Building on the scholarly work on global phenomena of what Scheppele (2018) has termed “autocratic legalism”, and in particular those studies that have examined the creation of dual law, we focus on the making of majoritarian legal orders in India. Speaking of ‘autocratic acts’ suggest a top-down process of already constituted authority and conceals the social preparation of such legislative change. To speak simply of ‘authoritarian’ orders, equally obscures the selectivity of restrictions of rights, since many of these orders are in many fields and for many of their citizens still liberal. We therefore speak of the co-production of majoritarian legality. In this editorial essay, we argue that the making of majoritarian legality realises a new raison d’état, which normalises the partisan use of laws, the authoritarian oppression of dissent through existing laws, and the inauguration of differential citizenship regimes. Thereby a dual law situation is elevated from the level of misuse and abuse of means to the actual purpose of the state, the raison d’état being the establishment of a Hindu majoritarian nation-state.

This paper is an act of remembrance, a testimony to the horrors inflicted on our lives and bodies as women prisoners of Tihar Jail No. 6, Delhi. It documents the struggles for life and survival of fellow women prisoners, and bears witness to the deaths of Fiza and Jesca. Through these experiences, I argue that the measures introduced in the lockdown prison during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic did not merely respond to a public health emergency, but inaugurated a field of penal experimentation that emboldened existing practices of custodial violence and sought to establish a new regime of impunity aligned with Hindutva politics. I demonstrate how isolation cells came to function as de-facto solitary confinement, how the jail manual was effectively suspended, how the right to life was stratified into hierarchies of “deservingness” by High Powered Committees, and how daily prison life was restructured through intensified surveillance.

This paper seeks to question the strict separation between liberal and authoritarian legality by revealing the fictions and contradictions of liberal law necessary to maintain its order and the authoritarian practices involved in sustaining it. Bringing forth stories of carceral labour of women prisoners in an Indian prison who bear witness to authoritarian logics of punishment and animating spaces of legal ambiguity occupied by this labour, I draw out this dialectical relationship between liberal law and its authoritarian practices. I also demonstrate how carceral labour serves to construct labour and its subject outside prison as “free” (notwithstanding its actual conditions and relations of coercion), sustaining a seductive dichotomy between “free” and “unfree” labour. Both materially and psychically, the liberal rule of law asks us to deposit “unfreedoms” in prison and its practices so that the fantasy of the free liberal subject with rights and citizenship is sustained.

This article explores how low-level bureaucrats in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand both construct and feel for “endangered” Hindu subjects in ways that profoundly shape their legal practice. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from rural Uttarakhand, I suggest that focusing on the sociohistorical production of embodied feeling among bureaucrats allows us to understand the incremental, almost unremarked, remaking of law along majoritarian lines. I situate this inquiry in a social and political context marked by violent suspicion of religious minorities, especially Muslim men. Tracking bureaucratic anxieties around love jihad specifically, this article engages the following questions: How are state conceptions of justice, victimhood, and culpability shaped by particular embodied affects which, in turn, are moulded by contingent historical regimes of identification and suspicion? Through what socially resonant attachments and disavowals does this structure of feeling and thinking come into being? How do the emergent, contingent feelings of state actors shape the everyday acts of storytelling, interpretation, and evaluation that make up the reading of a legal case?

This article examines how majoritarian domination—as a constitutive feature of global democratic decline—is produced and entrenched through everyday judicial practices. Focusing on Assam, India, where denationalisation policies threaten millions—particularly Bengali-origin Muslims—within a political climate saturated by suspicion and hostility, it draws on an unprecedented empirical study of more than 1200 rulings of Assam’s High Court since 2009. The article develops the theoretical prism of legal work to show how judges encode majoritarian domination through both the exercise and withdrawal of judicial labour. Exercised judicial labour produces suspicion, visible in doctrines of evidence, reliability, and juridical truth that construct minority identities as presumptively fraudulent and foreign. Withdrawn judicial labour produces silence, as courts refuse to record, engage, or reason, rendering minorities legally invisible. The article advances a novel methodological and theoretical framework for understanding how courts routinise hierarchy, making authoritarianism both durable and legally sanctioned.

This paper advances current debates on majoritarian state-making by bringing into dialogue theoretical debates on linguistic polysemy, legal hermeneutics, and digital authoritarianism. It analyses hate speech accusations in India as a polysemic discourse, which allows majoritarian regimes to create new public hierarchies of interpretation that equate “hate speech” with critique of Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) ideologies. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography with legal professionals, police, and hate speech accused in North India, the paper analyses how adherents of India’s Hindutva government mobilise a dual strategy of online virality and procedural, judicial dismantlement to create a system of majoritarian legal hermeneutics: a self-reinforcing complex of interpretation that exploits the indeterminacy of legal terminologies to imbue criminal provisions aimed at safeguarding equality with anti-democratic meanings. In the process, legal actors are turned into active participants in the creation of a public of wounded Hindus that views minorities as a threat to their identity.

In this paper, I argue that the 2021 update to Facebook’s Community Standards on hate speech that distinguishes between “attacks on people” and “attacks against concepts and institutions” represented a shift in Meta’s content moderation policies from a consequentialist United States First Amendment influenced view of free speech to a constitutive approach that is responsive to the “real-world” harm of the virality of hate speech online in contexts such as India. To illustrate this argument, I focus on Meta’s response to “attacks against Islam and The Prophet” that are regularly used to attack Muslims by Hindu nationalists and their supporters, in India and abroad. The weaponisation of hate speech and the virality of speech-acts afforded by Facebook and other platforms by Hindu nationalists and their supporters to subordinate minorities and dissenting voices is one of the many contemporary practices that have contributed to the production of majoritarian legality in India.

How do lawyers understand legality in contemporary India? We examine the experiences of lawyers in Delhi, who defend people accused under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), statutes increasingly deployed to target dissent and minority groups. Drawing on in-depth interviews, these trials produce a sense of normlessness—where foundational assumptions about rules, processes, and institutional roles collapse. Lawyers describe an “alien” legal world marked by unpredictability, an absence of established procedure, and blurred boundaries between judges, prosecutors, and police. While ordinary cases retain a sense of normality, UAPA and PMLA cases destabilise imaginations of the legal process, compelling lawyers to speculate on motives and majoritarian influences. We explore how lawyers respond through insistence on procedural norms and strategies to mitigate harm to clients. These narratives illuminate the transformation of legality into a contingent, shape-shifting form of power, challenging deterministic accounts of authoritarian legality

On grounds of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi between 2021 and 2023, this paper analyses 20 cases of police violence, which occurred during the December 2019 protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. I argue that majoritarian practices of policing, through legal and extra-legal mechanisms, “unmake” the victims of violence. Instead, police procedures frame victims as perpetrators. The unmaking of the victims and subsequent criminalization occur through layers of discursive, procedural, investigatory, and legal strategies employed in everyday policing. In a Kafkaesque turn in law and society, I identify the omissions, exclusions, and invocations that result in a devastating deprivation of justice.