Kalpana Kannabiran: Tools of Justice: Non-Discrimination and the Indian Constitution

In the years since independence, the Indian subcontinent has witnessed an alarming rise in violence against marginalized communities, with an increasing number of groups pushed to [and outside] the margins of the democratic order.  Against this background of violence, injustice and the abuse of rights, Tools of Justice: Non Discrimination and the Indian Constitution explores the critical, ‘insurgent’ possibilities of constitutionalism as a means of revitalising the concepts of non-discrimination and liberty, and of reimagining democratic citizenship.

What are the possibilities for a critical engagement with law in a context of perpetration of atrocities against communities and the flagrant denial of liberties to marginalized groups?

Stressing the links between non-discrimination and the right to liberty, the book attempts to return history and politics to constitutional hermeneutics, suggesting that interpretation is not the exclusive preserve of constitutional courts but, importantly, may be crafted by people’s movements in their exercise of a dispersed sovereignty. It attempts an intersectional approach to jurisprudence as a means of enabling the law to address the problem of discrimination along multiple, intersecting axes. The argument is developed in the context of the various grounds of discrimination mentioned in the constitution — caste, tribe, religious minorities, women, sexual minorities, and disability. The book attempts to bring together an understanding of the social history of resistance to oppression in its specific forms, and the constitutional articulation of non-discrimination. 

The book plots the possibilities of popular constitutionalism and constitutional morality, inside and outside courts in an attempt to project these as the other, the mirror, in which the existing constitution must validate itself. The constitution itself is not a fixed legal text, but a vision that shapes and is shaped by peoples through daily struggles and upheavals.

Tools of Justice: Non-Discrimination and the Indian Constitution, New Delhi: Routledge, 2012.