NLS PACT Conference | Project on Pluralist Agreement and Constitutional Transformation
July 15, 2024
The National Law School of India University (NLSIU) will host a conference on August 1st to 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 Address by Hon’ble Justice B. V. Nagarathna
The conference keynote will be delivered by Hon’ble Justice B V Nagarathna on the relevance of constitutional values in contemporary times and the role of women in Indian constitution-making. 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.
Venue and time for the keynote will be confirmed shortly.
Conference Panels
The conference will comprise 5 panels that will be organised on the August 2 (full day) and August 3 (first half) at the NLSIU. The finalised program will be published shortly. Here are some of the papers that will be presented:
Implications of introducing gender into the history of constitution-making in India
Dr Achyut Chetan, Dean of Faculty, Arts and Social Sciences, St Xaviers, Kolata
Constitution-Making and the Cultural and Educational Rights of Minorities: The Statement of a New Research Agenda
Adrija Ghosh, DPhil Candidate, University of Oxford
Beyond the Hollow Crown: The Chimeric Constructions of Pudukkottai’s Reform Efforts
Bharath Gururagavendran, Consultant, NYU Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice
Sieving Silence: The Archive of Indian Constitutional History
Kanika Gauba, PhD Candidate, Birkbeck, University of London.
From a federation to a nation-state: the self, other and stranger in the Indian founding.
Dr Moiz Tundawala, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Oxford, Associate Professor Jindal Global Law School
Making the Twain meet: India, Kashmir and the Constitutionalisation of Difference
Dr Rouf Dar, Researcher, University of Kashmir
Quasi-Democratic Imaginations: Envisioning the Parliamentary Opposition in the Constituent Assembly
Rupak Kumar, Assistant Professor, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore
A Brief History of the Scheduling Discourse in late-Colonial India (1918-1950)
Dr Saagar Tewari, Associate Professor Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities O.P. Jindal Global University
The Radical Democratic Party (RDP) and Parliamentary Constitutionalism
Dr Tejas Parasher, Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science and at the UCLA International Institute
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