BOOK CHAPTERS
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CARE
The Rebirth of Delinquent ‘Adult - Children’: Criminal Capacity, Socio-Economic Systems, and the Malleability of Penality of Child Delinquency in India
The Palgrave International Handbook of Youth Imprisonment, 2021
This chapter investigates the historical and sociological aspects of childhood, child delinquency, and the social reaction and State response towards children in conflict with the law (CCL) in India. Beginning from the ancient period to the present times, I trace how various social systems have shaped childhood. I analyse how different social, economic, political, and legal factors have contributed to the shifting age boundaries of children so as to criminalise their behaviours. The chapter also explores the conventional institutions of child social control by reflecting on roles played by family, community and locality. I examine integrative mechanisms, specific to the Indian socio-economic context that dealt with children’s behaviours in non-penal ways. I juxtapose this history with neoliberal child carceralism post-mid-1980s that produced delinquent ‘adult-children’, and penal populism and ‘carceral’ feminism after the Nirbhaya gangrape and homicide. I present an abolitionist critique of the ‘adultification’ of children and of deployment of punitive measures by the State to deal with CCL by the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2015, to first ‘reproduce,’ and then ‘reform,’ what I call the delinquent ‘adult-children’.
CHANGE
Thinking Beyond Penal Reform in India: Questioning the Logic of Colonial Punishments
The Routledge International Handbook of Penal Abolition, 2021
This chapter is an abolitionist critique of penal ‘reform’ in India, wherein I suggest a reinterpretation of ‘reform’ not as an extension but rather a process of replacement, dismantling and elimination of the existing penal structures. Tracing the presence of principle of non-violence (ahimsa) as an instrument of response to violence (himsa) and inegalitarianism in the Indian subcontinental cultural history by navigating through precolonial and colonial periods, I argue, by thinking through postcolonial and subaltern frameworks, that the existing penal structures and punishments are colonial products. Highlighting the role of the relationship between different social systems and rationalisation of violence in law for caging the subalterns and marginalised people, I contend that India needs decriminalisation, diversion and decarceration as apparatuses to decolonise criminal law so as to take the recourse of social justice and not criminal justice as a response to social deviance.
CONSTITUTIONALISM
Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer and Expansive Interpretation of Fundamental Rights
Human Rights, Constitutionalism and Rule of Law: Contemporary Issues and Challenges, 2017
Padma Vibhushan Vaidyanathpuram Rama Ayyar Krishna Iyer is a name that has carved a niche for itself in both the social and legal fraternity. Krishna Iyer has contributed hugely to society and the legal fraternity through his liberal interpretational skills, which in itself has become a discourse in the arena of constitutional interpretation. It is worth mentioning here at the very outset that his humanitarian expansive interpretation of provisions of Part III of the Constitution of India is unparalleled and cannot be aped in the near future. As Mahatma Gandhi has said that “You must be the change you wish to see in the world”, Krishna Iyer was a person who has tried throughout his life to be such change. He was a Karmyogi, an intellectual, a pro-poor, a crusading maverick and along with all these, as the literature world considers him, a genius of vocabulary.