Author
Prof Aparna Chandra
Organisation/Institution
National Law School of India University
Country
INDIA
Panel
Constitutional and Admin Law
Title
A 'Swadeshi' Turn in Indian Constitutional Law
Abstract
In a recent case (Special Reference No. 1 of 2025), the Supreme Court of India decried the use of foreign precedents in constitutional adjudication, stating instead that the Indian Constitution has "[shed] its colonial vestiges for a vibrant and evolving swadeshi [indigenous] foundation." The Court's statement mirrors recent attempts in the public sphere to use the language of decoloniality as a methodological intervention in the interpretation of the Indian Constitution. This paper describes, evaluates, and criticizes these attempts to deploy the language of decoloniality in the service of an exceptional and parochial reading of the Indian Constitution. It argues that such an approach misunderstands the purposes and methods of comparative constitutional law, mischaracterizes Indian constitutional history, and hides behind the progressive premises of decolonial politics to encode an ethnocentric vision of the polity into the Indian Constitution.
Biography
I am a Professor of Law at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, where I head the M.K. Nambyar Chair on Constitutional Law. I teach, research, and write on Indian constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, gender and the law, and empirical legal studies. I have previously worked at the National Judicial Academy, Bhopal and the National Law University, Delhi, where I co-founded the Centre for Constitutional Law, Policy and Governance. I am the co-author (with William Hubbard and Sital Kalantry) of Court on Trial: A Data Driven Account of the Supreme Court of India (Penguin Random House, 2023). The book provides a quantitative empirical account of the working of the Indian Supreme Court. I am also the co-editor (with Gautam Bhatia and Niraja Gopal Jayal) of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Constitution of India (CUP, 2026). I serve on the editorial board of the Asian Journal of Comparative Law.
