58 – Law on the Ground in a Time of Indian Political Transformation

October 3, 2025
3:45 pm
H03
Scholarship on the intersections of law and democratic politics in India is extensive but frequently operates at the levels of theory or history. By contrast, this panel provides a venue for scholars studying the law-democracy nexus at the level of lived realities. Panelists use methods that include but are not limited to interviews, participant-observation, media analysis, surveys, and other forms of qualitative social science. We are particularly (but not exclusively) interested in understanding how widely studied frameworks like autocratic legalism, democratic decay, democratic backsliding, and illiberal democracy manifest in everyday ways. How are they constituted through and reflected by changes to speech practices, behaviors, interpersonal relationships, community networks, activist strategies, legal strategies, institutional and regulatory praxis, and other granular forms of social life? We are also interested in unearthing insights about law and democracy in India that are only or are primarily accessible through these types of ground-level qualitative study. By engaging with the social life of law and political transformation in contemporary India, the presentations in this panel help to move the conversation from the “ideal” (what ought to be) to the “real” (what is). Among other issues, we seek to explore the following in the Indian context: 1. The use of legal concepts or institutions to resist or reinforce longstanding or emerging socio-political hierarchies; 2. The everyday nature of violence and mob action as mediated (or not) by law; 3. Intra- or inter-religious disputes pursued through formal law; 4. Legal institutional transformations that are driven by or responsive to political transformations; 5. Shifting experiences at lower-level (judicial or administrative) legal institutions; 6. Shifting relationships between religious legal systems and state legal systems.

Convenors

Deepa Das Acevedo
Fuchs Sandhya

Presentations

What is authoritarian legality? Lawyers and legal consciousness in contemporary India.
Suresh Mayur - SOAS, University of London, London, United Kingdom
Rangarajan Lubhyathi - SOAS, University of London, London, United Kingdom
Fariya Yesmin - SOAS, University of London, London, United Kingdom
Law, Legitimacy, and Dispossession: Navigating Legal Mobilization in New Delhi
Singh Shatakshi - University of California Santa Cruz, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, United States
Locating the Injustice in Sexual Harassment: Perspectives from Public Universities in India
SENGUPTA ATREYEE - SOAS University of London, SOAS, London, United Kingdom
Justice for Torture and the Question of Temporality
Lokaneeta Jinee - Department of Political Science & International Relations, Drew University, Madison, United States
The Law as a Means to Belong: Assertions from Indian Muslim Civil Society Networks
KHAN AIMAN - Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS), University of Goettingen, GOETTINGEN, Germany
Legal Polysemy: On the Emergence of an Autocratic Hermeneutics of Hate Speech in India
Fuchs Sandhya - School of Policy Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom
Far-right Vigilantism and Hindu Supremacy in India
Chatterjee Moyukh - Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh, edinburgh, United Kingdom
PILs for Democracy: Exploring the Nature of Judicial Power in Indian High Courts
Bandyopadhyay Sourya - Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law, IIT Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India
Shankar Dr Uday - Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law, IIT Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India