http://youtube.com/post/Ugkx7h8jHBjLksyjnFq7FEB4Bg0la_4wVlR1?si=Db7pyuVKCEP8IWz8. In The Constitution Is My Home: Conversations on a Life in Law, Jaising looks back at years in constitutional litigation, told in conversation, and also makes a sharp diagnosis of the present moment.

[01/06, 09:15] sekarreporter1: [01/06, 09:09] Inthira Jaising Senior Advt Sc: https://thefederal.com/category/features/indira-jaising-lawyer-book-constitution-religion-livelihood-hawkers-shayara-bano-tripple-talaq-polygamysabarimala-emergency-244390
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How senior advocate and activist Indira Jaising talks of her ‘home’, the Indian Constitution, in new book
In The Constitution Is My Home: Conversations on a Life in Law, Jaising looks back at years in constitutional litigation, told in conversation, and also makes a sharp diagnosis of the present moment.
V Aravinda
25 May 2026 5:58 PM IST

File photo of Indira Jaising. Photo: X
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“Where are you from?” is the first question one is asked in India and for most of her life, senior advocate and activist Indira Jaising had no satisfactory answer. There is no Indian state called Sindh; her family came from there as refugees after Partition.

She eventually arrived at an answer of her own. She belongs to the Constitution of India. The title of her book, The Constitution Is My Home: Conversations on a Life in Law, published by Speaking Tiger, is therefore not a metaphor but a citizenship claim. The 220-page conversation with the publisher Ritu Menon that follows is the testament of a woman who has spent fifty years defending the house she chose.

The conversation is organised by theme rather than chronology and reads less like a deposition than like a long, candid evening at the senior advocate’s chambers. As Supreme Court judge Justice BV Nagarathna said at the book’s launch in New Delhi on May 21, court records “tell us judgments, but they don’t tell us the strategy, loneliness, fear or hope of litigants and lawyers within the courtroom.”

This book does. It opens in the chambers of a senior who taught the young Jaising what she calls “stealing truth” — the lawyer’s craft of extracting from a witness what the witness will not give. She does not sanitise the apprenticeship. The Constitution she has spent a lifetime defending is built, the passage reminds the reader, on a craft that is not entirely innocent.

From there, the chapters move through the cases that made her reputation: pavement-dwellers, hawkers, women workers, Bhopal gas tragedy survivors, women denied inheritance, women denied entry into a temple, women harassed at work. The cases are well known. The texture of how they were built is not.

Livelihood to women’s issues
Take the Bombay Hawkers’ Union v. BMC and Olga Tellis cases; the parallel 1985 judgments through which she helped pull the right to livelihood into the right to life under Article 21. The doctrinal headline of Olga Tellis — that the right to life includes the right to livelihood — has been taught for 40 years. The book’s contribution is the strategic detail.

In the hawkers’ case, it is the photograph she placed before the Bench of a woman selling bananas whose basket had been crushed under a police officer’s boots. KK Venugopal, then appearing for the Corporation, conceded the obvious: “There can be no argument against a photograph”. The Court held for the first time in Indian legal history that hawkers had a right to vend and directed the Corporation to demarcate hawking zones.

A week later, in Olga Tellis, the Bench led by Chief Justice YV Chandrachud applied the same constitutional logic to the pavement-dwellers facing eviction. From cases like these, Jaising, who has also served as additional solicitor general of India, derives what she calls democratic lawyering: the use of courts not only to defend rights but to expand them. At the launch, she put it succinctly: In the 1950s and 60s, she said, liberals and the Left fought over land reform and detention but ignored “working people, homelessness, the self-employed”. Her generation “decided that the court belongs to us”.

The cover of Jaising’s book, The Constitution Is My Home: Conversations on a Life in Law. Photo: X

The feminist chapters are the book’s strongest. Jaising moves the reader from formal equality (the McKinnon Mackenzie case, on equal pay for women stenographers under the Equal Remuneration Act, 1976) to the harder terrain where formal equality is not enough. The Domestic Violence Act of 2005, which she helped draft, is the legis
[01/06, 09:16] sekarreporter1: https://thefederal.com/category/features/indira-jaising-lawyer-book-constitution-religion-livelihood-hawkers-shayara-bano-tripple-talaq-polygamysabarimala-emergency-244390