Category: Interventions

Interventions

WEB SERIES: The Goa Inquisition: New Scholarship on the State and Religious Violence

Nearly 500 years after it was set up and 200 years after it was abolished, the Goa Inquisition remains a much debated yet poorly understood topic today. What exactly was the Inquisition? Why was it set up in Goa? Who were the people tried and judged by it? Was it linked to religious conversions? Who were the heretics and what was their heresy? What was the nature of the violence associated with the Inquisition? And why was this institution finally shut down? These are some of the questions that plague the mind of many a modern Goan, but to which no clear answer is usually and easily available. (more…)

Books, Interventions, Talks, Webinars

Jason Keith Fernandes, ‘CONTEMPLATING CITIZENSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA’ Special Lecture at the Tamil Nadu National Law University,13 July 2021

Abstract

Citizenship has been at the heart of many of the more recent controversies within India – be it those linked with the revocation of Article 370 of the Indian constitution and the dismemberments of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh, the National Register of Citizens, or the Constitutional Amendment Act. The polemics around these issues have demonstrated with uncomfortable clarity, however, that there is much confusion between the terms nationality and citizenship, with the latter often being understood to mean the same as the former. Drawing on the legal history of the subcontinent, including spaces from outside of British India, particularly Portuguese India, Dr Fernandes suggests that there is a fundamental distinction between the two terms and it is necessary to maintain this distinction if the citizenship rights of Indian nationals are to be preserved.