Bharat Bhushan The belligerence of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s MPs against Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is not letting Parliament function. This is unprecedented, and especially galling because Parliament needs to pass the Budget in this session, irrespective of whether Gandhi apologises for comments made in the United Kingdom on the erosion of democracy in India. Forget his… Read More Why the ‘Mother of Democracy’ brooks no criticism
PUCL Bulletin, June 2001 – A.D.M. Jabalpur vs Shukla Supreme Court overrules Emergency era Habeas Corpus verdict April 28th, 1976 is a day never to be forgotten by any of us Indians who love the pledges of Justice and Liberty which we gave to ourselves in the Preamble of our Constitution. It was on this day… Read More EMERGENCY Archive / When the Supreme Court struck down Habeas Corpus
Bharat Bhushan If Adani was allegedly just another rogue businessman, a discussion in the Parliament and the institution of a transparent inquiry into allegations of market manipulation should have been the order of the day. However, the demand for an enquiry was stamped down in Parliament by the power of the presiding officers last week.… Read More Censoring debate in Parliament will not help the government
Dalya Alberge The north London home of Sigmund Freud is being recreated in Dublin for a major feature film in which Sir Anthony Hopkins, the Oscar-winning actor, will star as the Austrian founder of psychoanalysis. It will include the study, complete with reconstructions of his famous psychoanalytic couch and other possessions. Freud had meticulously arranged… Read More Freudian trip: psychoanalyst’s London home recreated in Dublin for major film
the core element in the Fascist state of mind (in the individual or the group) is the presence of an ideology that maintains its certainty through the operation of specific mental mechanisms aimed at eliminating all opposition. But the presence of ideology (political, theological, or psychological) is hardly unusual; indeed it is quite ordinary. The… Read More Christopher Bollas: The fascist state of mind (1992)
The author forcefully points out that the price of quiescence is tyranny, war, and a distorted and deprived sexual life, and he exhorts the average man and woman to assume a personal responsibility for themselves and their children. Supplemented in this edition by William Steig’s humurous drawings, Listen Little Man! bears witness to Reich’s unceasing and passionate search for a… Read More Wilhelm Reich’s classic essay: Listen, Little Man! (1945)
RAJU RAMACHANDRAN The recent controversy over the appointment of advocate L Victoria Gowri as an additional judge of the Madras High Court has raised the question as to whether people with political allegiances should be made judges. Disclosure: The author led the team of lawyers who challenged Gowri’s appointment before the Supreme Court. The challenge was not… Read More Here are SC, HC judges with political pasts. Gowri’s unconstitutional views were the problem
‘The Dual State is one of the most erudite books on dictatorship ever written’ Opening paragraphs of Jens Meierhenrich’s 2017 introduction to The Dual State (1941) Though largely forgotten today, Ernst Fraenkel’s The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Democracy, first published in 1941, is one of the seminal works in the study of law… Read More An Ethnography of Nazi Law: The Intellectual Foundations of Ernst Fraenkel’s Theory of Dictatorship
First posted January 13, 2013 Cutting the civic and human community in two: this is fascism…. Citizenship is today the very exceptional privilege of the inhabitants of flourishing capitalist nation-states. The field had been chosen by post-fascism, and liberals are mistakenly trying to fight it on its own favorite terrain: ethnicity… We are faced with… Read More On Post-Fascism: How citizenship is becoming an exclusive privilege by G. M. Tamás
It was the first time that the Iranian authorities have admitted to holding tens of thousands of political prisoners. Some 500 persons were shot dead by government security forces in the course of last fall’s demonstrations, and most of those detained were simply protesting peacefully, which should not have been the basis for an arrest… Read More Iran’s Khamenei admits to holding “Tens of Thousands” of Prisoners of Conscience
After the truth-shower 