1.

The story of demonetization reads like a thriller. It is a saga which had kept the nation riveted
– in queues outside moneyless banks and ATMs. On 8 November 2016, Prime Minister Modi
announced that from the midnight of the same day, India’s ₹1,000 and ₹500 rupee notes would
become worthless pieces of paper.

It was far worse than a run on a bank. Hundreds of millions of Indians were forced to drop
everything to stand in bank queues from early morning, often to return home empty-handed
and exhausted at the end of the day. Work came to a halt across the country as people struggled
to withdraw the basic amounts needed to be able to eat and live. The key protagonists and their
roles, the almost daily twists and turns in policy, the nationwide distress and inconvenience,
the sting operations and raids on hoarders of black money and corrupt bankers – all made for
fascinating copy and viewing, except for those whose livelihood it wiped out.

With respect to the cash being returned, the RBI initially posted frequent updates on the
quantum and value of the old ₹500 and ₹1000 being deposited in the banks. The number rose
from ₹5.44 trillion on 18 November to ₹8.45 trillion on 27 November and further to ₹11.55
trillion on 5 December 2016. It was only on 29 August 2018 that the RBI revealed in its 2017-
18 Annual Report, the final figures. Of the total ₹15,417.93 billion (15.41 lakh crores)
demonetized notes, ₹15,310.73 billion (15.31 lakh crores) had been returned, which
represented 99.35 per cent of the demonetized currency. The value of notes not returned was
₹10,720 crores (10.72 billion).

While the subsequent events are clear, what is not so clear is who planned the demonetization,
why 8 November was selected as the date, and on whose advice and on what assumptions this
major decision was taken. One of the many theories was that the decision was taken to divert
attention from a potentially disastrous revelation that could affect the reputation of the Prime
Minister, the alleged scenario bearing striking resemblance to the infamous Jain Hawala
Diaries case of 1991. In a landmark judgment related to this case, the Supreme Court ruled in
1997: ‘Whenever any record indicating illegal payments to public functionaries is recovered
by any government agency, a thorough and independent investigation must be undertaken.’

On 15 November 2016, the then Delhi CM alleged on the floor of the Delhi Legislative
Assembly that documents seized during raids by the income tax department purported to show
that the Prime Minister had received bribes during his tenure as the Chief Minister of Gujarat.
On the same day, senior advocate Prashant Bhushan, through his NGO Common Cause filed a
petition in the Supreme Court requesting action against those whose names featured in the
documents. However, on 11 January 2017, a bench of the Supreme Court comprising Justices
Arun Mishra and Amitava Roy dismissed the Common Cause petition, stating, ‘No democracy
can function when allegations are cast against constitutional functionaries without cogent
evidence.’

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from The Big Reverse: How Demonetization Knocked
India Out, by Meera H. Sanyal, Harper Business, 2018]
2.

In many ways, the anonymity in death is just a continuation of anonymity in life. One need not
go around too far in any part of the country before encountering such people. They are
homeless, living on the roads, behind temple walls, on and under bridges, or by the banks of
waterways now carrying sludge. That they survive in such harsh conditions has little do with
government. They have learnt to survive, sometimes using their own resources and sometimes
by the benevolence of others.

Over the years since Independence in 1947, various governments have tried to address this
segment of the population through a number of poverty alleviation programmes: old-age
pensions, employment guarantee schemes, PDS, midday meal programmes, and so on. Tamil
Nadu, for example, has been running a midday meal programme for children in government
schools since the 1960s. A study conducted has found that such schemes have increased the
school attendance of girls by 12%. Later, under Tamil Nadu chief minister J. Jayalalitha, the
state government launched a chain of low-cost restaurants providing basic food for as low as
Rs. 10 per plate.

What is common to many of these programmes is that they are solutions. Sangeet Paul
Choudhary in his books Platform Scale and Platform Revolution contrasts platforms with
pipes. In the pipe model, value gets created at one end (by the producers) and it gets consumed
at the other end (by the users). Hollywood produces movies at one end, distributes them through
cinema halls, television channels, DVDs, etc and at the other end of the supply chain, people
watch the movies. A platform, on the other hand, just attracts producers and consumers to it,
and enables transactions between them. YouTube lets producers post their videos and users
watch them. Value is created on the platform.

Aadhaar was built as a platform. Nandan Nilekani said that when they were building Aadhaar,
they took GPS and the Internet as inspirations. Both GPS and the Internet were US government
projects, and both had an hourglass architecture, allowing innovations above and below them.
Nilekani and team envisioned Aadhar as the stem of the hourglass, with innovations in devices
happening below the stem and innovations in applications happening above the stem.

Ruling on the constitutionality of the Aadhaar Act, 2016, the Supreme Court had ruled that
Aadhaar helps the disadvantaged sections lead a dignified life by assuring better targeting of
subsidies and state benefits and helps in effective realization of a range of socio-economic
rights. On the submission that it violates the right to privacy, the majority opinion of the court
was that it passed the three-fold test established in the landmark privacy
judgment, Puttaswamy, i.e. legality, need and proportionality. The sole dissenting judge in the
Aadhaar judgment, Justice DY Chandrachud held that informational privacy is an essential
aspect of the fundamental right to privacy. According to him, biometric data, collected as a part
of the Aadhaar process squarely fits into the realm of informational privacy and any storage,
collection or usage by the State of such information violates an individual’s right to privacy.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from The Aadhaar Effect: why the world’s largest identity
project matters, by N.S. Ramnath and Charles Assisi, Oxford University Press, 2018]
3.

Unlike the official narrative of the Indian Constitution, many have seen the document as a
mirage and its promise as illusory. The excitement and despair produced by the Constitution is
perhaps best described by Saadat Hasan Manto, one of the finest writers in Urdu in the
twentieth century, in his short story “Naya Kanoon” (The New Constitution). The protagonist
of the story, Ustaad Mangu, is a tanga (horse-drawn cart) driver in Lahore, a classic sub-altern
figure who is aware and excited about the buzz on the street about the passage of the
Government of India Act of 1935, which promised to bring greater self-government to Indians.
Throughout the story, Mangu is elated at the passing of the new act, and he imagines that it
will send the Englishmen “scurrying back into their holes.” On the day the act is promulgated,
Mangu is assaulted by an English customer for daring to ask for a higher fare. Retaliating,
Mangu says, “Well, sonny boy, it is our Raj now…Those days are gone, friends, when they
ruled the roost. There is a new constitution now, fellows, a new constitution!” At the end of
the story, Mangu finds himself being dragged by two policemen but he kept on screaming,
“New constitution, new constitution!”. But nobody paid any attention to him, and he was
locked up.

In recent years, historians and constitutional scholars have turned to Mangu’s story as a
metaphor for independence and the Constitution as a “spectacle of emancipation, i.e. the gap
between the vision of emancipation that the law promises and the reality of violence that the
law performs.” Aamir Mufti describes it as a “lesson in the discrepancy between the subaltern
struggles and bourgeois aspirations” in which the subaltern, blinded by the bourgeois project
of reform, tries to claim his new rights and is quickly repressed.

Despite the apprehensions about it, the Indian Constitution quickly came to dominate public
life in India. One of the primary modes of such domination was the right to constitutional
remedies for the enforcement of fundamental rights granted in the Constitution. These
supposedly procedural provisions of the Constitution empowered citizens to challenge laws
and administrative action before the courts.

The popularity of the courts arose not only from the nature of the remedies available but also
from the speedier hearing accorded to writ petitions in a system rife with endemic delays. In
1950, the Supreme Court heard more than 600 writ petitions. Its immediate predecessor, the
Federal Court had heard 169 cases in eleven years. By 1962, the Supreme Court had heard
3,833 such cases. In contrast, over the same twelve year period the US Supreme Court (with
more than a century of history and influence) heard only 960 such cases. In the first fifty years
of American independence since 1776, the US Supreme Court had heard about 40 cases, not
even 1 a year. The dockets at the Indian Supreme Court, which were more accessible, grew
even more exponentially. The wide original and appellate jurisdiction of high courts, along
with comparatively simple procedural requirements for filing petitions, brought a greater
diversity of disputes before the Indian courts than were brought before Western constitutional
courts.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law
in the Indian Republic, by Rohit De, Princeton University Press, 2018]
4.

In most parts of the world, it is taken for granted that whoever is convicted of a serious crime
will be sent to prison. In some countries, including the United States, where capital punishment
has not yet been abolished, a small but significant number of people are sentenced to death for
what are considered especially grave crimes. Many people are familiar with the campaign to
abolish death penalty. In fact, it has already been abolished in most countries. Even the
staunchest advocates of capital punishment acknowledge the fact that death penalty faces
serious challenges. Few people find life without the death penalty difficult to imagine.

On the other hand, the prison is considered an inevitable and permanent feature of our social
lives. Most people are quite surprised to hear that the prison abolition movement also has a
long history – one that dates back to the historical appearance of the prison as the main form
of punishment. In fact, the most natural reaction is to assume that prison activists – even those
who consciously refer to themselves as “antiprison activists” – are simply trying to ameliorate
prison conditions or perhaps to reform the prison in more fundamental ways. In most circles
prison abolition is simply unthinkable and implausible. Prison abolitionists are dismissed as
utopians and idealists whose ideas are at best unrealistic and impracticable and, at worst,
mystifying and foolish. This is a measure of how difficult it is to envision a social order that
does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them
from their communities and families. The prison is considered so “natural” that it is extremely
hard to imagine life without it.

Let us consider the case of California in the United States. There are now 33 prisons, 38 camps,
16 community correctional facilities, and 5 tiny prisoner mother facilities in California. In
2002, there were 157,979 people incarcerated in these institutions, including approximately
twenty thousand people whom the state holds for immigration violations. The racial
composition of this prison population is revealing. Latinos, who are now in the majority,
account for 35.2 percent; African-Americans 30 percent; and white prisoners 29.2 percent.
There are now more women in prison in the state of California than there were in the entire
country in the early 1970s. In 1990, the Washington-based Sentencing Project published a
study of U.S. populations in prison and jail, which concluded that one in four black men
between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine were among these numbers.

The most immediate question today is how to prevent the further expansion of prison
populations and how to bring as many imprisoned men and women as possible back into what
the prisoners call “the free world”. How can we move to decriminalize drug use and the trade
in sexual services? How can we take seriously strategies of restorative rather than exclusively
punitive justice? Effective alternatives involve both transformation of the techniques for
addressing “crime” and of the social and economic conditions that track so many children from
poor communities, and especially communities of colour, into the juvenile system and then on
to prison.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from Are Prisons Obsolete, by Angela Y. Davis, Navayana
Publishing, 2011]