Jurisdictional Crisis in the Kashmir Novel

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-47
Author(s):  
Rajgopal Saikumar
Keyword(s):  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Law And Literature ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Indian Constitution ◽  
Constitutional Politics ◽  
The Earth ◽  
A Performance

The India-Pakistan relationship and its hold over Kashmir is often described by words such asdeadlock, intractability, andstalemate; conveying a geopolitics of “stuckness.” Within conditions of postcolonial era colonialism, and at the intersection of constitutional law and literature, this article explores this stuckness as a jurisdictional crisis. A constitution first and foremost constitutes jurisdictions. Appropriation of land by delimiting the earth, marking out territories, enclosures, boundaries, and visible divisions is the necessary condition for the very possibility of law. How does the Indian constitution constitute the jurisdictional conditions of Kashmir? And how does one read for these jurisdictional conditions in literature? This article is more specifically interested in literary representations of jurisdictional crisis in the contemporary Kashmir novel. It argues that the constitutional politics and history that created the jurisdictional conditions of Kashmir produce a “performance of stuckness” in Kashmir literature.

The Citizenship Amendment Act 2019: An Insight through Constitutional and Secularism Perspective

2021 ◽  
pp. 002190962110588
Author(s):  
Narender Nagarwal
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Basic Structure ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Democratic Values ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Indian Constitution ◽  
Socialist State ◽  
Democratic Character

The primary endeavor of this paper is to illuminate the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 through the constitution and human rights jurisprudence perspective. In this paper, an attempt has been made to propose a different interpretation of the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 which not only infracts constitutional values but also legalized the hate against minorities, especially Muslims. India—as a nation state—has always cherished and remained concerned about its secular and democratic character. Since independence, India has maintained its global position as a responsible and humane society to protect minorities’ rights and social justice. Shockingly, the legislative development that had taken place in the recent past has questioned India’s commitment toward the certain principle of human rights, democratic values, and secularism which are the hallmark of the Constitution of India. The Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 has put religion as a pre-requisite qualification if someone is desirous to apply for Indian citizenship which is purely a violation of the basic ethos of the constitution. The idea of India as envisioned by the framers of the Indian constitution as a democratic, secular, and socialist state and anything that contrary to its basic structure is unconstitutional. The contentious legislation whether unconstitutional or not needs to be examined through the prism of constitutional law and fundamental norms of human rights. In this research exercise, a modest attempt is made to examine all merits and demerits of this antagonistic citizenship legislation. Throughout the paper, the effort has been given to sustain the notion that India cannot be a republic founded on discrimination, hate, and a pervasive sense of fear.

scholarly journals Constitutional Politics/Constitutional Law

1989 ◽  
Vol 99 (3) ◽  
pp. 453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Ackerman
Keyword(s):  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Constitutional Politics

Part IV Separation of Powers, Ch.15 Separation of Powers

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pal Ruma
Keyword(s):  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Judicial Power ◽  
Indian Constitution ◽  
Auditor General ◽  
Election Commission

This chapter examines how the issue of separation of powers is treated in the Indian Constitution. More specifically, it considers whether the separation of powers is a principle in the constitutional law of India and if so, what sort of doctrine of separation of powers is embraced by the Indian Constitution. The chapter begins with an overview of the three models of separation of powers articulated in the Indian Constitution, along with the constitutional provisions showing the functional overlap between the executive, legislature, and judiciary. It then turns to a discussion of the legislative branch’s judicial powers under the Constitution, as well as its control of the judiciary; the executive’s administration, legislative, and judicial functions; and the courts’ judicial power and independence. Finally, it looks at the allocation of powers relating to governance to autonomous bodies such as the Election Commission and the Comptroller and Auditor-General.

Ch.1 Locating Indian Constitutionalism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Choudhry Sujit ◽  
Khosla Madhav ◽  
Mehta Pratap Bhanu
Keyword(s):  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Constitutional Development ◽  
Indian Constitution ◽  
Constitutional Morality

This chapter explores the historical commitment to the idea of constitutionalism and how the framers understood India’s constitutional project. It begins with an overview of the concept of ‘constitutional morality’ as it relates to the Indian Constitution, along with the cosmopolitan character of Indian constitutionalism. It then considers some of the tensions that have characterised constitutional law in India, with particular emphasis on some of the sources of these tensions, for instance the debate between centralisation and decentralisation. It also discusses the major axes around which the normative and institutional imagination of the Indian Constitution is articulated and concludes by analysing the character of constitutional development in India and paying attention to the forces that have shaped its evolution.

Part III Constituting Democracy, Ch.11 Language

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Choudhry Sujit
Keyword(s):  
Central Government ◽  
Official Language ◽  
Linguistic Minorities ◽  
Indian Constitution ◽  
Constitutional Politics ◽  
Constituent Assembly ◽  
Regional Language ◽  
Language Status ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the constitutional politics of official language status in India. It gives an overview of the debates in the Indian Constituent Assembly over issues such as the official language of the Central Government and the Indian Constitution’s distinction between the language of parliamentary deliberations and the language of legislation. It considers the disaggregation of official language status into different linguistic states within the context of the relationship between federalism and language. It also discusses the implications of linguistic federalism for linguistic minorities in India and the legal controversy regarding the extent to which Article 30(1) of the Indian Constitution grants linguistic minorities the right to exclude instruction in the regional language.

On the Rationality of Radical Theological Non-Naturalism

1978 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Necessary Condition ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Concept Of God ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Time And Being ◽  
Clear Idea ◽  
The Way

In my Contemporary Critiques of Religion and in my Scepticism, I argue that non-anthropomorphic conceptions of God do not make sense. By this I mean that we do not have sound grounds for believing that the central truth-claims of Christianity are genuine truth-claims and that we do not have a religiously viable concept of God. I argue that this is so principally because of three interrelated features about God-talk. (I) While purporting to be factual assertions, central bits of God-talk, e.g. ‘God exists’ and ‘God loves man-kind’, are not even in principle verifiable (confirmable or disconfirmable) in such a way that we can say what experienceable states of affairs would count for these putative assertions and against their denials, such that we could say what it would be like to have evidence which would make either their assertion or their denial more or less probably true. (2) Personal predicates, e.g. ‘loves’, ‘creates’, are at least seemingly essential in the use of God-talk, yet they suffer from such an attenuation of meaning in their employment in religious linguistic environments that it at least appears to be the case that we have in such environments unwittingly emptied these predicates of all intelligible meaning so that we do not understand what we are asserting or denying when we utter ‘God loves mankind’ or ‘God created the heavens and the earth’ and the like. (3) When we make well-formed assertions, it appears at least to be the case that a necessary condition for such wellformedness is that we should be able successfully to identify the subject of that putative statement so that we can understand what it is that we are talking about and thus understand that a genuine statement has actually been made. But, where God is conceived non-anthropomorphically, we have no even tolerably clear idea about how God, an infinite individual, occupying no particular place or existing at no particular time, and being utterly transcendent to the world, can be identified. Indeed we have no coherent idea of what it would be like to identify him and this means we have no coherent idea of what it would be like for God even to be a person or an it. He cannot be picked out and identified in the way persons and things can.

scholarly journals The Difficulty of Constitutional Amendment in Canada

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Albert
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Constitution ◽  
Constitutional Amendment ◽  
Court Decisions ◽  
Constitutional Politics ◽  
Comparative Constitutional Law ◽  
Constitutional Conventions ◽  
Democratic Constitution

Scholars of comparative constitutional law would suggest that the United States Constitution is the world’s most difficult democratic constitution to change by formal amendment. This article suggests that the Constitution of Canada may be even harder to amend. Canadian constitutional politics have proven the textual requirements for major constitutional amendment so far impossible to satisfy. But the extraordinary difficulty of formal amendment in Canada derives equally from sources external to the text. Major constitutional amendment also requires conformity with extra-textual requirements imposed by Supreme Court decisions interpreting the Constitution of Canada, parliamentary and provincial as well as territorial statutes, and arguably also by constitutional conventions — additional rules that may well make major constitutional amendment impossible today in Canada. These as yet underappreciated extra-textual sources of formal amendment difficulty raise important questions for Canadian constitutionalism, namely whether in making the Constitution virtually impossible to amend they weaken democracy and undermine the purpose of writtenness.

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