NLSIU PACT Conference | Project on Pluralist Agreement and Constitutional Transformation

The National Law School of India University (NLSIU) will host a conference on August 2nd and 3rd, 2024, in Bengaluru as part of the Pluralist Agreement and Constitutional Transformation (PACT) Project.

PACT is an international collaboration, that aims to produce cutting-edge scholarship on India’s constitutional founding, establish a new digital archive on Indian constitution making, and learn from historical and contemporary public engagements with the Constitution. Led by SOAS University of London, PACT collaborators include the Universities of Oxford, York, the Centre for Law and Policy Research, Bengaluru and NLSIU. 

Theme

The conference will explore Indian constitution-making as a process of reaching pluralist agreement between contending actors and constitutional transformation over time, through three lines of enquiry

• First, what were the types of counter-majoritarian proposals put forward by advocates of individual freedoms and group rights in India between 1928-50? What were the constitutional alternatives offered by those outside the Constituent Assembly?
• Second, what was the relationship between the procedures adopted in the Indian Constituent Assembly’s deliberations, and its outcomes with regard to pluralism? How did the division of the Assembly’s work into various committees, decision making processes and the timing and sequencing of proposals enable or hinder the accommodation of diversity?
• Third, what forms of participation and civic engagement are enabled by the extensive constitutional archive available today? In what ways is this archive used to bolster contemporary appeals to constitutional values and principles?

Keynote Speakers 

Hon’ble Mrs. Justice B. V. Nagarathna, Supreme Court of India

Hon’ble Mrs. Justice B V Nagarathna will deliver the conference closing keynote on the topic ‘Home in the Nation: Indian Women’s Constitutional Imaginaries’. This closing keynote address will be delivered on August 3, 2024, 5 PM, at The Falcon’s Den, Prestige Falcon Tower No. 19, Brunton Road. Hon’ble Justice Bangalore Venkataramiah Nagarathna is a Judge of the Supreme Court of India. She served as a Judge of the Karnataka High Court from 2008 to 2021. She is in line to become the first female Chief Justice of India in 2027. The poster for this session can be accessed here.

Prof. Pratap Bhanu Mehta

Pratap Bhanu Mehta is the Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University. Prof. Pratap Bhanu Mehta will deliver the opening keynote address on August 2, 2024, 9:15 AM, at the NLSIU Training Centre. He was previously Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University, and President, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi. He has previously taught at Harvard, Ashoka University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and has been Global Faculty at NYU Law School. He has published widely in political theory, history of ideas, Indian constitutional law and politics in India. He is the author of The Burden of Democracy (Penguin 2003) and has produced several edited volumes. He is (most recently) co-editor with Madhav Khosla and Sujit Choudhary of The Oxford Handbook to the Indian Constitution. His forthcoming work looks at philosophical ideas about religion in 20th-century India. The poster for this session can be accessed here.

Conference Panels

The conference will comprise 5 panels that will be organised on August 2nd (full day) and August 3rd (first half) at the NLSIU campus.

Day 1: August 2, 2024
Venue: Training Centre, NLSIU

9 am to 9.05 am – Welcome and Introduction | Sudhir Krishnaswamy, NLSIU and Rochana Bajpai, SOAS University London

9.05 am to 10.00 am – Opening Keynote | Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Princeton University

10.15 am to 11.45 – Panel I : Studying India’s Constitutional Founding: Methods and Archives
(Discussant: Sidharth Chauhan, NLSIU)

Paper Presentations:
Quantitative Analysis of Borrowing in the Indian Constitution | Sudhir Krishnaswamy, NLSIU
Our Constitution: The Archive of Constitutional Expectations | Ornit Shani, Haifa University and Rohit De, Yale University
Constitutional Debates in the Indian Journal of Political Science in the 1940s | TT Arvind, York Law School

12.00 to 1.30 pm – Panel II: Key Constitutional Choices: Democracy, Federalism and Social Transformation (Discussant: Karthick Ram Manoharan, NLSIU)

Paper Presentations:
Indian Constitution and Indian Democracy: A Divergent History | Shruti Kapila, Cambridge University, Visiting Professor, NLSIU
India’s Directive Principles: Clarifying Origins and Fate in the Early Republic | Vineeth Krishna, Centre for Law and Policy Research
From Federation to National State: Self, Other and Stranger in the Indian Founding | Moiz Tundawala, Oxford University
Making the Twain Meet: India, Kashmir, and the Constitutionalizing of Difference | Rouf Dar, University of Kashmir

2.30 to 4.30 pm – Panel III: Forgotten Histories of Constitution Making (Discussant: Sanjay Jain, NLSIU)

Paper Presentations:
Implications of Introducing Gender into the History of Constitution-making in India | Achyut Chetan, St Xaviers University
Beyond the Hollow Crown: The Chimeric Constructions of Puddukottai’s Reform Efforts | Bharath Gururaghavendran, New York University
Exclusion of Pasmanda Muslims and Dalit Christians from the Scheduled Caste Quota | Arvind Kumar, Royal Holloway, Universtiy of London (Virtual)
The National Archives and Indian Constitutional History: Perspectives and Experiences | Sarfaraz Hamid, Archival Researcher
The Quill Project: Modelling the Negotiation of the Indian Constitution | Lauren Davis, University of Oxford

Day 2: August 3, 2024
Venue: Conference Panels at Training Centre, NLSIU | Keynote at Prestige Falcon, Brunton Road

9.30 am to 11.00 am – Panel IV: Minority Rights in Indian Constitutionalism
(Moderator: Anwesha Ghosh, NLSIU; Discussant: Salmoli Choudhuri, NLSIU)

Paper Presentations:
Minorities and the Un-making of Indian Democracy | Aparna Chandra, NLSIU
Constitution-Making and the Cultural & Educational Rights of Minorities: The Statement of a New Research Agenda | Adrija Ghosh, Oxford University
Sanatanist Claims to the Constituent Assembly of India | Manas Raturi, Oxford University (Virtual)
A Brief History of the Scheduling Discourse in late-Colonial India (1918-1950) | Saagar Tewari, Jindal Global University
Sieving Silence: The Archive of Indian Constitutional History | Kanika Gauba, Univeristy of Birkbeck (Virtual)

11.15 am to 1.15 pm – Panel V: Deliberative Institutions in Indian Constitutionalism
(Discussant: Aishwarya Birla, NLSIU; Moderator: Megha Sharma, NLSIU)

Paper Presentations:
Rethinking Hegemony through the Indian Constituent Assembly | Rochana Bajpai, SOAS University of London
‘The Indian Parliament: Deliberation and Representation’ | Udit Bhatia, University of York
Parliament and Difference: Parliamentarianism and Development in a Divided Society | Sandipto Dasgupta, The New School for Social Research
The Radical Democratic Party (RDP) and Parliamentary Constitutionalism | Tejas Parasher, University of California, Los Angeles (Virtual)
Quasi-Democratic Imaginations: Envisioning the Parliamentary Opposition in the Constituent Assembly| Rupak Kumar, Vellore Institute of Technology

1.15 pm to 1.30 pm – Closing Remarks and Thanks | Rochana Bajpai and/or Sudhir Krishnaswamy

5.15 pm to 6.30 pm – Closing Keynote | Honourable Justice Nagarathna, Supreme Court of India, Prestige Falcon Towers

Contact

For any queries, reach out to  

Please note: Given the limitations on seating capacity, all panels including the opening keynote address will accom0date guests/attendees on first come, first served, basis.