September 2026 Issue
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The Watched Republic: Surveillance and the Shrinking Space for Dissent in India
Abstract This article examines the expanding use of biometric surveillance, particularly facial recognition technology, against protesters in India, and its uneasy fit within the constitutional privacy framework established in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India. Using the Delhi Police’s deployment of facial recognition at the 2026 Cockroach Janta Party protests as a case study, it argues that such deployments fail even the threshold…
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Dissent in Designated Spaces: A Rawlsian Critique of Spatial Constraints on the NEET Student
Abstract The increasing dependence of the Indian government on spatial containment, which effectively pushes public protests to out-of-the-way, ‘designated’ places like Jantar Mantar according to preventive measures outlined in Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (now Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023),[i] has led to the silencing of dissent. Using…