Pakistan’s Supreme Court to Purify Parliamentarians
For roughly sixty years, by means political, military, and media, Pakistan’s political elite has curbed the Supreme Court from snooping around in their affairs. Corruption flourished. Then came the...
View ArticleSave the Constitution!
In the late evening hours of June 25th 1975, Indira Gandhi, the then prime minister, rushed a letter to the president of India. In this letter Mrs Gandhi alerted the president that “information has...
View ArticleFATA’s fate in Pakistan
On May 25th 2018, Pakistan’s senate passed a constitutional amendment that merges the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) – a patch of mountainous land snaking along parts of the Afghan border –...
View ArticleBeing Gay under India’s Constitution
Being homosexual in India is like having studied abroad. It gives the speaker a permeant topic of conversation. But consensual gay sex is illegal in India – it has been, ever since the British hastily...
View ArticleMango Scented Sovereignty: Pakistan’s Chief Justice Saqib Nisar and Baba-justice
The Supreme Court’s primary role is to shield citizens from the abuses of sovereign power, scribbled Alexander Hamilton in an essay with the clunky title The Federalist No. 78. In itself, the Court...
View ArticleMurder in the Name of Allah: Asia Bibi and Pakistan’s Blasphemy Law
“Every time a lower court sentences someone to death for insulting the Prophet, the Supreme Court eventually jumps in and lets the wrongdoer off death row,” Afzal Qadri, an old man with a greyish...
View ArticleTo Catch a Spy: India v. Pakistan at the ICJ
Court encounters between Pakistan and India usually entail twenty-two sweaty men batting and jumping after a cricket ball in stadiums financed with Saudi oil-money. This time around however, the court...
View Article“Twenty Years of Selfless Service”: The Unmaking of India’s Chief Justice
Ranjan Gogoi is a man of firsts. When he took the oath as India’s Chief Justice on 3 October 2018, he was the first Assamese to do so; the first sworn in by a dalit (former untouchable caste)...
View ArticleKashmir: A Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy
In the mid 19th century, sovereignty was transactional. This held particularly true for colonial enterprises. The British, for instance, auctioned off large chunks of conquered land to rich merchants....
View ArticleHow Old is 14 Really? On Child Marriage and Case-by-Case Justice
In 2011, German authorities put a sudden halt to the six-months grace period during which minors could continue to use driving licenses acquired abroad. Until then, kids fortunate enough to get their...
View ArticlePakistan’s Reluctant Constitutionalism
Not too long ago, a middle-aged Pashtun guava seller in one of Lahore’s upscale markets, dressed in what cosmopolitan fashionistas will eventually appropriate as Taliban street-chic, whispered to me in...
View ArticleAfghanistan’s Constitution between Sharia Law and International Human Rights
In February 2006, the 41-year old Afghan national Abdul Rahman was arrested in Kabul. Rahman’s family had reported him to the authorities. In an emotionally charged interview some days after the arrest...
View ArticleHow not to Divorce Muslim Women in India
Five years ago, during an extended tea break in Cambridge’s architecturally underwhelming University Library, a grad school friend of mine observed that her research topic, the Uniform Civil Code in...
View ArticlePrivacy and the Indian Supreme Court
Privacy, in something close to its current form, first appeared as a concept in the nineteenth century, the invention of Western legists, who, as the world recovered from enlightenment’s birth pangs,...
View ArticleFour Indian Supreme Court Judges Accuse the Chief Justice of Wrongdoing
‘The administration of the court is not in order!’, fumed Jasti Chelameswar of the Indian Supreme Court on 12 January, 2018, from the lawn of his luxuriant Lutyen’s bungalow, where the occasional...
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