Statement by Academics and Activists on the Harassment of Ashis Nandy and a Demand for Withdrawal of Spurious Charges Levied Against Him

We write to protest in the strongest possible terms against the charges of criminal offence levied against Ashis Nandy, a political psychologist, sociologist and an internationally renowned public intellectual of the highest caliber. This is the latest case of harassment of intellectuals, journalists, artists, and public figures by antidemocratic forces that claim to speak on behalf of Hindu values sometimes and patriotism at other times, especially in Gujarat, but who have little understanding of either. What is pernicious in this case is that the charge of criminal offence against Nandy levied under Section 153 (A) and (B) for his newspaper article “Blame the Middle Classes” was brought by the head of the Gujarat Branch of the National Council of Civil Liberties. The State Government of Gujarat by giving its permission for filing the case has shown its own complicity in the case.

It seems part of the strategy of the most intolerant sections of Indian society today to make a cynical use the language of civil liberties to achieve ends that are the opposite of what the aspirations to civil liberties and the struggles over them represent. The harassment of well-known intellectuals and artists hides we fear, the daily intimidation being faced by members of minorities and especially the Muslims in Gujarat. We demand that all the charges against Professor Nandy be immediately dropped. We understand that there is a great deal of anxiety in Gujarat today about its lost honour. It might help to remind ourselves that this honour or “asmita” will not be gained by acts of violence and intimidation but by recovering or discovering the humanity of each other. Gujarat can and will regain its own destiny by remembering the politics of nonviolence, as one of its sons by the name of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi once taught the nation and the world.

1.Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University, USA.
2.Homi Bhabha, Harvard University, USA
3.Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Center for Policy Research, Delhi, India
4.Gananath Obeyesekere, Princeton University, USA
5.Pratiksha Baxi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India
6. Saurabh Dube, El Colegio de Mexico
7. Diana Eck, Harvard University, USA
8.Sanjay Subrahmaniam, University of California at Los Angeles, USA
9.Lawrence Cohen, University of California Berkeley, USA
10.Sasanka Perera, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka
11. Jonathan Spencer, University of Edinburgh, UK
12.Flavia Agnes, Legal Center of Majlis, Mumbai, india
13. Harsh Mandar, Aman Biradari, Delhi, india
14. Uma Chakravarty, Independent Scholar, Delhi, India
15.Hent de Vries, Johns Hopkins University, USA
16. Ravinder Kaur, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India
17. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, University of California Berkeley, USA
18. Akhil Gupta, University of California Los Angeles, USA
19.Ishita Bannerjee, El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico
20.Nivedita Menon, University of Delhi, India
21.Deepak Mehta, University of Delhi, India
22. Nirja Gopal Jayal, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
23. Srimati Basu, University of Kentucky, USA
24. Pamela Reynolds, Johns Hopkins University, USA
25. Perveez Mody, University of Cambridge UK
26. Janaki Abraham, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India
27. Rajni Palriwala, University of Delhi, India
28. Kalpana Kannabiran, NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad
29.Stewart Motha, Kent Law School, UK
30. Anand Pandian, Johns Hopkins University, USA
31.Vikram Vyas, St. Stephens College, University of Delhi
32.Maria Pia de Bella, CNRS-IRSI-EHESS, Paris
33. Gil Anidjar, Columbia University, USA
34. Lawrence Liang, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore
35 Ranendra K Das, Johns Hopkins University, USA
36. Stanley Samarsinghe, Tulane University, USA
37.Kavi Bhalla, Harvard Initiative for Global Health, USA
38.Naveeda Khan, Johns Hopkins University, USA
39 C K Raju, Center for Studies in Civilizations, Delhi, India
40. Asha Singh, Lady Irwin College, University of Delhi, Delhi.
41 Sanjay Barbora, Panos Institute South Asia, Guwahati, India
42.K. Tudor Silva, University of Peradinya, Sri Lanka
43. Ashok Xavier, Loyola College, Chennai, India
44. Rada Ivekovic, College international de philosophie, Paris
45. Vasuki Nesiah, Brown University, USA
46. Nermeen Shaikh, Asia Society, New York, USA
47. Mani Shekhar Singh, Independent Scholar, Delhi
48. Kavita Misra, Columbia University, USA
49. Christopher Stone, Hunter College, New York, USA
50.Arjun Appadurai, New School University, USA
51.Fredrique-Appfel Marglin, Smith College, USA
52. Ailli Trip, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
53. Nayanika Mookherjee, Lancaster University, UK
54. Sanjay Reddy, University of Columbia, USA
55.Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago, USA
56. Sanmay Das, Ransellier Polytechnic Institute, USA
57. Mohan Trivedi, University of California, San Diego, USA
58.Kamala Visweswaran, University of Texas at Austin, USA
59.Banu Subramaniam, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA
60.Geeta Patel, University of Virginia, USA
61.Ajay Sakaria, University of Minnesota, USA
62.Gloria Goodwin Raheja, University of Minnesota, USA
63.Farah Aziz, Journalist, Mumbai, India
64.Pankj Mishra, Writer, New York, USA
65.Uday Mehta, Amherst College, USA
66.Qadri Ismail, University of Minnesota, USA
67. Rachel Dwyer, University of London, UK
68. Michael Dwyer, Publisher, London, UK
69.Bhaskar Sarkar, UC Santa Barbara, USA
70.Ashok Dhareshwar, Washington, DC, USA
71.Mahdi Almandrja, University Mohammad V Rabat, Morocco
72. Richard Falk, Princeton University, USA
73. Piya Chatterjee, UC Riverside, USA
74 Ann Grodzins Gold, Syracuse University, New York
75. Sunil Bhavsar, San Diego, California, USA
76.Simone Sawhney, University of Minnesota, USA
77.Gyanendra Pandey, Emory University, USA
78.Sabina Sawhney, Hofstra University, New York, USA
79.Vivek Dhareshwar, Center for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, India
80. Adel Wessell, Southern Cross University, Australia
81. Baden Oxford, Southern Cross University, Australia
82. Indira Chowdhury, ARCH, Bangalore, India.
83. Jerry Pinto, Journalist, Mumbai, India.
84. Andrea Pinto, Librarian, Mumbai, India.
85.Sruti Chaganthi, Center for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, India
86.David Loy, Xavier University, Ohio, USA
87.Jan Obevg, Transnational Foundation, Sweden
88. Vrinda Grover, Marg, Delhi
89.Mahua Sarkar, Binghamton University, USA
90.Joseph Borocz, Rutgers University, USA
91.Megha Subramanian, University of Southern California, LA, USA
92. Nayanika Mookherjee, Lancaster University, UK
93.Pradeep Jeganathan, International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka
94. Malathi de Alwis, International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka
95.Ein Lal, Independent Film Maker, Delhi, India
96.Shastri Ramachandran, Journalist, the Tribune, Chandigarh, India
97. Rita Brara, University of Delhi, India.
98. V.Venkatesan, Journalist, Frontline, Delhi
99. Debamitra Kar, Pearson Education, Delhi, India
100.Maitreyi Krishnan, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, India
101.Ponni Arasu, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, India
102.Manoranjani Thomas, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, India
103. Mayur Suresh, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, India
104. Prashant Iyengar, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, India
105. Namita Malhotra, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, India
106. Clifton Rosario, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, India
107. Arvind Narrain, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, India
108. Jiti Nichani, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, India
109. Usha R, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, India
110. Siddhartha Narrian, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, India
111. Anand Chokhwala, Surat, India
112. Nayana M Trivedi, Scripps Memorial Hospital, San Diego, California, USA
113. Munira A Basnai, NIH, Bathesda, USA
114. Attila Melegh, Corvinus University, Hungary.
115. Gauri Viswanathan, Columbia University, USA
116.Bhrigupati Singh, Johns Hopkins University, USA
117. Prerna Singh, Princeton University, USA
118. Saumya Das, Mass. General hospital, Cambridge, USA
119.Ranjini Obesesekere, Independent Scholar, Sri Lanka
120. Sithie Tiruchelvam, Tiruchelvam Associates, Colombo, Sri Lanka
121.Jonathan Parry, London School of Economics, London, UK
122. Manav Ratti, Oxford University, UK
123. Priyamvada Gopal, University of Cambridge, UK
124.Harsh Pant, King’s College, London, UK
125. Keya Ganguli, University of Minnesota, USA
126. Joshua Castollino, Middlesex University, UK
127. Sudeshna Guha, Univeristy of Cambridge, UK
128. Debjani Ganguli, Australian National University, Australia
129.Kavita Daiya, George Washington University, USA
130. Jonathan Woolf, University of Liverpool, UK
131. Soumhya Venkatesan, University of Manchester, UK
132.Kriti Kapila, University of Cambridge, UK
133. Shirin Rail, University of Warwick, UK
134. Radmila Nakarada, University of Belgrade, Serbia
135. Gul Khattak, Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Islamabad, Pakistan
136. Suketu Bhavsar, Cal Poly, Pomona USA
137. Jishnu Das, Center for Policy Research, Delhi, India
138.Swati Chattopadhyay, UC Santa Barbara, USA
139.Dineshwar Tiwari, Deshkal Society, Delhi, India
140. Ranjeet Nirguni, Deshkal Society, Delhi, India
141.Mary JaJehanbegaloo, University of Toronto, Canada
142.. Imtiaz Ahmad, Dhaka University, Bangladesh
143. Shard Chandra Behar, Bhopal, MP, India
144.Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University, USA
145. Aamir Mufti, UC Los Angeles, USA
146.Nauman Naqvi, Brown University, USA
147. Steven Caton, Harvard University, USA
148. Ziauddin Sardar, City University, London, UK
149. Ohashi Masaki, Keisen University, Japan
150. Jessica Marglin Princeton University, USA
151. J. Mohan Rao, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA
152. Sylvia Marcos, Center for Psycho-ethnological Research, Cuernavaca, Mexico
153. Jean Robert, Architect, Mexico
154. Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University, USA
155. Rajeev Bhargav, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi
156. Baber Johansen, Harvard University, USA
157. Srirupa Roy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA
158. Fredrique-Apffel Marglin, Smith College, Northampton, USA
159. Shudana Yusaf, Princeton University, USA
160. Sudhir Kakra, Psychoanalyst and Writer, Goa, India
161.Daho Djerba, University of Algeria, Algeria
162. Upendra Baxi, Warwick University, UK
163. Harsh Kapoor, South Asia Citizen’s Web
164.Govinda Rath, G.B.Pant institute of Social Sciences, Allahabad, India
165.William Connolly, Johns Hopkins University, USA
166.Dipankar Gupta, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India
167.Indrani Chatterjee, Rutgers University, Delhi
168. Peter Ronald deSouza, Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Simla
169. Triloki Madan, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, India
170. Mara Kamdar, World Policy Institute, New York, USA

Varun Gauri

Varun Gauri is Senior Economist in the Development Research Group of the World
Bank. His research focuses on politics and governance in the social sectors and
aims to combine quantitative and qualitative methods in economics and social
science research. His research has addressed HIV/AIDS policies in Brazil, South
Africa, and Mozambique, basic immunization in Pakistan, the behavior of
development NGOs in Bangladesh and Uganda, payment modalities for health care
providers in Costa Rica and Nigeria, litigation for social and economic rights
in developing countries, and the relationship between international human rights
treaties and development outcomes. He is the author of School Choice in Chile:
Two Decades of Educational Reform. He has published widely in development
journals, including World Development, the Journal of Development Studies,
Studies in Comparative International Development, World Bank Research Observer,
and Health Policy and Planning. Since joining the World Bank in 1996, he has
also worked on and led a variety of operational and analytic tasks, including
project and program evaluations, investments in privately owned hospitals,
health care decentralization, and public expenditure reviews.

Geetanjali Srikantan

Geetanjali Srikantan is a doctoral student at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore. Her research interests lie in the area of law and religion. Her present research which draws from jurisprudence and legal history revolves around the site of the religious place.

Gauri Nanayakkara

Gauri Nanayakkara, an Attorney-at-Law from Sri Lanka, is currently researching on performers’ rights in Sri Lanka for the doctoral thesis at the University of Kent, UK. She possesses a Master of Laws from the Queen Mary University of London, UK on Communications and Computer Law. She has been working as a private practitioner and subsequently as a State Counsel at the Attorney General’s Department of Sri Lanka prior to joining the University of Kent. In addition to her research work she also teaches at the University.

Saptarshi Mandal

Saptarshi Mandal is a student of law at the National University of Juridical Sciences in Kolkata. His primary interest is in understanding the relationship between law and marginality. He seeks to do this by bringing together perspectives from Dalit, Queer, Disability and Feminist studies and the way law interacts with each of these. He has been working on the idea of jurisprudence of caste, and has published on Dalit conceptions of justice and the legal discourse around manual scavenging. At present, he is working on the theme of disability and citizenship, of which the present effort is a part.

Renu Addlakha

Renu Addlakha, Ph.D. is senior fellow at the Centre for Women's Development studies, New Delhi. Her areas of specialisation include the sociology of medicine, mental illness and the psychiatric profession, public health, anthropology of infectious diseases, bioethics, gender and the family, disability and society. She has published in peer reviewed national and international journals. She is the author of 'Deconstructing mental illness: An ethnography of psychiatry, women and the family (2008).

Rajshree Chandra Ahuja

Rajshree Chandra Ahuja, doctoral researcher at JNU, has been teaching at LSR and Janki Devi Memorial College for a number of years in the Department of Political Science, Delhi University. She was awarded her Masters and M.Phil degrees from CPS, JNU. Rajshree recently submitted her doctoral thesis entitled "Intellectual Property Rights and the Politics of Knowledge" at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, JNU. The thesis examines IP rights as a rights claim examining both the ontological criterion as well as the consequentialist premises of IP rights.

Ahilan Kadirgamar

Ahilan Kadirgamar is an activist with the Sri Lanka Democracy Forum. He has written about the international dimension of the conflict and peace process in Sri Lanka and worked on human rights concerns related to the conflict. His current interests include the political economy of state-society relations and attempts at constitutional reform in Sri Lanka.

Proposed Panel on Labour, Livelihoods and the State

This panel for the forthcoming LASSNET conference on Law and Social
Sciences in South Asia aims to explore the conception of a 'worker'
who is the object of legal protection. How have the state and law
imagined the 'worker'; what have been the shifts and continuity in the
law; why have certain categories of work and livelihoods been
privileged over others, and in what manner; what are the implications
of legal protection/ exclusion; and what are the costs the 'worker'
and organizations/collectivities have to bear for inclusion in such
legal coverage.

Papers from plural perspectives are welcomed.

Please email: Prabhu Mohapatra (prabhuayan@gmail.com) and Kamala
Sankaran (kamala.sankaran@gmail.com)

MANAS RAY

Manas Ray is a Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. He has written on cultural and film theory, ethics, governmentality, the Indian diaspora, and post-partition Calcutta and has been published in collections like Global Television: views from the periphery (OUP, London, 1998), Floating Lives: negotiating cultural identity through media (Rowman and Littlefield, New York, 2002), Media of the Diaspora (Routledge, New York, 2003), City Flicks (Seagull, Calcutta 2004), Partitioned Lives (Pearson Longman, Delhi, 2007) and Penguin Anthology of Writings on Calcutta (New Delhi, 2008). At present, he is working towards a monograph entitled, Theorizing the Illiberal: essays on sovereignty and (neo)liberal technologies of governance.

Tarunabh Khaitan

Tarunabh completed his undergraduate law degree from National Law School, Bangalore in 2004 and the BCL and M.Phil. from Oxford thereafter. He is currently finishing his doctorate on comparative aspects of anti-discrimination law and teaches constitutional law to Oxford undergraduates. His past research activities include a conference paper on the use of litigation as a political tool by social interest groups; and another on the characterisation of the crimes committed in Gujarat 2002 under international criminal law. A forthcoming article deals with the equality jurisprudence under the Indian constitution and the extremely deferential standards of review evolved by the Supreme Court, which has ensured that Article 15(1) remains a non-starter. More broadly, his research interests include studying constitutional, criminal and family law from socio-legal and comparative perspectives.

Priya Thangarajah

Priya Thangarajah is currently a Law student at the National Law School of India University. She is Sri Lankan and has worked on a range of Human Rights issues related to conflict for the past three years and continues to do so intermittently from India and when she visits Sri Lanka. In India, she works consistently with a number of independent collectives with a focus on issues of gender and sexuality. More recently she has been involved in research and writing around issues of queer women and the law in India. Her primary areas of focus are gender, sexuality and conflict related issues.

Rajendra Pradhan

Rajendra Pradhan is currently the Chair of Social Science Baha, an NGO dedicated to promoting social sciences in Nepal. He received his doctorate in sociology from the University of Delhi but prefers to call himself an anthropologist. A researcher with varied research interests, he has studied religion among the Hindu Newars of Kathmandu, the care of the elderly in a Dutch village, food beliefs and practices in the Nepal Tarai, (irrigation) water rights and history and culture of water in Nepal, traditional dispute resolution processes, social exclusion and inclusion and more recently an ethnography of the state.

Over the past 12 odd years, he has developed an interest in and used legal anthropological and especially legal pluralism perspectives for his research search on water rights, dispute process and ethnography of the state.

He has published numerous articles and edited several books including Water Rights, Conflict and Policy (1997), Water, Land and Law: Changing Rights to Land and Water in Nepal (2000), Law, History and Culture of Water in Nepal (2003), Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law in Social, Economic and Political Development (2003). He is currently working on several books, including on Legal Anthropology and Traditional Disputing Processes in Nepal and on an ethnography of the state-citizen interaction at the local level.

Email address rpradhan@soscbaha.org

May 29 South Asia Lunch at Montreal LSA Meeting

Please join us
for the annual
South Asia CRN Lunch
at this year's Law and Society Meeting
in Montreal, Canada.

The lunch will take place on
Thursday, May 29, from 12.30-2pm
at
the Brasserie Brunoise,
1012 de la Montagne:
http://www.brunoise.ca/brasserie/index.html

Please RSVP Mitra Sharafi (mitrasharafi@ yahoo.com)
by Tuesday, May 27
if you plan to attend (partners welcome).

Directions from conference area: walk west from the Place Bonaventure approximately five blocks along boulevard Rene Levesque Ouest, rue de la Gauchetiere, or boulevard St. Antoine Ouest. Early on, you will pass Marie Reine du Monde cathedral. The restaurant is on a cross-street,
rue de la Montagne, between Rene Levesque and de la Gauchetiere. If you reach the campus of Concordia University, you have gone 1-2 blocks too far.

Map: http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&q=brasserie+brunoise&near=Montreal,+QC,+Canada&fb=1&cid=0,0,1368105787806840336&sa=X&oi=local_result&resnum=1&ct=image)




We look forward to seeing you there.

-Mitra Sharafi & Marc Galanter
(University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Meeting at Law and Society, Montreal

Dear All,



As this fascinating network grows …and plans get into place for the first inaugural conference at JNU – there is much to talk and engage about. I imagine there are some of us here who are heading to the L&S meeting in Montreal? With that round the corner – I thought it would be a great idea (possibly highly ambitious given diaries?!) to try and convene a meeting there – nothing more serious that food and drinks. Though, with plans to scheme something for LASS/JNU?



Any takers – please drop me a line at dwijenr@gmail.com



Best,



Dwijen



Dr Dwijen Rangnekar

CSGR/Law

University of Warwick, UK

Email: d.rangnekar@warwick.ac.uk

Ph: +44 +24 7652 8906

Fax: +44 + 24 7657 2548

http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/drangnekar

ESRC Project on Geographical Indications http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/feni