“It’s a very brave thing for you to do, to want to question me,” Indira Jaising declares, moments after we sit down. It’s “not exactly easy” to question someone who has been in the legal profession for more than 60 years, the veteran human rights and women’s rights lawyer and activist explains. “The sheer expanse of that is intimidating.”
The assertion is arresting — and a bit grand — but she has a point: I am indeed feeling slightly daunted as Jaising, 83, fixes a steely gaze on me from behind round spectacles. I can imagine how effective this might be in the courtroom.
Jaising has taken on cases stretching from advocating for the victims of the Bhopal chemical disaster of 1984 to some of the leading #MeToo and civil liberties cases of the present day. She co-founded, with her husband Anand Grover, the Lawyers Collective, a pioneering public interest law firm, and the pair launched The Leaflet, a feisty progressive online publication that coolly unpacks legal and human rights controversies.
“You’re right,” I reply. “I might be intimidated by you, but are you not afraid of speaking?”
One of the reasons I have invited Jaising to lunch is that she is among that now rare breed: an unabashedly outspoken Indian progressive. She is a fearless critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the increasingly majoritarian India he has helped build since taking power in 2014.
India is about to go into an election in which the populist prime minister is widely expected to win convincingly. The country is at what many liberal Indians describe to me — typically in hushed voices, at least if we are speaking in a public place — as an inflection point as regards its character as a constitutional republic, whose secular nature always differentiated it from the likes of Pakistan and Bangladesh. If Modi wins a third five-year term, they fear, he will formally enshrine India as a Hindu nation, in practice or possibly even in an amendment to the constitution.
Within minutes of meeting, Jaising makes it clear that, as a woman in her eighties with limited years left, she does not plan on biding her time, nor biting her tongue. “I’m going to tell you this, you’re meeting someone who is older than the Constitution of India,” she says. “One of my main missions of life — what drives me to do what I do now and for a long time — is the fact that there is this constitution that we call the Constitution of India, that I can see crumbling in front of my eyes.”
For our lunch, Jaising has picked East, a pan-Asian restaurant in the India Habitat Centre, a members’ club favoured by the capital’s old elite, because it has good vegetarian options and because — in a city full of restaurants with off-puttingly loud music — it is quiet.
A waiter comes to take our orders: lotus stems and Thai-style papaya salad for Jaising, who is vegetarian, and fried fish with kaffir lime for me.
Jaising was born in 1940 in what was then Bombay in British India, to parents from Sindh in what was to become Pakistan. While parts of her father’s branch of the family were already established in India’s business capital when Partition happened in 1947, her mother’s side were forced to flee Karachi during the upheaval, while her father’s remaining relatives fled Shikarpur.
“I think I have experienced a sense of homelessness and statelessness ever since I can remember,” she says. When I ask her what made her want to practise law, she ties it to her gender. “I think it’s got a lot to do with the fact that I’m a woman,” she says. “And the expectations of my parents were that I would get married and that was the end of everything.”
Jaising resisted pressure for an arranged marriage, studied law in Bombay, and qualified as a lawyer in 1962. “Very distinctly I wanted a profession,” she says. “Very distinctly I wanted my own income in hand.”
Her early years at the bar coincided with those of that other Indira: Indira Gandhi, who came to power in 1966 and presided over an increasingly autocratic government, suspending democracy by declaring an Emergency in 1975.
One of the first cases that launched Jaising’s career was a hard-fought right to housing case brought against the Bombay Municipal Corporation on behalf of the city’s pavement-dwellers facing eviction — an especially dispossessed group below even the residents of the city’s wretched slums.
The case drew attention, as Gandhi had campaigned successfully for re-election in 1971 under a “Remove Poverty, Save the Nation” campaign. After five years, Jaising and Olga Tellis, a crusading journalist, won the case after the court accepted that the people facing eviction had a right to livelihood as they had migrated from the hinterland in search of jobs, and could not be evicted without being offered a reasonable alternative. Those arguing for evictions of pavement-dwellers “were the same people who were employing them as housemaids in their own homes”, Jaising says indignantly. “It was the sheer hypocrisy of it.”
Before that, Jaising had done work defending the air hostesses of Air India, “who were not being given promotions because they were women”. Jaising met Grover, a Kenyan-born UK citizen of Indian descent, in Bombay during the Emergency, when they were representing dockworkers and railway workers, and the pair wed when she was 36 — an advanced age by Indian standards of the day.
Somewhat abruptly, Jaising begins questioning me: “Tell me a little about you.” I demur that this would be a waste of time, and make some bland remarks about how India is at an “interesting moment”.
“It’s a devastating moment,” she says bluntly. “The rule of religion is replacing the rule of law, which in a million years was not visualised by the constitution at all. My rebellion as a woman, my right to work, my liberties which are guaranteed by the constitution — there is no other source of inspiration I can turn to.”
The preamble of India’s constitution defines it as a “sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic”, but this year India’s more than 1bn people watched as Modi presided over the consecration of a massive Hindu temple devoted to Lord Ram built at the site of a mosque torn down by religious zealots in 1992.
In the 11 days running up to the January 22 consecration, the prime minister toured temples across India and fasted. Welcomed by millions of Hindus, the rise of Ram Mandir was an opening salvo for the upcoming election to be held in staggered fashion in April and May.
But for Indian liberals it marked a disturbing moment, both because of the fervent crowds of young men chanting “Jai Shri Ram!” (“Praise Lord Ram”) in public places — including outside my New Delhi office — and, they say, for the erosion of secular values it represents.
I ask Jaising how she responded to it. “I wept,” she says. “He’s supposed to represent all of us. He cannot be seen to be privileging one religion over all others.”
Our food has arrived, in ample portions: Jaising offers to share with me the fried lotus stems, which are delicious. Did she face discrimination as a woman advocate, I ask. “I do,” she replies, answering in the present tense. “Sometimes it’s very subtle, sometimes it’s blatant.” She bristles at being described as “aggressive”, a term she says is used demeaningly for women lawyers, but as praiseworthy when used for men.
“Why am I aggressive?” she asks. “Because I am successful.”
Jaising secured a conviction in one of India’s first sexual harassment cases to make it to court, in 1988. The case was brought by Rupan Deol Bajaj, a female civil servant, against KPS Gill, a decorated and celebrated chief of police in Punjab, at a time when Gandhi’s government was facing down Sikh militancy in the northern state.
“We got a conviction against this man,” Jaising says, emphasising the word, “who was India’s number-one hero — he-ro.” The reaction of the press, on the other hand, was “quite disgusting”, she adds, with newspapers asking how a man of his standing could be prosecuted.
Since Modi took power, his government has presided over a crackdown on foreign-funded non-governmental groups it sees as meddling in India’s affairs, while pressuring or arresting activists and the press. Civil society groups have had to scale back or stop their operations after having their funding frozen.
Jaising mentions the case of Umar Khalid, an Indian Muslim student activist who has been incarcerated since 2020 under the strict anti-terrorism law. The clients she has taken include reporters from the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, who are resisting a police summons in Modi’s home state of Gujarat in connection with an exposé the group published in 2023 on the Adani Group. (The report stemmed from a joint investigation with the Financial Times, two of whose reporters have also been summoned for questioning in Gujarat and are challenging it in India’s Supreme Court; Jaising is not representing them.)
Our mains have arrived: bibimbap, vegetable for her and with prawns for me. After the starters, I find mine both excessive and a bit cloying, drenched in a sweet sauce. “Oh my God, there’s so much food,” Jaising says. The restaurant is filling up with lunchtime diners, and the noise level is rising.
We are talking about the independence of India’s judiciary, which Indian liberals such as Jaising count on to defend the constitution but increasingly say is being compromised by overtly political appointees. I suggest that the US, for example, is similar.
Jaising differs: whereas confirmation hearings of judges bring “transparency” to US appointments, in India, she says, “there’s no confirmation procedure, no one’s allowed to ask any questions”.
Jaising and Grover’s own Lawyers Collective had its licence to raise foreign funds revoked in 2016 after India’s Ministry of Home Affairs alleged it was using them for “political purposes”. In 2019 India’s Central Bureau of Investigation registered a criminal case against the Lawyers Collective and Grover in connection with the probe.
“Look, it’s a way to disable you, right?” she says. “Filing a criminal case against you. Because lawyers are in the position of human rights defenders, so they become the butt of attack.”
Jaising is openly irritated that she was brought to book after being credited with landmark human rights cases and helping to draft India’s domestic violence law. She was appointed India’s first female additional solicitor general under India’s last Congress-led government in 2009-14, and she and Grover have both held UN appointments. “This is what came to me as a shock,” she says. “The contribution . . . not that I should be saying it . . . it’s there for all to see.”
I push back a bit. As often as I have listened to the laments of embattled Delhi liberals such as Jaising — more often, in fact — I have also heard the counter-narrative from Bharatiya Janata party and pro-Modi circles that the old Congress-aligned, English-speaking elite who ran India until 2014 are merely resentful of losing their entrenched entitlements and privileges.
One of Modi’s most successful lines of attack against Congress and Rahul Gandhi, the fourth-generation standard-bearer of Congress and India’s divided opposition, has been to paint them as dynastic heirs of inherited privilege in a country where nearly half the population is poor and/or lower caste. Modi is himself “backward” caste, and has made it a project to strip India of the remaining trappings of foreign domination — which for the BJP includes not just British rule but India’s Muslim dynasties.
“Yes, the ruling dispensation is now spreading the story that ‘We are the true anticolonial people’, that the anticolonial movement in India is starting now, after 2014,” Jaising says.
That, she adds, is denying history: “Because India’s anticolonial movement and social justice movement started together before the British left.” India’s first post-independence leaders, she says, made a point of guaranteeing job and study reservations for lower-caste people and framing what she calls an “anti-discrimination constitution . . . It’s the very foundation on which India was built,” she says.
A waiter has been hovering with a large pot of tea; Jaising takes some but I opt for coffee. And what kind of republic is India becoming, I ask, proffering a few phrases favoured by Modi critics: “electoral autocracy” and “illiberal democracy”. Jaising rejects these labels “because they don’t capture the whole truth.
“It’s moving towards becoming a theocratic state,” she says. “It’s very, very unfortunate because India was unique in the world to be home to so many believers.”
In the run-up to the election, BJP officials including Modi have spoken of winning a supermajority of as many as 370 seats — or 400 with their electoral allies — up from 290 now, enough to leave an even more indelible mark on India’s constitutional order.
Jaising declines to speculate on the numbers because “I’m not an astrologer”, she says. “If they do get a majority, my fear then would be that the de facto changes we have seen in India will become de jure . . . From saying that India is now a Hindu nation, and they can change the preamble.” (When the FT interviewed Modi in December, he dismissed talk of constitutional amendments as “meaningless” and said that the “most transformative steps” had been “realised without amending the constitution”. He also noted that India’s constitution guaranteed rights for all citizens, irrespective of religious beliefs.)
Our lunch is drawing to a close, and Jaising asks for some of her uneaten food to be packed up because “I don’t like to see it go to waste.”
Now that she’s in her eighties, is Jaising wearying of fighting her corner? She laughs and cites a “beautiful” quote from Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature aged 82 and told the New Yorker of her fears that “they’ll steal my old age from me”.
“What am I going to be afraid of?” Jaising says. “I’ve lived my life on my terms and now I won’t let anybody steal my old age from me.”
A new generation of civil rights lawyers are taking up the fight. Before we go, I have been meaning to ask Jaising about her WhatsApp avatar: an image of herself reimagined as a superhero-like figure in a shimmering blue spacesuit-style costume. She tells me with a laugh that younger colleagues drew it up using AI after she won a case against the Supreme Court challenging how Senior Counsel (the equivalent of King’s Counsel in the UK) are designated.
“Look at how much you’ve done, a superwoman taking on the Supreme Court,” she laughs, recalling their words. And in further answer to my question, she says she has no intention to quit. “Some people say ‘Not in my name’. But I say, ‘Not in my lifetime’.”
John Reed is the FT’s South Asia bureau chief
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