Faculty Seminar | Consistent Discrepancies: Citizenship and the Language of the Gauhati High Court

Padmini Baruah, Assistant Professor at NLSIU, will present a paper titled “Consistent Discrepancies: Citizenship and the Language of the Gauhati High Court”. Darshana Mitra will be the discussant.

Abstract:

Given the sweeping and discriminatory waves of law and policy that have emerged in India with respect to the most crucial right of citizenship, it is essential that we understand the kind of hegemonic discourse that guides adjudicatory behaviours. It has been pointed out by almost every scholar working on the issue of citizenship in India that the courts and special tribunals making a majority of the rulings are not neutral sites where a static notion of ‘justice’ is upheld. In this piece, I seek to conduct an empirical investigation into the language of the Gauhati High Court, one of the most prolific courts of record dealing with writ petitions contesting citizenship cases. By examining the data from 1444 GHC judgments, I try to tease out patterns between the verdict that judges issue, and the identity of the litigant trying to defend their ‘right to have rights’. Further, using the tools of discourse analysis, I examine the text of 300 randomly sampled judgements to draw out how judges construct the body of the litigant in court. I argue that judges, by and large, create impossible standards for litigants which perpetuates the framework of otherisation which has been prevailing in the subcontinent since colonial rule. Thus, judges actively participate in the xenophobic project undergirding the citizenship regime.