Week 8: Slow Changes
Our boss was out of the office on a camping trip this week, so Kate & I mainly worked from different cafés around Mcleod Ganj. The week was largely uneventful––we continued to work on our statelessness project and got into more niche areas of the legal status of Tibetans-in-exile. One interesting and useful report about Tibetans-in-exile can be found here if you want to read more about the issue.
On the first of July, new Indian criminal laws came into force, replacing much older laws (the oldest dated back to the 1860s). The rest of our work-week was spent comparing one of these laws, the new Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), with what it replaced––the over-150-year-old Indian Penal Code (IPC). Some of these new laws are progressive (for example, changing the age of marital rape from anyone under 15 to anyone under 18), but many are being criticized as expanding government and police power. Some of the most significant overhauls include law enforcement issues, including the extension of the amount of time that police can legally hold a suspect in custody and the new statutory ability of police to handcuff accused people during arrest, which was not expressly given under old criminal laws, and which has been held by the Indian Supreme Court to be prima facie inhuman and unreasonable save in exigent circumstances.
Next week, we will continue this project, comparing the (now old) Code of Criminal Procedure with its replacement, the new Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (NSS). 
On Saturday, I visited the beautiful Dharamshala Tea Garden, where I sipped some delicious fresh green tea and ate homemade ice cream. On Sunday, I walked down to the Church of St. John in the Wilderness, a Protestant church built in 1852, now softly decaying on a tree-lined hillside just outside of town. An overgrown graveyard around the church is filled with the cracked headstones of British colonists who died during their time in India. I paused in the graveyard to consider the slow passage of time, and the often beguiling way the law evolves as the years pass, before I had to escape the mosquitoes.
[Sources for new law info: 1. Admin, APCR Secretary Nadeem Khan Warns of Excessive Police Power and Civil Liberty Threats Under New Criminal Laws, India Tomorrow, (Jul. 8th, 2024), https://indiatomorrow.net/2024/07/18/apcr-secretary-nadeem-khan-warns-of-excessive-police-power-and-civil-liberty-threats-under-new-criminal-laws/; 2. Prem Shankar Shukla v. Delhi Administration, (1980) 3 SCC 526.
Source for church info: Wikipedia, St. John in the Wilderness Church (Dharamshala), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John_in_the_Wilderness_Church_(Dharamshala), (as of Jun. 13, 2024, 1:45 UTC).]