The Constitution Is My Home -...
Indira Jaising, Ritu Menon
'I may not have been one of the founding mothers of the Constitution, but I am one of its founding daughters. Founding a nation is a continuous process, one without end. This is where I have lived, loved and worked—and that is where home is. The Constitution of India is not just a text ... [It] is where my home lies.'
""Rarely do we think of the Constitution as a home. Yet only a few metaphors could capture Indira Jaising's legal journey with such depth and accuracy."" - Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant
""There is a thread connecting all these cases. In each case, people pushed to the margins of society claimed the full protection of the Constitution."" - Justice B.V. Nagarathna, Judge, Supreme Court of India
""The testament of a woman who has spent fifty years defending the house she chose... The feminist chapters are the book's strongest. Jaising moves the reader from formal equality to the harder terrain where formal equality is not enough."" - The Federal
""Not just a memoir, but an intervention-part personal reflection, part constitutional critique at a moment when, as Jaising put it, 'we live in hope, but also in the present moment.'""- The Week
""Jaising was a forerunner in cracking the country's legal glass ceiling... and today is among the country's most recognisable constitutional lawyers.""- The Print
Few lawyers have shaped India's constitutional landscape as consistently and fearlessly as Indira Jaising. For over five decades, she has led some of the country's most consequential legal battles, compelling the law to reckon with the realities of gender, inequality, state violence and institutional neglect.
In The Constitution Is My Home, Jaising looks back upon a life spent on the frontlines of law and activism. In conversation with Ritu Menon, she reflects on the cases and causes that have defined her career: Mary Roy and the fight for equal inheritance; Rupan Deol Bajaj and the pursuit of justice in the face of sexual harassment; Olga Tellis, which recognized the right to livelihood for pavement dwellers; Shayara Bano and the challenge to triple talaq; her long advocacy for the victims of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy; and the Sabarimala case, where she argued for women's right to worship. She also offers sharp observations on the present, marked as it is by rising Hindu nationalism, a judiciary in retreat and a democracy growing brittle by the day. Through it all, she unfailingly returns to the Constitution--as scripture, argument, shelter and home ground.
Clear, unsparing and deeply political, The Constitution Is My Home is both a vital record of resistance and a call to hold fast to the republic's founding promises by one of the most inspiring legal minds of the country.
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