Mainstream WeeklyVery recently, Indira Jaising, the eminent legal practitioner in the Supreme Court, has expressed her thoughts in her conversations with Ritu Menon, the noted feminist writer and publisher. The conversations have been incorporated in the book titled – The Constitution is My Home: Conversations on a Life in Law (Harper Collins Publishers, India, 2026).
In the Author’s Note, Indira Jaising stated: “Over the past six decades of my legal career, not a single day has passed without my entering a courtroom with a copy of the Constitution of India in hand. Every legal thought, every argument, every moment of clarity has been shaped by its text…When you are unfairly targeted for the work you do, it is the Constitution that stands by you. I turned to it when I needed to defend myself.”
While speaking about early life, Jaising narrated her exposure to radical politics in Europe: “…I was awarded a one-year fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London, from 1969 to 1970…During this period, I also visited Paris, where I met several students who had taken part in the 1968-69 student movement in France…Their talk of protest stirred something in me. Back in London, meanwhile, the anti-racism movement was in full swing. For me, it was not only about politics. It was the exhilaration of being present: an Indian, marching alongside Indian and Pakistani migrants against racism.”
After coming back to India, Jaising decided to ‘start afresh’ in Delhi. She had a mixed experience in her professional journey in Delhi: “This was 1970. I rented a small place and joined the chamber of a brilliant lawyer and member of the Communist Party of India…The environment was intellectually electric and deeply committed to defending workers and trade unions…Yet, despite my ideological affinity with the work, I could not stay for long. The atmosphere was thick with male chauvinism.” Jaising had a different experience when she returned to Bombay for her legal practice: “Soon afterwards, I started working with K. T. Sule, a senior trade union lawyer and member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). From him, I learned a great deal…We worked closely, often laughing over briefs, and in him I found both a mentor and a colleague.”
Indira Jaising’s mission of life was to represent the marginalized people in the court. To put it in her own words: “When I began practising, there were no collectives of lawyers working on social and economic rights…The Lawyers’ Collective emerged (in 1980) from the need to collectivize legal services in the public interest and make them accessible to those who needed them most.” In fact, she represented the marginalized people in many court battles. Jaising narrated a number of such prominent cases in her conversations:
“I chose to focus on the concerns of working women because I instinctively identified with them…In the mid-1970s, I represented an Air India air hostess who had challenged her dismissal…I took up the hawkers’ case in the early 1980s…At the time, the Bombay Municipal Corporation had issued barely 14,000 hawking licences in a metropolis with several lakh street vendors. This imbalance inevitably bred corruption. Unlicensed vendors were forced to pay regular bribes to the police to continue earning a living…When George (Fernandes) approached me, I decided to take the matter to court…The litigation culminated in what came to be known as the Bombay Hawkers’ Union case, one of the earliest matters before the Supreme Court to recognize livelihood and street trading as questions of social and economic rights under the Constitution.”
In the chapter of the book bearing the caption ‘Secular Lawyering’, Jaising stated her ethical position: “If I believe in liberty, equality and fraternity, those beliefs are not open to question. The Constitution is meant to be the instrument through which those values are realized. If I say the Constitution is my home, then it must be a home I build that I actually want to live in…”
Jaising shared her experience of acting as the Additional Solicitor General of India during 2009-2014: “My appointment as the additional solicitor general of India was exceptional in many ways, apart from my gender. I was the first woman from the Supreme Court bar to hold the position…Among criminal matters, I represented the CBI in prosecuting several police officers implicated in the murders of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife Kauser Bi during the Gujarat riots in 2005…I believe my track record, particularly my role in opposing bail for police officers implicated in the Gujarat killings, was never forgotten by the ruling BJP. In time, it became another reason to target me.”
Indira Jaising has critiqued the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019, in her conversation on the topic –- Who is A Citizen?
“I am older than the Constitution itself and owe my own citizenship to the founding moment of the republic. My parents migrated to India from what is now Pakistan during Partition. I am a citizen by birth – but in today’s India, being born here does not necessarily entitle you to citizenship. The law has changed. Now, even birth in India doesn’t automatically confer citizenship. And those who live along the eastern border, where historic back-and-forth migration has occurred for decades, face the possibility not just of being denied citizenship, but even the right to reside in the country they call home.”
Almost at the end of her conversations with Ritu Menon, Indira Jaising narrated the location of her own home: “Founding a nation is not a moment in time. It is a continuous process, without end. This is where I have lived, loved and worked. This is where home is. The Constitution of India is not just a text; it’s normative in content, and that is where my home lies.”
Indira Jaising’s conversations with Ritu Menon bear testimony to a Life’s Journey with the Constitution of India.