The Antinomy of Emergency and Its Repetitions in India

Abstract

This article will demonstrate how a constitutive tension between the sovereign decision on the state of exception and the norm structured by the rule of law has not just animated legal discourse in the colonial period in India, as exhaustively demonstrated by Nasser Hussain, but has also affected the making of the Indian Constitution, exacerbated by the crisis of partition. This antinomy, on closer inspection, is antinomic merely in form and appearance, for the exception, although understood as outside, and against, the norm, is also lodged deep within it. This article will delineate how a constitutive state of exception structured the exception as the norm and encoded it within the rule of law.