CVP213 | Violence, Law and Politics in India

The proposed course seeks to introduce students to key concepts and debates on violence, sovereignty, authority and constitutionalism in India. Violence is an important variable that shapes politics and society in India. To deny its hold, to be oblivion to the relationship it has with India’s democratic structures and processes is to miss an integral variable that shapes political experience in India today. However, scholarly attention on this key conceptual category has been far and few and unsystematic.

The central thematic of the course is to systematically explore the relationship between violence and politics in India. Towards this the entire course is structured in three parts. The first part of the course tries to give a philosophical exposition of this relationship. There are three ways in which politics-violence relationship has been understood: related, antithetical to each other, or violence is to be kept at the margins of the society.

After this we move on to India and look at how this has played out here. We undertake the survey of literature on themes relating to violence and politics in India under three broad heads. How it has been understood theoretically and historically, legally, and anthropologically?

The debate on transformative role of Indian constitutionalism and its practice has preoccupied legal theorists in India. Hence, moving forward the last part of the course is occupied with the many lives of law of law in India and its capacity to engender civility and norms for peaceful adjudication.

Since normative regime of law is generally considered instrumental in taming violence, the last two weeks takes on this important debate with regard to the scholarship on Indian constitutionalism. The central problematic posed here is whether the normative rule of law as an adjudicator been able to produce its hegemony in India? Here two short visual documentaries have also been included to give a broader sense of the theory and practice of rule of law.

With a broad view to understand the relationship between Violence, Law and politics in India, the course is brings together three different kinds of reading materials: the theoretical, legal and the anthropological.