal was passed in the parliament in 2008. It is often said there’s no real ideological divide among parties in India. This view can be contested on various grounds. But events like the opposition to the nuclear deal make you wonder if there are genuine ideological positions on key policy issues in India. Many sound policy decisions are opposed merely for the sake of it. Ideology doesn’t figure anywhere. 2007It was the year when the Left parties were out-lefted. In Singur and Nandigram, protests erupted over land acquisition for industrial projects. The crucible of the resulting violence created a new political force. As for the investment, the capital took a flight to other places. The tax on capital ended up being a tax on labour. Businesses stayed away from West Bengal. The citadel of Left turned into its mausoleum.2008Puja Mehra in her book The Lost Decade traces the origin of India losing its way following the global financial crisis to the Mumbai terror attack of 2008. Shivraj Patil, the home minister, quit following the attack and Chidambaram was shifted from finance to fill in. For reasons unknown, Pranab Mukherjee, a politician steeped in the 70s-style-Indira-Gandhi socialism, was made the FM. Mehra makes a compelling case of how that one decision stalled reforms, increased deficit and led to runaway inflation over the next three years. Till Chidambaram was brought back to get the house in order, it was too late, and we were halfway into a lost decade. It is remarkable how bad policies always seem easy to implement while good policies take ages to get off the blocks.2009The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) was established in January 2009 to architect a unique digital identity for persons in a country where low rates of death and birth registrations made fake and duplicate identities a means for corruption and denial of service. Under the Modi government, the digital identity — Aadhaar — became the fulcrum of several government services. This project also set the stage for later projects such as the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Abha (Health ID).2010There’s petty corruption everywhere in India. It is pervasive. Not surprisingly, it is one political issue leading to mass movements in India. The anti-corruption mood gripped India in 2010 on the back of the 2G spectrum scam, where the chief accountant of the government claimed a notional loss of about Rs. 1.8 trillion to the exchequer. Auctioning of natural resources wasn’t exactly a transparent process then. It was evident there was a scam in the allotment of the 2G spectrum. But the 1.8 trillion number was a wild exaggeration that anyone with a semblance of business understanding could see through. It didn’t matter. That number caught the imagination. UPA 2 never recovered from it. More importantly, the auction policy for resources was distorted forever. We still suffer the consequences.The 2010s: Missed Opportunity2011India’s last case of wild poliovirus was detected in 2011. Until about the early 1990s, an average of 500 to 1000 children got paralysed daily in India. The original target for eradication was the year 2000. Nevertheless, we got there eleven years later. India’s pulse polio campaign has since become a source of confidence for public policy execution in India. We internalised the lesson that the Indian government can sometimes deliver through mission mode projects. 2012If you cannot solve a vexing public policy issue, turn it into a Right. It won’t work, but it will seem like you’ve done everything. After years of trying to get the national education policy right, the government decided it was best to make education a fundamental right in the Constitution. Maybe that will make the problem go away. A decade later, nothing has changed, but we have an additional right to feel good about.2013This year saw the emergence of AAP as a political force via the anti-corruption movement. AAP combines the classic elements of what makes a political party successful in India - statist instincts, focus on aam aadmi issues, populism and ideological flexibility. Importantly, it is good at telling its own version of some future utopia rather than questioning the utopia of others. 2014The BJP came to power with many promises; the most alluring of them was ‘minimum government, maximum governance’. Over the past eight years it has claimed success in meeting many of its promises, but even its ardent supporters won’t claim any success on minimum government. In fact, it has gone the other way. That a party with an immensely popular PM, election machinery that rivals the best in the world, and virtually no opposition cannot shake us off our instinctive belief in the State's power never ceases to surprise us.2015The murder of a person by a mob on the charges of eating beef was the first clear indication of the upsurge of a new violent, majoritarian polity. It was also one of the early incidents in India of radically networked communities using social media for self-organisation. Meanwhile, 2015 also witnessed the signing of a landmark boundary agreement between India and Bangladesh, which ended the abomination called the third-order enclave. The two States exchanged land peacefully, upholding the principle that citizen well-being trumps hardline interpretations of territorial integrity. 2016There will be many case studies written in future about demonetisation. Each one of them will end with a single conclusion. Public policy requires discussion and consensus, not stealth and surprise. We hope we have learnt our lesson from it.2017Until 2017, many in India still held the hope of a modus vivendi with China. Some others were enamoured by the Chinese model of governance. However, the Doklam crisis in 2017, and the Galwan clashes in 2020, changed all that. Through this miscalculation, China alienated a full generation of Indians, led to better India-US relations, and energised India to shift focus away from merely managing a weak Pakistan, and toward raising its game for competing with a stronger adversary. For this reason, we wrote a thank you note to Xi Jinping here. 2018It took years of efforts by the LGBTQ community to get Section 377 scrapped. In 2018, they partially won when the Supreme Court diluted Section 377 to exclude all kinds of adult consensual sexual behaviour. The community could now claim equal constitutional status as others. There’s still some distance to go for the State to acknowledge non-heterosexual unions and provide for other civil rights to the community. But the gradual acceptance of the community because of decriminalisation is a sign that our society doesn’t need moral policing or lectures to judge what’s good for it.2019The J&K Reorganisation Act changed the long-standing political status quo in Kashmir. Three years on, the return to political normalcy and full statehood still awaits. While a response by Pakistan was expected, it was China that fomented trouble in Ladakh, leading to the border clashes in 2020. 2020We have written multiple pieces on farm laws in the past year. The repeal of these laws, which were fundamentally sound because of a vocal minority, is the story of public policy in India. Good policies are scuttled because of the absence of consultation, an unclear narrative, opportunistic politicking or plain old hubris. We write this newsletter in the hope of changing this. 2021The second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic left behind many bereaved families. People are still trying to pick up the pieces. The sadness was also interrupted by frustration because of the delays in getting the vaccination programme going. India benefited immensely from domestic vaccine manufacturing capability in the private sector. Despite many twists and turns in vaccine pricing and procurements, the year ended with over 1 billion administered doses. In challenging times, the Indian State, markets, and society did come together to fight the pandemic. So, here we are. In the 75th independent year of this beautiful, fascinating and often exasperating nation. We are a work in progress. We might walk slowly, but we must not walk backwards. May we all live in a happy, prosperous and equal society. Thanks for reading Anticipating the Unintended! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit publicpolicy.substack.com

Jhala Nath Khanal was the 35th Prime Minister of Nepal who served in the post from Feb 2011 - to Aug 2011. Khanal also served for a time as Minister of Information and Communication in the 1997 coalition government under Surya Bahadur Thapa. Khanal was a member of the Communist Party of Nepal and was its General Secretary from 1982 to 1986. Later, he became a member of the Communist Party of Nepal. Khanal won the seat of the Ilam 1 constituency in the 2008 Constituent Assembly election. He led the CPN (UML) as General Secretary from 2008 to February 2009 and was elected as the Chairman of the CPN (UML) on February 16, 2009. In this podcast, Mr. Jhala Nath Khanal and Sushant talk about Political parties, International relations, Education, SPP, Citizenship, Border disputes, and much more.

Summary Alexis Albion (LinkedIn) joins Andrew (Twitter; LinkedIn) to discuss Kim Philby using some of his personal belongings as prompts. This episode on the Soviet mole inside MI6 coincides with SPY's 20th Anniversary. What You'll Learn Intelligence Why Philby has been called “The Spy of the Century” Philby the man, the ideologue, the spy, and the traitor Philby's corrosive effect on Cold War British and American intelligence The cultural blind spot that allowed him to hide in plain sight then ride a storm of suspicion  Reflections Psychological complexity and contradiction Social stratification And much, much more… Episode Notes The Cambridge Five are some of the most notable and notorious traitors in British history, and among them one man stands out in a way that has led some to call him, “The Spy of the Century,” MI6 officer Kim Philby. How did a quintessential Englishman who came from the “right” stock and went to the “right” schools become a Soviet mole? How did a genial chum come to haunt the corridors of British and American intelligence like a ghastly apparition?  Dr. Alexis Albion is this week's guest and the Curator of Special Projects at the International Spy Museum. She was formerly on the 9/11 Commission Report, the World Bank and the U.S. Department of State. In this is a first of a kind podcast, Alexis and Andrew sat down with some of Philby's personal belongings drawn from our world-leading collection of artifacts on espionage and intelligence.  And… Harold Adrian Russell Philby acquired the nickname “Kim” from the main character in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim, an orphan-boy-cum-spy in British India. Kim and Philby also have the Punjab in common, the novel begins in Lahore and Philby was born in Ambala, although the historic region was partitioned between Pakistan and India in 1947. The drive between Lahore and Ambala is roughly similar to that between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Quote of the Week "So why is he The Spy of the Century? Maybe the fact that he's not identified with any particular event or set of information [e.g., unlike Julius Rosenberg], but he's identified with this idea of betraying his Englishness is perhaps why he's been such a lasting figure because he almost is a touchpoint for the history of the 20th century and England. Great Britain's demise is a great power." Resources *Andrew's Recommendation* My Five Cambridge Friends, Y. Modin (FS&G, 1994) A one-time KGB handler of the Cambridge 5 reflects on each of them as spies and as individuals *SpyCasts* Stalin's Englishman: Guy Burgess – with Andrew Lownie (2016) The British the Joint Intelligence Committee – with Mike Goodman (2014) The Real History of MI6 – with Keith Jeffrey (2010) The Cambridge 5 – with Nigel West (2009) *Beginner Resources* Facts About Kim Philby, J. Hayes, Factinate (n.d.) Reading Material Culture [i.e., objects] (2020] India's Partition in Pictures, BBC (n.d.) Books Spies & Traitors, M. Holzman (Pegasus, 2021) A Spy Among Friends, B. McIntyre (Crown, 2015) Kim, Rudyard Kipling (1901) Articles The Punjab Partition, S. Sultan, LSE (2018) Philby & Mistrust, M. Gladwell, New Yorker (2014) Documentary Why Was India Split into Two Countries, H. Roy, TED-Ed, YouTube (n.d.) MI6 Agent Turned Russian Spy, Philby, Timeline, YouTube (n.d.) Primary Sources Philby, I Spied for Russia from 1933 (1967) My Silent War, K. Philby (1967) The Disappearance of Kim Philby (1963)  Kim Philby (Peach): File 1 (1951-52) Constituent Assembly of India (1946) Primary Source Collections Indian Independence & Partition, UK National Archives *Wildcard Resource* Surnames & Social Mobility in England, 1230-2012 So, you thought social mobility in England has changed significantly since the Norman Conquest almost 1000 years ago – well, yes, and NO!

A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/india/a-tale-of-two-supreme-courts-best-practices-from-the-us-and-india-need-to-be-adopted-10875201.htmlI must confess a little shamefacedly that I watched the godawful fuss in the US following the SCOTUS’ overturning of Roe v Wade with some smugness. That was because, at long last, the Supreme Court of India finally threw the book at Teesta Setalvad, R B Shreekumar, Sanjiv Bhatt et al, in what had long been a travesty of justice. I began to think that maybe the Indian system, although glacially slow, has a thing or two to teach the much-ballyhooed Americans.Sadly, my joy was short-lived. Within a week, there was the spectacle of a two SC judge-bench in India harshly criticizing Nupur Sharma. They denied her plea to bundle various FIRs filed in far-off places like Calcutta, expressed personal opinions not germane to the plea, and lectured her on how a blasphemy allegation against her was her fault. They had apparently made up their minds without considering any evidence. I am properly chastened, and I am eating crow. Hubris before nemesis. I should have known. India’s institutions are severely compromised. Even the CJI implied in a speech in the US that India’s institutions are less developed because India is not a “mature democracy”.Thanks for reading Shadow Warrior! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Earlier, I used to stand in awe of the Indian judiciary. My great-uncle was a Chief Justice, and a family friend was on the Supreme Court. Two friends are or were High Court justices. I have always had a good impression of them. But over time, I began to see problems in the Indian system, and I wrote in 2018 about urgently needed judicial reform in Can We Fix the Deeply Troubled Judiciary?. The PIL (Public Interest Litigation) system has been weaponized, for one thing. The backlog of cases is daunting, for another. Several years later, the same problems have gotten worse, including structural issues about the Supreme Court straying far beyond its remit of interpreting the Constitution. But in India, a judge recently condemned ‘social media’ for alleging that he had violated both decorum and propriety in what an impartial observer might consider extraneous comments.In the US, those who were upset with the SCOTUS’ action roundly abused it; for instance an Indian-origin politician named Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal. I don’t know about the merit of her argument (and based on her ultra-woke-ness, it may have none), but it is very interesting that she could say rude things like this about the court and judges. In India, draconian ‘contempt of court’ provisions would be applied, and the critic jailed, for even mild criticism..That is one of the differences between the US judiciary and the Indian. There are several others. To begin with they are a) selection, b) tenure, c) ambit/remit and jurisdiction, d) appraisal and termination.Thank you for reading Shadow Warrior. This post is public so feel free to share it.Selection and AccountabilityIn the US, quite a few judges are elected: I have seen their names on election billboards, and so far as I can tell this is for state judge positions. That sounds odd to Indians partly because the US is a federation of states, whereas India is a union, and that makes a difference. Anyway, I am under the impression that most judges in say, the California state judiciary, are directly elected by the public. On the other hand, federal judges are appointed by the government, but they also have to go through a confirmation process wherein they are basically grilled by the Senate, i.e. the equivalent of the Rajya Sabha. Thus, elected officials representing individual voters do ‘elect’ the judges. This brings in a level of accountability.There is the obvious flaw that a determined government can “pack” the courts with people they like, especially if they have an ideological ax to grind. This only works, of course, if the Executive Branch can convince a majority in the Senate, i.e. the Legislative Branch. In fact, it is alleged, and it is likely, that ex-POTUS Trump packed the courts with people he liked. Even then, it is hard to make the case that the US Supreme Court is representative of public opinion. Look at how the old school tie works, and how a discreet endorsement here and there might have worked.In India, it is much worse. Judges themselves select new judges, and will not tolerate the Executive branch or Legislative branch getting involved in this. So far as I know, this is unique in the whole world. When the Indian Government suggested a National Judicial Appointments Committee (NJAC) that would have input from the other branches, the judicial branch shot it down claiming it was unconstitutional. I wonder if a National Judicial Service is a good idea, because the obvious rot in the Indian administrative services gives one pause. Common sense suggests a selection mechanism where there is a level of outside input. Without that, there is every incentive to promote friends and relatives of current judges. In fact, it turns out that many current Supreme Court judges are indeed related to former judges or politicians. It would be better to adopt the US system of confirmations by the legislature following a nomination by the government, of course with advice from the judiciary. TenureOnce selected, a US Supreme Court judge is in place for life, until he/she retires voluntarily, or dies, or is impeached. This means judicial appointments can have a very long impact, because a judge may be on the SCOTUS for fifty years. But judges have also been known to change in office, for instance moderating extreme views they might have entered with.In India, Supreme Court judges retire at 65, state High Court judges retire at 62.  On the face of it, this seems like a more sensible system, because the judges are still relatively young and vigorous while on the court. However, there is a pernicious loophole: retiring judges are then absorbed into other positions, which means there is an incentive for them to write judgments that make them attractive to possible future employers. Judges get such substantial pensions and other privileges that it would not be a hardship to place a moratorium on them accepting post-retirement employment. In the US case, it is unlikely that a SCOTUS judge would take up post-retirement employment, even though I wonder if they are explicitly forbidden from doing so. (Even post-retirement POTUSes don’t take up new jobs. They just sort of fade away).A via media on tenure may be a better idea: raise Indian judges’ retirement age to, say 70, considering that people are healthier and live longer these days, and that they have valuable expertise, but strictly forbid any post-retirement employment of any kind, including commissions, arbitration, etc. Ambit/remit and jurisdictionIn my earlier essay, I pointed out the need to bifurcate the top court and to clearly specify its scope. Here the US structure is clearly superior, and could be adopted more or less in toto.For, in the US, the Supreme Court hears Constitutional cases, and only Constitutional cases. All other cases go elsewhere: Federal Circuit Courts that are courts of appeal, and Federal District Courts that are trial courts. I think this fine distinction can be ignored, and India should institute four regional Courts of Appeal that will hear cases that exceed the state High Courts’ jurisdiction, for instance inter-state disputes. One of the issues today is that the SC seems whimsical in what cases it decides to hear, and what it drops. For instance, it declined to hear a case brought by Kashmiri Hindus about their genocide saying the matter was too old, but paradoxically it agreed to hear a case about the Mahatma Gandhi assassination, even though that was much older. And it likes to take up cases on cricket! Besides, certain influential lawyers (and certain NGOs) can get the SC to hear their clients at midnight, while others languish for decades. There must be clear guidelines provided by Parliament perhaps through a Constitutional Amendment. This should also put paid to such quaint notions as “constitutional morality” (Constitutions are not moral documents) or “original intent”, the US version of “basic structure” (who knows what was going on in the minds of the Constituent Assembly; only what they wrote down can be discussed).In addition, the PIL mechanism should be dropped, and all cases required to be filed at the District or Magistrate court, and they should bubble up through the system in case they have merit. It is deeply offensive to watch those with deep pockets, especially malign foreign-funded NGOs, getting their way with little effort by just waltzing directly into the SC.Appraisal and terminationJudges are extremely important members of society, and the Supreme Court in particular is the last refuge for a common man. There should be mechanisms to ensure that the judiciary does not go off on tangents, but that they are working towards the common good of the nation. An ancient judge was executed and flayed alive. His skin was used to upholster a judge’s chair. What is more, his successor, his son, was forced to sit in that chair, on his dead father’s skin, to deliver his judgments. That is barbaric, but it does make a point. Judges must be immaculately neutral and scrupulous.So what is the metric for appraisal? In India, one should be the quick disposal of cases. Pendency is a huge problem, and a good bit of it is because of too few working days: too many holidays, and a two-month vacation in summer and a two week vacation in winter. These days there is no reason not to run the courts in multiple shifts, including a night shift. And most work should be done online, so that litigants needn’t waste time waiting around courthouses all day.There should be clear Key Result Areas, and judges need to be measured on meeting them. These metrics can be determined by Parliament through a Constitutional Amendment. Justice delayed is justice denied, after all.What if a judge fails in these metrics, or in other ways? There was a High Court judge, with the memorable name of Karnan, who was sent to six months’ imprisonment for contempt of Supreme Court. The rules for impeachment should be made more transparent. At the moment, it looks like judges can close ranks and prevent impeachment, or at least make it very difficult in India, and possibly even in the US. There has been only one successful impeachment of a SCOTUS judge so far as I can tell: one Justice Samuel Chase in 1805. But the US senate acquitted him, so he returned to service. I am not aware of a single Indian judge who has been impeached, but surely some deserve to be. While India’s democracy “matures”, there is nothing wrong in taking some lessons from the US about what works. There is no need to import everything wholesale, but pick and choose judiciously. As has been discussed by many, it would be a good idea to also emulate the structure of the US Constitution, a brief document of 10 or so pages. A new Constitution is needed in India, as the prolix version we have now is failing to stand the test of time, as the many Amendments indicate. All the more reason why we need a better-designed Supreme Court to interpret it, and it alone. 1900 words, 5 Jul 2022 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com

Global Policy Watch: Woe Vs RaidInsights on policy issues making news around the World - RSJOn Friday, Justice Samuel Alito along with the conservative bloc of the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) overturned the landmark Roe v Wade judgment that had granted women a federal right to terminate a pregnancy about half a century ago. The conservative raid into the SCOTUS that started with the efforts of Bush Jr and concluded with Trump appointing three judges during his term has delivered to the great woe of the progressives. The learned judges searched for the word abortion in the Constitution. And to their surprise, they figured it just wasn't there. To quote:We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely—the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.”  The right to abortion does not fall within this category. Until the latter part of the 20th century, such a right was entirely unknown in American law. Indeed, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, three quarters of the States made abortion a crime at all stages of pregnancy. The abortion right is also critically different from any other right that this Court has held to fall within the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of “liberty.” Roe’s defenders characterize the abortion right as similar to the rights recognized in past decisions involving matters such as intimate sexual relations, contraception, and marriage, but abortion is fundamentally different, as both Roe and Casey acknowledged, because it destroys what those decisions called “fetal life” and what the law now before us describes as an “unborn human being.”Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.Strong stuff. But with a minor problem. I’m not sure SCOTUS has always stayed away from subjects that don’t have a reference to them in the Constitution like the learned judges have claimed. I mean I have gone through the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence document a few times. I could have also told them they won’t find a reference to abortion there. But I didn’t find the word woman in them either. No idea how that section of the human species got all sorts of rights in the US then. Also, missing from the Constitution are references to wild house parties involving strippers, or to tomatoes, home video recording, or swats to your bottom with a paddle to name just a few of my favourite things. But these are all things on whom the Court has delivered verdicts. Read them if your life is as boring as mine: Wild house parties involving strippers. Is the tomato a fruit or vegetable? The Betamax case of using a home recording device. And the case of the Principal who delivered 20 swats with a paddle to his pupil James. The SCOTUS has opined on them all. So, you see the judges aren’t exactly being consistent with precedence here. And they are setting new dubious benchmarks. There have been numerous instances of the Court striking down past judgments to grant more rights. Not to take them away. This is a repudiation of a lot of truths that progressives take for granted. That the arc of history in the long term bends towards moral justice. Or, that gains on individual liberty that survive more than a generation become irreversible. Apparently not. So, we have the US now joining El Salvador, Poland and Nicaragua in the list of countries that have rolled back abortion rights in the last three decades. About 26 states will make abortion illegal or restrict it on the back of this judgment with immediate effect. It is all quite remarkable. Some days you try and make sense of the pitched battles on the US cultural landscape: on how to use pronouns - he, she, they, it, them, their; or the definition of woman; or cancelling J.K. Rowling because she is a TERF. The terms of such debates are so rarefied that you need a primer first to understand the language being used before you can come to the substantive issues. And while they busy themselves in an ever-splintering contest of being ‘purer’ than the other, the rug gets pulled from under their feet with a judgment that rolls back years of hard-fought wins on women’s autonomy on their bodies, individual liberty and female reproductive health and safety. Now more than half the states are readying themselves to implement it tomorrow. It reinforces my view that any ideology or “-ism” isn’t threatened by its rival but by the absolute section of its own adherents. The desire to finish off the ‘near enemy” is stronger than fighting the real one. Some day the ‘trads’ and ‘raitas’ of Indian wrong wing will also get there. It is a point I have made a few times in explaining Schmitt’s notion of an enemy being essential for a political ideology to flourish.It is not that progressive are alone in this kind of hypocrisy. The same conservatives who value the life of a foetus or of those who are ‘unborn’ don’t see any problem in defending the ‘gun culture’ that takes away more than fifty thousand lives every year. For some convoluted reasons, those lives are an acceptable cost to pay for the right to possess firearms. It is sad yet funny to an outsider looking in.  This won’t stop here. The conservative majority in the SCOTUS took decades, and a lot of good fortune, to come to fruition. They will make the most of it. Justice Clarence Thomas gave a sense of what is to come in his concurring note to this ruling:“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.”Quick reminder. Griswold v Connecticut is about a married couple’s right to use contraception without state interference. Lawrence v Texas restricts the states from criminalising sodomy, and Obergefell v Hodges established the right for same-sex couples to marry in 2015. Justice Thomas might be alone now in raking these up. But something tells me that the genie is out now.For all its pretensions, ideology reduces itself to three functional truths. Find something to hate viscerally, over-extend the shadow of your ideology to all realms of a citizen’s life and protect yourself by sanctifying a core principle within the ideology that cannot be made profane. You will enjoy the fruits of power while future generations will foot the bill. We are now on an overdrive of ideology on both sides of the partisan divide.  Stepping back there are three points I want to make here about what this reversal could mean from the seemingly ineluctable path the American society was marching on since the civil rights movement of the 60s. First, the tyranny of the well-organised minority in a democracy is real. American society isn’t as divided on the issue of abortion as it was decades back. Roe v Wade didn’t ‘deepen division and enflamed debate’ as Justice Alito puts it. I went through Pew and Gallup surveys over the years on people’s attitudes towards abortion. It is safe to say anywhere between 60 - 80 per cent of Americans are against the idea of making abortion illegal. Most of the remaining too don’t hold extreme positions on this topic. Maybe there’s a 15 per cent minority of evangelicals and Catholics concentrated in certain states that hold views that have been upheld by the SC. Yet they have prevailed because single-issue voters like them matter in the Republican primaries and in winning the swing states. This is what explains Trump’s base among these groups despite his standing for everything they abhor on moral grounds. And once you establish this ‘tyranny of minority’, you can override the silent majority. Because the benefits are concentrated with them while the costs are diffused among the majority. It is not as if the founding framers of the US Constitution were unaware of this risk. Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Papers #22 (1788) had cautioned:“To give a minority a negative upon the majority (which is always the case where more than a majority is requisite to a decision), is, in its tendency, to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser.If a pertinacious minority can control the opinion of a majority, respecting the best mode of conducting it, the majority, in order that something may be done, must conform to the views of the minority; and thus the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater, and give a tone to the national proceedings. Hence, tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good.” This is the reality. The only way to deal with this is for the opponents to mobilise themselves into a single issue minority that counters this or to wait for this to splinter on its own. Neither seems possible at this time in the US. But the broader message on how a minority cause can overturn a majority consensus will not be lost on many who champion fringe causes. And this is also the reason one shouldn’t casually dismiss any voice even in India as fringe as we tend to do. Fringe swings votes and influences the social and cultural agenda of political parties. It is wise to remember that when considering the statements of Yati Narsinghanand or Nupur Sharma. Second, the concurrence note by Justice Thomas that refers to other hot-button conservative cultural causes will play out in a certain way. It is important to understand this. As he wrote:“we have a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents …. After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated.”What Justice Thomas has done is in public policy called ‘shifting the Overton window’. What was earlier not in the realm of discussion or consideration now comes into play. The terms of reference for the cultural debate to be played out in courts have been widened with those lines. This will have an impact on the decisions made in numerous lower courts. Lives will be affected. Lastly, I come back to a point I have made before about the sanctity of Courts directing social norms in a top-down fashion as it was first done in Roe v Wade and the manner of overturning it on Friday. A bit of context will help here.The conservative preference is for any social change to be gradual. Societal change is shaped through the many eddies of debates and protests that resist the flow of the mainstream. As they gain wider acceptance, they begin changing the course of flow of social norms. This could be painstakingly slow, but it makes change acceptable and sustainable. For the conservatives, the role of the judges is to apply laws, not to create them. Going beyond this brief becomes judicial activism. So, the original conservative view was that all issues of public or social policy should be discussed and debated by the legislative and executive branches of the state that represents the society. Courts resolve disputes following the written-down law while sending back any ambiguities to the legislative arm for approval.The liberal position, as it has evolved over time, is marked with suspicion of the society reforming itself. The classical liberal approach to this problem was to accelerate the process of change in society. This was to be achieved through a combined political, social and cultural assault on the bastions of conservatism in the society. This led to the portrait of a liberal as a perpetual activist in a constant state of mobilisation to upend existing norms. The liberal belief that society must change from within was no different from the conservative stance. The difference was between the need to induce change through proactive measures and the speed of change. This need for speed eventually led the liberals to the courts.Based on the evidence it can be argued the conservatives have lost the argument. The courts are at the front and centre of social policy-making today. The many historic judgments that cleave the US society are evidence of it. The legislative arms of the state representing the society aren’t drafting these laws.But here’s the irony. The conservatives have co-opted the liberal model. With a few strokes of good fortune, the single-minded agenda of turning the US SC bench into a conservative majority has been fruitful. The peril of pushing social change into the cabins of a powerful, centralised and autonomous institution is clear to the liberals now when the shoe is on the other foot. A blunt instrument doesn’t look blunt till it is in the hands of your adversary. The path of wresting back control to society will be long and arduous. Roe v Wade verdict in 1973 was ahead of its time. It was imposed on a society where the majority weren’t onboard. It bred resentment and a counter-movement. Justice Alito’s verdict on Friday takes us back in time. It too is imposed on a society where the majority isn’t with it. The Court is either ahead or behind the times in which they live.And it is on this subject, I come to the only line that I agreed with in Justice Alito’s 213-paged judgment:It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives. “The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations, upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.”That’s the way it should always be. Back in 1973. In 2022. And in future.Addendum— Pranay KotasthaneI don’t follow American politics. I’m also cognizant of my ignorance of the context of the abortion debate. And so I’ll stick to three broader points of comparison between the Indian and American political systems. First, this case brings the Constitutional Immutability Dilemma into focus. The underlying reasoning of the judgment is that the American constitution makes no specific reference to a right to obtain an abortion. The cases Roe and Casey tried to link it with other rights, which the current Court did not find acceptable. As an Indian observer, one would think that the constitution should’ve been amended to insert this right expressly, but that’s where the Constitutional Immutability Dilemma kicks in — how amendable should a constitution be after all?To resolve this dilemma, India and the US pick opposite ends. Amending the American constitution requires fulfilling extraordinary conditions, and hence just 27 amendments have been made in its nearly 250-year-old history. On the other hand, amending the Indian constitution is far easier. The latter’s mutability often attracts criticism on these lines—“a document that flexible is a periodical, not a constitution”. However, I’ve always been sceptical of that view. Constitutions are neither sacred books nor indisputable words of a supernatural force. Allowing subsequent generations to alter the constitution through their elected representatives is perhaps a better equilibrium than relying on future judges’ interpretations of an inflexible constitution. Ambedkar, in fact, cited Jefferson in defence of this choice:“We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of the majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country.”As this case illustrates, having rigid conditions for amendments open the door for partisan court benches to interpret the constitution as per their ideological worldviews. At the very least, I submit that a periodical is not worse than an immutable book. The working of a constitution is dependent on many factors outside the nature of the constitution itself. These lines from Ambedkar’s Constituent Assembly speech reverberate today:“..however good a Constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it, happen to be a bad lot. However bad a Constitution may be, it may turn out to be good if those who are called to work it, happen to be a good lot. The working of a Constitution does not depend wholly upon the nature of the Constitution. The Constitution can provide only the organs of State such as the Legislature, the Executive and the Judiciary. The factors on which the working of those organs of the State depend are the people and the political parties they will set up as their instruments to carry out their wishes and their politics. Who can say how the people of India and their purposes or will they prefer revolutionary methods of achieving them?… It is, therefore, futile to pass any judgment upon the Constitution without reference to the part which the people and their parties are likely to pay.Second, every polity has its unique set of ‘sacred cows’—issues involving such deference and passion that logical arguments stand no chance. For reasons of historical path dependence, these issues over time become wicked, insurmountable problems. Guns and pro-life are two such sacred cow issues of the American polity. To an external observer, the solutions might seem absurdly simple. But to someone in the midst of it all, the issue seems intractable. India too has many such sacred cow issues, one of which is the sacred cow itself. Third, the judiciary often ends up confusing itself for the politician. These lines from the judgment are instructive: “And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.” Why should it be a court’s problem if its judgment has led to more division? Is it a Panchayat that needs to come to a mandavali (negotiated settlement) or should it only be concerned with the Constitutional provisions? These questions keep making a frequent appearance in India. Looks like they aren’t settled yet in the US as well. Course Advertisement: Admissions for the Sept 2022 cohort of Takshashila’s Graduate Certificate in Public Policy programme are now open! Apply by 23rd July for a 10% early bird scholarship. Visit this link to apply.India Policy Watch: Pension TensionInsights on burning policy issues in India— Pranay KotasthaneThe protests against the Agnipath scheme seem to have peaked. This gives us an opportunity to step back and look at the issue dispassionately. We have already looked at the Agnipath scheme in some detail last week. This time around, I’ll focus on the underlying motivation behind this scheme: India’s defence pension bill. In the Hindustan Times, I present a short history of India’s pension bill. "Before 1965, soldiers below officer ranks were recruited through a mechanism resembling Agnipath in the sense that they served seven years of compulsory service and didn’t receive a pension on retirement. This service period was first raised in 1965 to 10 years for bulking the armed forces after the 1962 defeat. Since a pension required a minimum service of 15 years, most soldiers still didn’t qualify.In 1976, this ten-year service term increased to 17 years, meaning every soldier in normal circumstances qualified for a pension on retirement. With the welcome development of a rising life expectancy, there was also a steady increase in the number of pensioners. The combined effect of these factors was a rapid rise in the pension bill. From Rs 228 crores in FY81, the pension expenditure galloped to Rs 5923 crores by FY99.The Kargil Review Committee (1999) set off the alarm bells over the pension issue, mooting the idea of reducing the service term to 7-10 years. As an alternative, the committee also proposed an inverse lateral induction mechanism, whereby a paramilitary force recruit would be deputed to the armed forces for seven years and repatriated back to the parent organisation after that. Through this mechanism, the experienced soldiers could be retained in the national security system longer while reducing the pension bill. None of these alternatives received the political nod. Meanwhile, in 2004, the union government was able to find a long-term solution for pensioners from the civil services cadre. While continuing to pay pensions of all current employees, the government moved its incoming employees recruited after 1 Jan 2004 to the National Pension System (NPS). NPS is a “defined contribution” scheme, where the pension is paid out of a corpus the employee and the government co-create over the employment period. Over time, this move will likely make the pension bill sustainable, as the liability is not being passed on exclusively to future taxpayers. However, armed forces personnel were kept out of this reform, mainly because non-officer rank soldiers retiring after a short 15-year service would not be able to build a robust corpus, unlike their civilian counterparts who were in service for twice that period. The lost opportunity in 2004 proved to be costly. By 2014, the public discourse had shifted in the opposite direction. Rather than customise the NPS to soldiers’ requirements—which would have been an ideal long-term solution—the NDA government implemented the One Rank One Pension (OROP) scheme. By agreeing to a “defined benefit” scheme that resets periodically based on current employee compensation, the union government unthinkingly committed itself to a perpetually fast-growing liability. While the government was happy to kick the can down the road, the COVID-19 pandemic was a wake-up call. On the one hand, government finances were thrown off balance. On the other, the border stand-off with China drove home the point that defence reforms are not just essential but also urgent. The creation of the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) position was the first step. General Bipin Rawat repeatedly drew attention to the unsustainable defence pensions. During his tenure, a few alternatives were discussed. Each available option came with its own set of implementation challenges. Out of this imperfect set, the government chose to reduce the default service term to four years, labelling it as the Agnipath scheme.In the Times of India, I try to estimate the defence pension savings arising from Agnipath:Over the long term, it has the potential to reduce the pension burden substantially. At the same time, the scheme will not directly impact the allocations for modernisation in the short term. Here’s why.Agniveers recruited today are replacing soldiers who would have retired approximately 15 years from now. The purported pension savings would start accruing only after a decade-and-half. As for the size of savings, we created a basic model from publicly available data. Our thumb rule suggests that the net present value of all future pension outflows per soldier is Rs 1 crore. The actual savings might be higher. Reports on the initial proposal by the Indian Army for a three-year Tour of Duty put the prospective lifetime savings per soldier at nearly ten times our estimate.Arriving at an accurate figure is difficult as the government does not release the split-up of total pension expenditures between officers, soldiers, and defence civilians. To get around this data hole, we assumed that the average pension of a retiring officer is 3.5 times the average pension of a retiring soldier. To calculate the total pension outflow per soldier, we assumed that a soldier receives a pension for 29 years on average, i.e. the difference between average life expectancy (69) and the retiring age of a soldier (40). Further, since pension outflows happen over several years in the future, we use the Net Present Value (NPV) method to determine the current value of all future payments. For simplicity, we assume that the pension is indexed to the discount rate. Using even this extremely conservative model suggests significant long-term gains. Allowing 75% of the Agniveers recruited this year to let go after four years alone has a net present value of approximately Rs 34500 crores.As highlighted earlier, these savings will accrue only after 15 years. But just as today’s deficits are tomorrow’s taxes, today’s reforms become tomorrow’s savings. Through Agnipath, the government can manage pension expenditures over the long term.Finally, this entire defence pension debate has three important lessons in public policy.First, secrecy is the enemy of public policy. Kelkar & Shah, in their book In Service of the Republic, identify secrecy levels as one of the barriers to building state capacity. They write that it is harder to achieve state capacity in areas closed to open feedback and criticism. The defence pension debate is a good illustration of their assessment. As a policy analyst, the sad feature of this entire debate over defence pension is the complete absence of good data. Believe it or not, the government does not release defence pension data beyond the aggregate numbers listed in the budget documents. For example, we still don’t know how this Rs 1 Trillion amount is split up between officers, non-officers, and defence civilians. In the absence of this foundational information, myths abound (We tried to tackle five common myths in ThePrint). Moreover, without good data, the policy pipeline is clean-bowled at the very first step. There are no good models or projections to inform a cost-benefit analysis. Second, is the absolute need for ex-ante fiscal projections of government plans. Seemingly innocuous changes in pension policies can have hard-to-reverse adverse effects. An institution such as an Independent Fiscal Council can help the people and politicians understand the financial consequences of such plans even before they are implemented.Finally, I liken pension reforms to six-day test matches. Reducing employees' pensions while they are in service would be an immoral breach of trust. And hence, all pension reform options can only tackle future employees. Reforms done today can at best contain the rise in spending a couple of decades later when these yet-to-be-hired employees retire. Hence, it is imperative to exercise caution on pension policies at the inception stage. HomeWorkReading and listening recommendations on public policy matters[Articles] In #171, we discussed two missing meta-institutions in India. This week, a couple of excellent articles throw light on two other missing mechanisms. KP Krishnan in Business Standard writes about the need for an independent evaluation mechanism for statutory regulatory authorities. Rajya Sabha MP Sujeet Kumar, Vedant Monger, and Vikram Vennelakanti propose a method for formalised impact assessments before and after any law/scheme get a go-ahead.[Audiobook] The late Richard Baum’s The Fall and Rise of China lectures are terrific.[Podcast] Over at Puliyabaazi, we discuss Agnipath and related issues.* Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit publicpolicy.substack.com

The last major political obstacle to the Bolsheviks was the Constituent Assembly, which as it turned out was more of a minor bump. A much bigger obstacle was the German army, and how to satisfactorily end a fight that had long since been lost.    Bibliography for this episode:    Hosking, Geoffrey Russia and the Russians: A History The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2001 Figes, Orlando A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1917 Penguin Books 1998 Smith, SA Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis 1890-1928 Oxford University Press 2018 Fitzpatrick, Sheila The Russian Revolution, 4th Edition Oxford University Press 2017 Kotkin, Stephen Stalin: Paradoxes of Power 1878-1928 Penguin Books 2015 Smele, Jonathon D The Russian Civil Wars C. Hurst & Company Ltd 2016 Mawdsley, Evan The Russian Civil War Pegasus Books LLC 2007 Suny, Ronald Grigor The Cambridge History of Russia, Vol III: The Twentieth Century Cambridge University Press 2006   Questions? Comments? Email me at peaceintheirtime@gmail.com

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday inaugurated the ‘Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya' or the Museum of Prime Ministers in New Delhi which tells the story of India after independence through the lives and contributions of all the 14 former Prime Ministers. He also bought the first ticket of the museum.   Sanctioned in 2018, it has been built on a 10,000 square metre land adjacent to the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library at Teen Murti Bhavan for Rs 271 crore. The museum features 43 galleries. Starting from displays on freedom struggle and the framing of the Constitution, it goes on to showcase the story of how Prime Ministers of India navigated the country through various challenges and ensured all-around progress.    The erstwhile Nehru Museum now has an updated, technologically advanced display on the life and contribution of the nation's first prime minister. A number of gifts received by him from all over the world, but not exhibited so far, have also been put on display.   The ‘sanghralaya' will showcase archival material, personal items, memorabilia, speeches of Prime Ministers and anecdotal representation of ideologies and different aspects of their lives in a thematic format.    Information for the museum was collected through repositories with institutions such as Prasar Bharati, Doordarshan, Films Division, Sansad TV, Ministry of Defence, Indian foreign media houses and news agencies.   The design of the museum building is inspired by the story of rising India, shaped and moulded at the hands of its leaders. The design incorporates sustainable and energy conservation practices. No tree has been felled or transplanted during the course of work on the project.  The logo of the Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya represents the hands of the people of India holding the Dharma Chakra, symbolising the nation and democracy.    Holograms, virtual reality, augmented reality, multi-touch, multi-media, interactive kiosks, computerised kinetic sculptures, smartphone applications, interactive screens and experiential installations, among others, have been leveraged to make the exhibition content to become interactive and engaging for visitors around the world.   It also celebrates the making of the Constitution of India and will apprise visitors about the men and women of the Constituent Assembly, who steered the transformation of India into a modern Republic. The museum will be thrown open to the public from April 21.

Jhala Nath Khanal was the 35th Prime Minister of Nepal who served in the post from Feb 2011 - to Aug 2011. Khanal also served for a time as Minister of Information and Communication in the 1997 coalition government under Surya Bahadur Thapa. Khanal was a member of the Communist Party of Nepal and was its General Secretary from 1982 to 1986. Later, he became a member of the Communist Party of Nepal. Khanal won the seat of the Ilam 1 constituency in the 2008 Constituent Assembly election. He led the CPN (UML) as General Secretary from 2008 to February 2009 and was elected as the Chairman of the CPN (UML) on February 16, 2009. In this podcast, Mr. Jhala Nath Khanal and Sushant talk about Politics, Khanal's experiences, and much more.

Questions of the bourgeois state, democracy, and the proletariat's conquest of state power were the subject of a number of debates and attempts at theoretical formulation in the Second International. In the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the dissolving of the Constituent Assembly, the stakes of the debate became even more pronounced, with figures such as Lenin, Kautsky, and Luxemburg focusing especially on the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat.

A version of this essay was published by swarajyamag.com at https://swarajyamag.com/politics/was-it-a-plot-to-assassinate-the-prime-ministerThe events on January 5th were shocking: the PM’s motorcade was stopped for 15 to 20 minutes on a highway overpass, blocked by a group of ‘protesters’. His car, the only black car in the row of white cars, was completely exposed to a possible drone attack, a Stinger missile, a rocket-propelled grenade, or even an IED that could have demolished the structure. The enormity of this situation, and the implications for India’s national security, are astonishing. Here was the Prime Minister of the country with the world’s 5th largest economy and 3rd largest armed forces, a sitting duck, at a location only a few miles away from the Pakistani border. Thank you for reading Shadow Warrior. This post is public so feel free to share it.It cannot be seen as an attack on Narendra Modi, the man, but on the institution of the Prime Minister, and by extension on the Government of India. This, in a country where two Prime Ministers were earlier assassinated. It is almost an existential question. What would happen if Modi were to be killed? I hasten to add that I am certainly not advocating it, as he is the PM, and I have been a fan of his for long. But we have to think of what happens in that eventuality. The same question was asked earlier: what would happen if Modi were to lose the elections? Well, not much. Modi would take his small suitcase, and, as in the famous painting, alight from the train in his hometown in Gujarat and walk home alone, in the rain, with his umbrella. It is not "Après moi, le déluge" as in the Nehruvian vanity: somebody will rule. But the nation will be the loser, just when it is at the cusp of inflection.There have been other dramatic moments in Indian history where one man made a difference. The stray arrow that pierced the eye of Hemachandra Vikramaditya at the second battle of Panipat doomed North India to centuries of Gurkaniya Timurid rule. The beheading of Rama Raya of Vijayanagar by his own renegade troops at the battle of Talikota caused the disastrous end of that bulwark that had protected South India against invaders from the North. It may not be that bad this time if there were to be, in Karan Thapar’s immortal words in 2007, “the sudden removal of Modi”. There are others that could step in. But surely, momentum will be lost, and all those malign forces urging ‘regime change’, especially the Deep State and China and their psy-warfare organs, such as the New York Times and Global Times, will smell blood.Thanks for reading Shadow Warrior! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.I also personally do not think it was an assassination attempt. If it were, it would have succeeded because there was nothing to prevent it. It was more a signal to Narendra Modi that if he dared enter Punjab again, he would be executed. The real question is, what will happen next?We have seen this movie before. In West Bengal, there was massive election-related violence and the wanton killing of BJP and RSS people by TMC cadres. In Kerala, there have been dozens of murders of BJP/RSS people by Communists or Islamists. There were at least two earlier attempts on Modi himself: the first when Ishrat Jehan, Javed (born Pranesh Pillai) and a Pakistani were intercepted driving to Gujarat to eliminate him. The second was the bomb that went off minutes before Modi was to speak in Bihar during election campaigning some time ago. If I were to extrapolate, the federal structure of the Indian Union is itself under strain: opposition-ruled states are acting as little personal fiefdoms that are, in effect, independent nations with only a tenuous link to the Union Government. For instance, just last week, the President of India was apparently humiliated when he had to cool his heels in the Kerala Raj Bhavan after an honorary D Litt to him was denied, allegedly under pressure from the state government (which, however, cleared D Litts for an actress, Shobhana, and a musician, T M Krishna). Opposition-ruled states also did not reduce excise taxes on petrol and diesel, while at the same time opposing bringing those under GST. In Bengal, a Chief Secretary was removed by the GoI, but was re-hired by the state government. In Punjab, the DGP was just installed, hand-picked by an Indian National Congress leader. There are many more instances that we all know of.So there are under-currents of anarchy being implemented nationwide. The bottom line is that a lot of people do not want the BJP to be in power: among them, the urban chatterati who keep pointing out that the BJP only got some 36% of the total vote, while quietly omitting the fact that the sainted Jawaharlal also did not get a clear majority, only a plurality, of the vote while ruling like an arbitrary, absolute monarch for 17 long years. There are several groups hurt by various measures taken by the GoI. Among them is the ‘Chandigarh Lobby’, a group of ex-military middlemen whose handsome commissions earned from foreign arms merchants have evaporated. This explains their schadenfreude when General Bipin Rawat was killed last month, and some of the very same group showed their dismissive contempt for the PM as well.Then of course there are the arhatiyas, or middlemen, who have profited from the aftermath of the Green Revolution. Let us ignore the fact that excessive rice cultivation has led to water tables falling precipitously and groundwater poisoning through pesticide and fertilizer runoff. This is not sustainable: I am reminded of Californians cultivating rice in the desert (see my old column “Water Wars: Cauvery, Chinatown, and Cadillac Desert”). Presumably, these were the ‘protesters’ who stopped the PM’s motorcade. So exactly what are they protesting against? Their demand has already been conceded: the farm bills are withdrawn. No, they have become protesters-for-rent; they are now determined to cause trouble.Proximate, preponderant and root causesAnd that is the proximate cause of the problem. The Indian State, various anarchists have concluded, is a soft state, and they can keep escalating their demands without consequences. These ‘farmer’ protesters (including during their Republic Day 2021 shenanigans), and earlier the Shaheen Bagh protesters, realized that they could, with impunity, hold the GoI hostage. And so they will. What can be done? Clearly, large-scale force against them would boomerang. But doesn’t the GoI know who the street thugs are, as well as their shadowy handlers in India and elsewhere? If the GoI doesn’t know, why doesn’t it know? Where is the humint as well as the reams of surveillance camera video? How about tracking their bank accounts, money transactions and vehicle movements via Aadhar, PAN, UPI and Fastag? Savitri Mumukshu quoted Chanakya on twitter: “A nation has 4 threats. First, from external enemies. Next, from internal enemies helped by foreigners. Third, from external enemies helped by insiders. But most dangerous is when internal enemies are helped by internal spies, like a hidden snake lurking in the home.” As usual, he was right.The intelligence agencies, assuming they are not riddled with moles, must identify, track, and then pick off the ring-leaders one by one, quietly. You know, the 2am knock on the door. Enough already with the kadi ninda! The State must show it will impose discipline: it has a monopoly on violence. A little bit of “iron fist in the velvet glove” is salutary and a deterrent.The preponderant cause, though, is the ridiculous fact that there are elections all the time in India. Yes, ALL THE GODDAMN TIME! This is a serious distraction from the job of governing the country, and politicians must figure out what will win elections, not what is good for the country. It is high time that elections were rationalized, perhaps as follows: every five years there are national elections to Parliament. Half the states must synchronize their elections with these. In between, 2.5 years later there will be elections to the other half of the states (so that their legislatures also have a life of 5 years). If there are problems in any state and the legislatures are dismissed for some reason, President’s Rule will be imposed until the next time their elections are due. In other words, no unnecessary and frequent elections, but only to a timetable. The root cause of the problem, however, is the Indian Constitution, which has mandated the current system of continuous elections. In general, not only for this but for other reasons as well, the Constitution needs to be rewritten because it is a prolix document, largely a cut and paste of the imperial Government of India Act of 1935, with tidbits thrown in from the US and Irish constitutions. Both the constitution and the increasingly bizarre interpretations of it, especially of Articles 25-30 that render Hindus second-class citizens, are problems. A Constituent Assembly should be set up and work should begin on a simple, 10-page document rather than a 500+ page behemoth. It will be the job of the Supreme Court to handle nothing but constitutional cases, which requires judicial reforms, with Regional Courts of Appeal set up to hear inter-state disputes and non-constitutional matters elevated from High Courts. And the National Judicial Appointments Commission needs to be revived as well, with a clear mandate for the legislature to approve the appointment of judges. So there are larger problems that need to be solved. But at the moment, the attack on the Prime Minister needs to be taken as an affront to the dignity of the Indian Union, and whoever instigated or participated in it needs to be taught a lesson. Some heads must roll. Otherwise the impression that India is a Soft State, especially after the mysterious death of the Chief of Defense Staff, will gain currency. We simply cannot afford that. 1600 words, 6 Jan 2022 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com

If I asked you whether Israel has a constitution are you sure that you would know the answer? This episode is the first half of answering the question by delving into the history of Israel's 1949 Constituent Assembly. Picture by Hugo Mendelson - This is available from National Photo Collection of Israel, Photography dept. Government Press Office (link), under the digital ID D715-035.

Any hopes that Yugoslavs would come together to write a consensus constitution for their newly united state were swiftly dashed. Theme Music – “Charlotte” by Damiano Baldoni, licensed under CC BY 4.0 Main Maps Page Patreon

In November 1920, Yugoslavs chose 419 deputies to represent them in a Constituent Assembly. Their choices were quite a surprise. Theme Music – “Charlotte” by Damiano Baldoni, licensed under CC BY 4.0 Main Maps Page Patreon

The Russian Revolution enters a new phase as the Bolsheviks successfully take power and form a coalition with the Left SRs. A new Constituent Assembly is elected, but out of date candidate lists leave the results in question. The Reds seek to make peace with the Germans without leverage, while facing off coup plots and military threats from the Right SRs and White forces. As the isolated revolutionaries wait for the German Revolution to break out and lift the siege of Red Russia, famine again hits Russia and the Bolsheviks resort to desperate acts of violence to feed the cities and assert control over industry.Support the show