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Full-Text Articles in Law

In Search Of Vanished Blood, Ashok Agrwaal Sep 2008

In Search Of Vanished Blood, Ashok Agrwaal

Ashok Agrwaal

Deaths in custody/ disappearance from custody are endemic in India and, have been so throughout its independent history. The reasons for this state of affairs are complex and, it would not be correct to assign the entire responsibility for it to any one factor, or pillar of the nation-state. However, there can be no gainsaying that the defects in the approach of the judiciary have played a pivotal role in the failure of the guarantee of the right to life. The report examines some of these shortcomings, using the aperture provided by one of the world’s best known legal remedies, …


Law's Autonomy, Ashok Agrwaal Sep 2007

Law's Autonomy, Ashok Agrwaal

Ashok Agrwaal

Like entropy, autonomy exists. As such, the existence of autonomy does not need any law or laws, beyond itself and its nature. Autonomy can, therefore, be said to be an "original" state of human kind; or at least of the individual. Law, which is frequently seen as preserving/ maximising/ conferring autonomy is actually a device to usurp autonomy. The paper looks at a specific example of how the nation-state, the most powerful usurper of autonomies created till date, arrogates autonomy to itself, in the name of ‘public interest’. Needless to say, in the hands of the state, autonomy translates into …


Bandipora Redux: A Tale From Two Insurgencies, Ashok Agrwaal Feb 2004

Bandipora Redux: A Tale From Two Insurgencies, Ashok Agrwaal

Ashok Agrwaal

This artixcle is based upon my work on State impunity in the context of the guaranteed right to life, in Punjab and Kashmir. The Indian state has fought insurgencies almost throughout its independent history: from Nagaland to Punjab, Andhra Pradesh to Kashmir, from the early 1950s to date. Among the many different kinds of human rights violations that the Indian security forces have been charged with, is the recurring charge that they force local people to act as 'human shields' \with a view to minimising uniformed casualties. These reports have been denied by the authorities who routinely provide other reasons, …


State Repression: Behind The Mask Of Democracy ..., Ashok Agrwaal May 2002

State Repression: Behind The Mask Of Democracy ..., Ashok Agrwaal

Ashok Agrwaal

There has never been a satisfactory solution to the problem of handling / controlling political power, albeit the liberal claim that theirs is the best of the possible solutions known to human history. Notwithstanding the rhetoric justifying the creation and evolution of the modern nation-state, which focuses on its potential – through the ‘Rule of Law’ – to be more just and egalitarian than any other system of organised political power, there is overwhelming empirical evidence to show that things have not changed very much. States continue to repress their citizens in all manner of ways. The difference being that, …