In this essay Qazi Shibli and Sajad Hameed look at the latest eviction drives in Indian controlled Kashmir. While claiming to retrieve encroached state land, the Union Territory administration is de facto illegally erasing years of land reform. Both from a historical and a legal perspective, the evictions appear as the latest episode of the ... Read more

This essay focuses on the custodial violence endured by a rural youth in Kashmir booked under the draconian Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act, 1978 in the hands of the Indian administration. Rupsa Dey explores the economic burden, the traumatic consequences of the Act and the brutality of the Special Operations Groups that enforce these ... Read more

In this article, Nikita Jain and Mohd Abuzar Chaudhary reconstruct the successive amendments that have made the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) an increasingly more draconian law. Intended to prevent terrorist activities, UAPA has de facto become the instrument of choice that the Indian government uses to silence opposition and criminalize voices of dissent.

Law and violence are thought to share an antithetical relationship in postcolonial modernity. Violence is considered the other of law, lawlessness is understood to produce violence, and law is invoked and deployed to undo the violence of lawlessness. Violent Modernities uses a critical legal perspective to show that law and violence in the New India ... Read more