ABSTRACT In order to understand how Dalits stand to be impacted by the 2020 Amendment to the Karnataka Land Reforms Act, 1961 as caste remains invisible in the legislation, the amendment is examined in the context of post-independence land reforms, and the implications of the legislation on Dalits in rural south India are studied. The research draws on 2013–15 survey data from three villages to show that Dalits are predominantly landless, lack access to agricultural tenancy but form an overwhelming majority of agricultural labour in rural Karnataka. The impacts of the amendments on the livelihoods of Dalits must be considered. The structural transformation envisaged by the state through such a land reform should enable a reduction in inequality rather than promoting exclusionary growth.

Abstract This chapter examines the place of the right to freedom of speech and expression within Indian constitutionalism. After reviewing the classical normative arguments for free speech, it considers how the domain of speech is related to colonial continuity, sedition, and public order. It discusses the scope of Article19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution with respect to free speech, as well as the Indian Supreme Court’s successes and failures in its efforts to expand the domain of speech. It explores the democracy argument as the primary justification used by the courts in free speech cases, and its consequences. Finally, it looks at the standards for determining reasonableness, hate speech, and obscenity, and argues that the idea of a deliberative democracy must be supplemented with the concept of agonistic politics to enrich and strengthen the free speech tradition that has evolved in the past six decades.

Although censorship has classically been understood as a vertical problem of repressive state laws being used to curb individual freedoms, there has been a gradual paradigm shift in the nature of censorship with right-wing religious organizations, political leaders, and overzealous individuals using the law to curb dissent or to proscribe speech that they disagree with. The infamous Dinanath Batra who used the laws to ensure that Penguin withdrew Wendy Doniger’s book is symptomatic of a phenomenon in which laws are used horizontally against other citizens. In the aftermath of the BJP’s electoral victory, we have already seen the law being used against individuals who have been critical of Narendra Modi. This article examines how hate speech legislations may be systematically abused by right-wing organizations to create chilling effects and the dangers that they pose to democratic dissent.

This article is anchored in two narratives: first, that of law and popular culture scholarship and second, of the Indian law school. Starting with law and popular culture as a ‘ite’ of legal scholarship: this has often been the cast-off step child when it comes to the Indian law school. Two reasons for this—one, the subject itself, the difficulty that many academic circles have with taking it ‘seriously’, of keeping it on par with other more conventional areas of legal study and second, the law school’s resistance to change. As for the Indian law school: Two decades from the establishment of the first national law school, there are rising doubts on the success of this experiment and whatever impact it may have had on the legal education system in India as a whole. A closer look at these institutions show that the veneer of adequate infrastructure cloaks an increasingly decaying framework. Whether it be the myopic aim (‘increasing the quality of the bar’), which itself has clearly failed, or issues of curriculum, methodology and evaluation techniques, the law school in India has fallen into an epistemic trap it is struggling to get out of. It is at this juncture that I believe a focus on law and popular culture scholarship and pedagogic techniques at the Indian law school may well be one way out. Ranging from the need for making our legal curricula multidisciplinary, creative and flexible, to understanding how the very idea of focusing on the study of this area will counter the Indian law school’s troubling ‘resistance to change’, I make a case for inculcating the study of law and popular culture at multiple levels within the law school framework. I back this up with instances of just how pop culture can be successfully utilized to make for a more interesting learning experience for everyone concerned. My own experiences as visiting faculty on media law at two institutions have been invaluable in grounding this article in experiential reality.

As part of the CPOV project with the Institute of Network Cultures, we published a Wikipedia reader titled Critical Point of View. The Reader is edited by Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. The essays, interviews and artworks brought together in this reader form part of the overarching Critical Point of View research initiative, which began with a conference in Bangalore (January 2010), followed by events in Amsterdam (March 2010) and Leipzig (September 2010). The Reader collects original insights on the next generation of wiki-related research, from radical artistic interventions and the significant role of bots to hidden trajectories of encyclopaedic knowledge and the politics of agency and exclusion.

This article explores the relationship between law, aesthetics, and film theory with a particular focus on how affective relations and intensities define the encounter between law and cinema. It considers the longer history through which law has come to deny the significance of emotions, sense-perception, aesthetic discernment, and sexuality in its deliberations. It challenges such a disavowal in several ways, by pointing to how such considerations are manifest in the law’s self-presentation, in its codes and judgments, and its production of sexually charged renditions of the obscenities it sets out to police. This reframing of law and legal experience draws upon and seeks to contribute to recent developments in film theory that highlight affective and bodily dimensions of film experience over questions of representation.

This paper raises a series of questions on the relationship between piracy, infrastructure and access to culture. Piracy has always posed a representational problem within contemporary discourses on law, public good and creativity. Piracy seems to allegorize an impure transgression, tainted by commerce and an inability to produce a discourse on itself. Pirate production of commodities and media objects fits neither a narrative of resistance nor normative critique, nor does piracy seem to fit received models of creativity or innovation. Piracy produces a series of anxieties: from states, transnational capital, and media industries and even within some liberal proponents of the public domain. The paper reframes the problem of the pirate through an examination of the content/ infrastructure binary, and questions existing assumptions about creativity, subjectivity and transformation, commodification and social life.

Citizenship, as conventionally understood, draws its definitional strength from a framework of national law increasingly supplemented by international law. There is a radical potential to the idea of citizenship as a concept that allows it to represent the rights of groups that have historically been marginalised. The recent history of the queer rights movement shows an attempt to frame queer struggles within the language of rights. While this has undoubtedly been an extremely useful strategy in terms of putting forward the radical idea of queer people as citizens of this country, it suffers from serious limitations. While mapping out the strengths of the use of rights as a framework of articulation, this article goes on to note the significant ways in which the radical critique of institutions such as the family and monogamy is muted by an appeal to the law. What the law eventually protects is a queer citizen who leaves aside his queerness and joins the mainstream as a person who is different but equal. In this context, this article addresses the role of the ´illegal citizen’ who resists the demands of ´normality’ and thereby struggles to articulate his/her concerns in the face of a legal system that cannot take on board the diverse ways in which his/her life threatens mainstream institutions.