CCI's Draft Amendments Clock, Not Architecture

The Competition Commission of India (CCI)'s recent proposed amendments (Draft Amendments) to the Competition Commission of India (Commitment) Regulations, 2024 are administrative housekeeping in nature. The Draft Amendments extend the window to file from 45 days to 60 days, allow for curing defects for 10 days, clarify fees, and increase the overall timeline from 130 to 180 working days. Each of those changes is commonsensical. But every one is a change to time, and none touches the three...

Ban App, Miss The Point

On June 16, 2026, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued two directions under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000. The first blocked all access to Telegram in India until midnight on June 22, the day after the NEET-UG 2026 re-examination. The second required Telegram to disable its message-editing feature for all previously posted content in India until June 30. Both directions were issued on the formal recommendation of the National Testing Agency. The...

Constitutional Critique Of Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2026

The government of India, in a move to further tighten administrative control over non-profit organizations, charitable trusts, and other non-governmental institutions, introduced the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2026, which vests the government with the power to strip these non-governmental organizations of their assets if they fail to comply with FCRA registration requirements. The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010, was enacted to ensure that foreign contributions...

When Anti-Defection Law Starts Defending Defectors

When the Tenth Schedule was enacted, its sole purpose was to slay the ghost of political opportunism and protect the sanctity of the people's mandate. But decades later, a striking paradox has emerged: has the anti-defection law transformed from a deterrent into a defence mechanism? The dramatic collapse of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in June 2026 perfectly illustrates this systemic shift. Led by four-time MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, a staggering 20 out of 29 TMC Lok Sabha MPs broke away to...

Zombie Trademarks In Metaverse

Can a dead mark be revived again? Can a trademark ever truly be considered dead? These are the foundational questions that modern intellectual property law must confront as commerce shifts toward digital frontiers. Logically, when the owner of the mark abandons it, it enters the public domain, and anyone should be allowed to use it. However, the commercial reality is far more complex.When a mark is abandoned, it leaves behind a nostalgic consumer experience, has created its own Goodwill in the...

Participation Without Accountability: Limits Of India's Pre-Legislative Consultation Policy

The Pre-Legislative Consultation Policy (PLCP), 2014, has been around for more than a decade. For most of that time, a fairly basic question has gone unanswered: Is anybody actually following it?That question received an answer in Parliament in December 2025 through Lok Sabha Unstarred Question No. 2110, which asked whether the Government had reviewed the effectiveness of the policy, monitored compliance by Ministries and Departments, and considered making consultation and legislative impact...

How Word 'Advertising' Stripped Google Of Safe Harbour

In early 2026, Justice Mini Pushkarna of the Delhi High Court decided Hindware Ltd. v. Google LLC & Ors. CS(COMM) 591/2017, decided May 22, 2026. The court permanently restrained Google from using the Hindware trademark as a keyword and awarded 30 lakhs in nominal damages. For over a decade, online advertising platforms structured their legal defence around a simple axiom. If an algorithmic process is hidden from the consumer's eye, it cannot legally constitute a trademark...

Yes, A Celebrity Must Be Protected, But To What Extent?

What defines a celebrity? -Talent? Lineage? The understanding of a celebrity today is quite different from what it was in the past. Cultural studies scholars unanimously agree that the metric for attaining this status in the present day is “well-knownness”. David Tan further identifies three aspects in attaining the standard of “well-knownness”: the celebrity individual, cultural producers, and the audience, which he collectively recognises as the “celebrity trinity”.According to him, these...

India's AI Governance Crisis Isn't A Lack Of Law

India does not have an AI governance gap. It has an AI governance fragmentation problem and the two are not the same thing.Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw's recent suggestion that India may need a dedicated AI law has framed the question as a binary: statute or administrative adaptation, EU-style legislation or sectoral flexibility. Both sides are answering the wrong question. The more consequential question is whether the three distinct AI governance regimes India has already built...

Why India's Anti-Defection Law Is Fractured

The June 2026 rupture in India's Trinamool Congress have left many questioning the efficacy of India's anti-defection law. Contained in the Tenth Schedule to the Indian Constitution, it was enacted with the aim to tackle the problem of perennial political defections within India. The law, however, was passed in haste, rushed through two Houses and lacked any national consensus. It left some major vacuums which allowed the judiciary to tweak the law to suit varying societal temperaments....

Beyond Ventilator: Harish Rana And Passive Euthanasia

On March 11, 2026, the Supreme Court of India delivered its judgement in Harish Rana v. Union of India[1] which reversed a Delhi High Court order. The earlier decision denied a family's petition to withdraw a Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy (PEG) feeding tube from their son, Harish Rana, who had been in an irreversible Permanent Vegetative State (PVS) for over thirteen years. The significance of this judgement lies in the doctrinal clarification it provides: for the first time, the Court...

Fragmentation Problem: Why Environmental Governance Needs Judicial Integration

In Re: Illegal Sand Mining in the National Chambal Sanctuary and Threat to Endangered Aquatic Wildlife (2026 LiveLaw (SC) 386)In its judgment of May 26, 2026, a Supreme Court bench comprising Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta addressed illegal sand mining in the National Chambal Gharial Sanctuary. The case, filed as Suo Moto Writ Petition (Civil) No. 2 of 2026, began with a straightforward crisis: rampant mining was destroying a notified wildlife sanctuary. The judgment's significance,...