dissent
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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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Academic Freedom and the Politics of Time: Market, Nationalism, and Resistance in Indian Higher Education
Academic freedom in contemporary India operates within a contested temporal-spatial framework where neoliberal market imperatives and Hindu nationalist agendas converge, constraining intellectual autonomy. This essay examines how competing chronotopes—time-space configurations that structure social relations—manifest in Indian higher education and how these temporal regimes shape academic labor. Drawing on Bakhtin’s theoretical concept, the analysis reveals how…