Turning Law Majoritarian: Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue

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.