Prof. Dr. Anuj Bhuwania
Areas of Interest
- Constitutionalism
- Federalism
- Consociationalism
Project Description
My research project is an intervention in the debates on democratic backsliding that has characterised the field of comparative constitutional law in the last few years. I argue that a historical understanding of the differential constitutional experiences in the various countries experiencing these illiberal trends would significantly enrich these debates. While these debates increasingly hyphenate India with Hungary and Turkey, it is usually missed that there has been hardly any recent move to significantly amend the Indian constitution unlike in the latter two countries. This is because, I argue, the Indian constitution is actually remarkably compatible with majoritarian authoritarianism. To explain this argument, I revisit the historical circumstances leading to Indian constitutional drafting to highlight the centralisation and concentration of power it enabled.
Biography
Professor, Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat (India)
Senior Visiting Fellow, Cluster of Excellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script” (SCRIPTS), International Research College, Berlin (Germany)
Smuts Visiting Research Fellowship in Commonwealth Studies, University of Cambridge (UK)
Senior Fellow, M.S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies ‘Metamorphoses of the Political’ (ICAS:MP), Max-Weber-Kolleg Erfurt & University of Gottingen (Germany)
Associate Professor, School of Law, Governance and Citizenship, Ambedkar University Delhi (India)
DAAD Visiting Professor, Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen (Germany)
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi (India)
Visiting Associate Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi (India)
Assistant Professor, Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat (India)
Relevant Publications
- Bhuwania, Anuj. “The Indian Supreme Court in the Modi era” (blog post). International Association of Constitutional Law (IACL-AIDC) Global Roundtable on "Democracy 2020: Assessing Constitutional Decay, Breakdown and Renewal Worldwide." 23 November 2020.
- Bhuwania, Anuj. “The Case that Felled a City: Examining the Politics of Public Interest Litigation through one Case.” SAMAJ: South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 17 (2018).
- Bhuwania, Anuj. Courting the People: Public Interest Litigation in Post-Emergency India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
- Bhuwania, Anuj. “Public Interest Litigation as a Slum Demolition Machine.” Projections: MIT Journal of Planning 12 (2016): 67–97.
- Bhuwania, Anuj. “Courting the People: The Rise of Public Interest Litigation in Post-Emergency India.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, no. 2 (2014): 314–35.
- Bhuwania, Anuj. “Black Friday: Mediation and the Impossibility of Justice,” Working Paper Series of the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance 17. Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 2012.
- Bhuwania, Anuj. “’Very Wicked Children’: ‘Indian Torture’ and the Madras Torture Commission Report of 1855.” Sur: International Journal on Human Rights 6, no. 10 (2009): 7–26.
- Bhuwania, Anuj. “The ‘Law’ of the Police.” In Sarai Reader 07: Frontiers, edited by Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Ravi Sundaram, 134–43. Delhi: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2007.
