Publications

Triple Equality before God

By Ranjeev C DubeyConstitutional Law
Judges often confront colliding ideologies with the law standing on one side, religion on the other and human empathy in the middle. In 2014, an 18 year old Muslim eloped with a 15 year old and married her. The girl’s mother filed a case of kidnapping, rape and sexual assault.…

Legally Xenophobic

By Ranjeev C DubeyArbitration Law
Predictably, when the Justice BN Srikrishna committee submitted its report to the law ministry last week advising the government to allow foreign lawyers to represent clients in international arbitrations being held in India, the legal community was in an uproar again. Yet again, we lawyers made it clear that we…

Foreign Lawyers: The Global Desi

By Ranjeev C DubeyLegal Profession
When Chief Justice JS Khehar stated on July 8 that he supported the entry of foreign lawyers in India, he drew attention to an issue that has been boosting the testosterone levels in lawyers’ canteens since Prime Minister Narasimha Rao liberalised the economy a mere 26 years back. Clearly, it’s…

NDTV-ICICI Bank case: What’s the inside story?

By Ranjeev C DubeyCriminal Law
We live in a world riddled with Moral Ambiguity. Aadhar shouldbring transparency and probity in our society yet our Government has handed over our confidential secrets to private parties in a patently non-transparent way. The judiciary remains the last bastion of hope in a polity that is fast descending into…

The Joint Lender Devastation

By Ranjeev C DubeyRegulation
When the entire banking industry of a country as large as ours is paralysed to a point where it becomes necessary to empower RBI, the banking regulator, “to issue directions to any banking company(ies) to initiate an insolvency resolution process under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016”, can we agree…

Rivers with legal rights of a human

By Ranjeev C DubeyEnvironment Law
Calendar art depicts Ganga Maiya as a beautiful full bodied lady venerated by millions, yet her devotees violate her guiltlessly. Electoral promises to clean up the Ganga wins votes but nothing then prevents the same voters from misappropriating funds allocated for the job. In this environment of grotesque irony, what…

Pul’s perversity tale

By Ranjeev C DubeyCriminal Law
In history, no one has the last word, but the former Arunachal Chief Minister Kalikho Pul’s suicide note must at least be a kind of judicial full stop. The note is as you would expect a credible suicide note to be: a potent 60 page tale of misappropriation of public…

Invisible Elephant in the Court Room

By Ranjeev C DubeyConstitutional Law
If you live long enough, you come to realize that today’s outrageous is next week’s new normal. Like 18 hour power outages, people can get used to almost anything. Eleven years ago, Praveen Babi, the iconic Bollywood heroine of my generation died leaving much of what she owned to charity.…

Voting For God’s Sake

By Ranjeev C DubeyConstitutional Law
Between chacha-bhatija battles within the Samajwadi Party and an election budget allegedly decimated by demonetisation within the BSP, it seems the Gods may well be on the side of Hindutva in the upcoming UP elections. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court ruled on January 5 that candidates can’t ask people to vote…