Inaugural Arthur Berriedale Keith Lecture and Keith Forum 2018

Inaugural Arthur Berriedale Keith Lecture

Professor Sunil Khilnani, Director of the King’s India Institute, presented the Inaugural Arthur Berriedale Keith Lecture on Monday, 5 November 2018 in the Playfair Library at the University of Edinburgh. The topic of his lecture is ‘Things Done in the Dark and in the Middle of the Night’: Nehru, Kashmir, and the Subterfuges of Building Constitutional Democracy.”

The lecture examined Jawaharlal Nehru’s attitude to democratic and constitutional norms at a moment of crisis, in the years after independence and partition. It considered Nehru’s judgements and actions as he tried to balance Hindu communal mobilization, Muslim minority fears, and Kashmir’s ambitions for regional autonomy, all within the still unformed institutions of the Indian union.

Prof Khilnani argued for a more complex understanding of Nehru, the geopolitics of his era, and the political options and choices confronting him and his country. The chapter pointed to some of the tensions between nationalism (even of the secular, plural Nehruvian variety) and democracy in the founding era, and between democracy and constitutionalism in its Indian ‘asymmetric’ forms.

Read Edinburgh Law School student Rohan Bannerji's blog posts from the event:

Thoughts on the Inaugural Arthur Berriedale Keith lecture (Rohan Bannerji, 5 November 2018)

Thoughts on ‘Things Done in the Dark and in the Middle of the Night’: Nehru, Kashmir, and the Subterfuges of Building Constitutional Democracy’ (Rohan Bannerji, 6 November 2018)

Keith Forum 2018

The inaugural Keith Forum on Commonwealth Constitutionalism took place on 6 – 7 November 2018 at the University of Edinburgh.

It featured a range of papers and discussions, and was designed to critically examine the epistemological and methodological issues that arise in conceptualising Commonwealth constitutionalism as a discrete sub-discipline.

Read Edinburgh Law School student Rohan Bannerji's blog post from the event:

Session 1 – History of the Commonwealth’s Constitutional Experiences (Rohan Bannerji, 7 November 2018)

View some of the academic perspectives from the event: