Book Review: Courting The People: Public Interest Litigation In Post-Emergency India By - Anuj Bhuwania

Public Interest Litigations (PILs) are one of the most celebrated features of the Indian Judicial System. Not only is it a tool to further democratize the nation, but it also makes justice accessible to a larger section of society by serving as a means for individuals who are unable to go to court by themselves, either due to financial constraints or personal limitations, to obtain justice from the court. This implies that the public interest petitioner acts as the sole intermediary between the court and the individuals whose interests are at the heart of the legal dispute. While movies like Jolly LLB show us the glamourous, positive, and beneficial aspects of it, Anuj Bhuwania (2017) in his book along with showing us this side shows us how the Judiciary’s ‘Saviour Complex’ and ideological disposition has taken over the ideas of justice and its position as an upcoming dangerous farce to the society. Anuj Bhuwania is a lawyer by education and training and is an author and a professor. He currently teaches at the Jindal Global Law School, OP Jindal Global University, and formerly also taught at the South Asian University. Bhuwania’s book tracks the evolution of the judicial system in the context of PILs using two major PILs based out of Delhi giving a detailed analysis of the same. He expounds upon the ideological explanation of this evolution and provides an entrancing critique of the same. In order to understand the significance and strengths of the book it is essential to first know the methodology adopted by Anuj Bhuwania for this book. Critical discourse analysis in the domain of legal and judicial aspects is clear since Bhuwania is a lawyer by training. He does a qualitative analysis of the cases discussed in the book and does ethnographic work including interviews with multiple stakeholders, judges, journalists etc. This book is vital to read to understand the discourse of PIL since most literature around it is set from a particular normative stance whereas this book gives the readers a flipside idea of PILs. The book gives an account of the development of PILs in the Indian Judicial system, even though the book is not a handbook on PILs, it does give a comprehensive explanation for sure. This book is an account of two major PIL cases which are essential for the understanding of PILs, and the author gives a very detailed and simplified account of the same. The book presents a picture of the interplay of the law and politics in the context of PILs because of their protean nature of them. The narrative and key ideas of the book emerge post the emergency era, the court had to regain its legitimacy because of the various issues of abuse of its power by the parliament. Also, how it became an agent of the parliament rather than an independent safeguard of the Indian constitution and its citizens. PILs thus became a tool for the “exorcism of its guilt” as referred to by Bhuwania to compensate for the habeas corpus case which is considered the lowest point in the history of the Indian Judiciary. PIL emerged through the late 1970s and early 1980s as an attempt to seek legitimacy back from the people. Bhuwania also offers the idea of how PILs were not a white-washed legal construct but an Indian conception with features unique to the Indian paradigm, as an attempt to mitigate the expense and accessibility of the courts. After laying the foundation of these ideas Anuj builds his argument on how public interest litigations gained an ideological disposition which then would change the entire debate around it. Bhuwania moves on to argue about the ideological concerns about how there a neo-liberal turn in the entire debate around the PILs has been and how there is a lack of compliance and issues of keeping a check on the power of the courts. In the next chapter- The case that felled the city we are confronted with the dilemma of welfare, procedure, and judicial intervention. The distinction between the ideological and material realms became relevant with the sealing case. It raised a concern of elitism in the Indian Judicial system, while there were allegations of it being called anti-poor. In the consecutive chapter-Public Interest Litigation as a Slum Demolition Machine while the idea of PILs is to offer representation to the under-represented people of the society in courts but the slum-dwellers who were forced out due to a certain case are under the garb of PIL. The court's language suggests that the occupation of public land is unlawful and needs to be resolved. However, the court has overlooked any comprehensive examination of this particular situation and instead relied on precedents and laws created for slum inhabitants. This is despite the fact that the writer claims that the state agency's failure to act is the direct cause of the illegal land occupation. Bhuwania argues about the ideas of populism in the context of...

Book Review: Courting The People: Public Interest Litigation In Post-Emergency India By - Anuj Bhuwania

Rishabh Sachdeva

Tags