The ascent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power in 2014 marked a significant transformation in India's sociopolitical landscape. The BJP, as the political wing of the Sangh Parivar, a network of Hindu supremacist organizations, strategically utilized the full spectrum of politico-legal systems and socio-economic institutions in its attempt to shape India into a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation). This effort has gained remarkable momentum, particularly following the BJP and its alliances’ successive electoral victories and firm control over the Indian parliament. For building Hindutva (Hindu nationhood) politics, the BJP adopts a primordial perspective, defining a nation through socio-biological links or socially constructed cultural connectivity, such as language, religion, territory, and kinship (de Souza 2022; Kumbamu 2020; Shani 2021). Deeply immersed in such primordialism, the Sangh Parivar defines the nation based on the idea of oneness (one law, one culture, one religion, and one language), which aims to promote Hindu supremacy, stigmatizing and labelling those who diverge from its definition as ‘enemies’ or ‘anti-nationals’ (Banaji 2018; Chacko 2023; Frykenberg 2008; Siddiqui 2017). As a result, there is an increasing criminalization of various forms of political dissent. This includes actions ranging from targeted ‘legal’ assaults on opposition political parties and ideologies to overt threats and ‘conspiracy’ cases against activists, academics, journalists, writers, and artists.

In this political context, deep-seated concerns have emerged regarding the state of democracy, civil liberties, and the functioning of constitutional institutions.

Profiling as Policy

At the height of the Non-Cooperation movement in 1921, supporters of the Congress harassed six men – all of them labourers – trying to enter a toddy shop in Vellandivalasu, Salem district. The violence was enough to deter four of the men, who promptly turned away from the premises. However, Innasi Muthu and Sowariappan were determined to have their drink that day. Leaving the establishment later, Sowariappan was ‘garlanded and beaten with a shoe, and Innasi Muthu was garlanded and slapped on the cheeks’. The latter was reportedly so furious that he would have whipped out a knife in self-defence but for the number of assailants. Filtered through the perspective of colonial officials, this account noted that Innasi Muthu and Sowariappan were Dalit Christians and sympathised with the drinking public for the caste violence they had had to endure owing to Congress nationalism.

Excise records surfaced a distinctive administrative term towards the end of the nineteenth century: ‘the drinking public’. Akin to ‘the criminal tribes’, the term circulated through repeated usage, so much so that official correspondences often did not elaborate any further on the subject. As we have seen, drinkers came from every strata of society and drinking in public triggered a great deal of alarm. However, the drinking public meant something entirely different and very particular. Erected at the intersection of caste, class and gender identities, it referred to working-class men drawn from the lowest caste communities. In the Presidency of Fort St George, it also included tribal communities from the Nilgiris whom the state defined by their economic role as servants of the resident European community.

In early 1967 the new commander of 1ATF, Brigadier Stuart C. Graham (succeeding Brigadier Jackson), planned and conducted a ‘classical’ counterinsurgency campaign. His focus on intensive patrolling, intelligence gathering, enemy logistics, political infrastructure, and the need to separate the civilian population from the influence of the VC were all elements germane to the British Army’s campaign during the Malayan Emergency. Graham emphasised the political and psychological nature of counterinsurgency warfare as opposed to the American approach of kill ratios and body counts, which he considered to be misguided. By the end of Graham’s tenure in October 1967, he believed that VC forces had either been forced out of Phuoc Tuy province or confined to their sanctuaries at the margins of the province.

The Australian Government’s involvement in South Vietnam was undertaken as a war of choice, driven by the desire to maintain the ANZUS alliance and keep America engaged in the defence of South-East Asia. While Menzies justified the Australian deployment in South Vietnam as responding to a direct threat to Australia from China, there was no Australian military assessment to support such an assertion. Since Australian national sovereignty was not at risk, the conflict did not require the significant economic and manpower commitments typically associated with the Second World War. Indeed, keeping the Australian commitment to the Vietnam War limited was the primary and recurrent aim of government policy. For defence planners and politicians alike, there was little other guidance, as the conflict suffered from a clear lack of aims in both Washington, DC and Canberra.

Roman imperial and non-Roman royal women seized the opportunities provided by frequent warfare and by the politics of court society to advance their interests and goals in novel ways in the fifth and sixth centuries. Admittedly, not all of their efforts succeeded. Nonetheless, some Roman imperial women did realize some of their goals, providing models for royal women in the wars that unfolded in the post-Roman Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy. This chapter discusses four women as case studies: two fifth-century imperial women, Justa Grata Honoria and Licinia Eudoxia, and two Ostrogothic royal women, Amalasuintha and Amalafrida. These women used the opportunities presented to them by war and the negotiations that precipitated fighting to assert political influence, demonstrating womanly agency in Late Antiquity.

Arbitration has had a long history in the United Kingdom and the United States. For many centuries, it has been widely used for the settlement of a variety of disputes between states, state entities and private parties and between private parties inter se. In England, the integration of equity and common law proceeded gradually until the beginning of the fifteenth century, when it slowed down and came to a halt. Thereafter, law and equity flowed in separate channels; and for many hundred years, much of the ethical content of English law consisted of principles of equity developed and applied in a separate court. Equity was used to correct the inadequacies and precedent-bound decisions of the common law in jurisdictions including the United States. But the situations in which and principles upon which relief was granted became in the course of time so well defined that equity developed into a technical branch of the law like what it was intended to correct. Reliance on equity to bring about a balance between legal rights and the interests of those persons who would be seriously harmed by their strict enforcement became less frequent, with the result that equitable principles as to what was fair and just were far less widely used in Anglo-American law than in any of the other great legal systems in the world. The simultaneous existence of two systems of substantive law in modern times is a phenomenon peculiar to common law countries. In two competing systems in the same body of law, the concept of ‘equity’ came to be regarded as an act of grace; it could not be demanded as of right.

Since 1931, the two powers China and Japan had fought intermittently in localised engagements. In 1937, however, these conflicts turned into a full-scale war between the Empire of Japan and the Republic of China governed by Chiang Kai-shek's (1887–1975) Guomindang, which entered into an alliance with the Chinese communists. The Second Sino-Japanese War which had begun with a local conflict near Beijing (the Marco Polo Bridge incident) ushered in four years of Chinese resistance against an expanding enemy before it became part of the global Second World War, following Japan's simultaneous attacks on Pearl Harbor and European colonies in Southeast Asia in 1941. The conflict in East Asia evoked various responses from humanitarian organisations and actors abroad. However, some relief initiatives decided not to take up this new cause and to continue to concentrate on the ongoing Spanish Civil War. In other cases, offers to help were declined by Japan. The international humanitarian system that emerged during the first four years of the war in support of China was majorly sustained by non-state initiatives, both established and newly founded ones. The latter especially were hardly impartial in their aid giving and often also had political motives in addition to altruistic ones. They came from strong left-leaning backgrounds and/or were rooted in diasporic Chinese, missionary or philanthropic communities.

In India, political and social actors and organisations and the press had, for a long time, followed the developments in East Asia. The outbreak of the war brought forward the question of humanitarian relief for the belligerent parties.