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| A breakthrough, with a difference | | |
K.P. Nayar
Frederick M. Lawrence, dean of America’s prestigious George Washington University Law School, was quarter way into his speech at Aligarh Muslim University a few weeks ago when he noticed some objects coming in his direction. Teachers are used to missiles from irate students. Here was an American in one of South Asia’s prominent Muslim institutions of learning in an era when the clash of civilizations can be ugly and it was a recipe for any volatile possibility. But Lawrence was pleasantly surprised that the flying objects moving in his direction were rose petals being showered on their guest speaker by students of the 134-year-old residential university.
“It turns out that we are the first American law school to make it to Aligarh,” according to Lawrence who gave an account of this incident to peals of laughter from an audience in Washington that had gathered last week to celebrate a new India Studies Centre at GWU Law School and to attend a day-long conference on “Emerging India: Rights and Responsibilities”. AMU and the GWU Law School are now considering an exchange of teachers and students, says M. Shabbir, programme director for the university’s highly acclaimed annual Dr Ambedkar Memorial Lecture. If this happens, and Lawrence follows up on his assessment after visiting Aligarh that “there is a great deal” that the two universities “can accomplish together”, he would have spectacularly succeeded where almost everyone else in the United States of America has failed.
Since the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001, Americans from the former president, George W. Bush, down to the lowly FBI agent have tried in vain to find common ground with Muslims in the US and around the world. The Bush White House spent billions of dollars trying to explain the US to the Muslim world and draw men and women of influence in Islamic societies into a dialogue with Americans. The result has been zero. Such has been the resistance in Muslim countries to doing anything meaningful with the US, culturally and academically, that high-profile jobs created in the Bush administration to this end had either no takers or had a high turnover of people when someone agreed to take up these positions.
But AMU’s vice-chancellor has already been to the GWU Law School and has discussed a number of ideas for potential collaboration. If the plans being made by Lawrence and Susan L. Karamanian, associate dean at the GWU Law School, are taken forward it will be the first time that the US has succeeded beyond lip service in establishing any worthwhile relations with a prestigious Muslim institution of learning and culture. “In the light of the size and importance of India’s Muslim community, we believe that a relationship with institutions representative of that community is beneficial in many respects, particularly given the need for dialogue,” says Karamanian in a publication for GWU’s alumni and friends of the Law School.
It is a coincidence of history that bilateral engagement between India and the US in the field of judiciary and law actually has an association with the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. On the day the World Trade Center in New York was razed and the Pentagon was attacked, two of the nine US supreme court justices, Stephen Breyer and Sandra Day O’Connor, were in New Delhi talking to their Indian counterparts in the first such engagement as part of an all-round bilateral interaction, which blossomed under the Bush administration in the seven years that followed. The US embassy in New Delhi was in a hurry to pack the two judges back to Washington, but Breyer and O’Connor refused to leave before they had finished what they came to accomplish.
Breyer has said since that viewing the terrorist attacks from the distance of New Delhi convinced him that “the serious division in the world is not of race, gender or religion, but between people who believe in the use of reason and those who have given up on reason”. He also learned of a precedent in India while trying to decide a case on how long a condemned man can be kept waiting for his execution, and has been inspired by a judge in Ahmedabad who unconventionally hears cases involving abused women in his house along with a social worker and a doctor and lawyers in an effort to solve problems rather than meting out punishment.
Following that trip by Breyer and O’Connor, exchange visits by Supreme Court judges in India and the US have almost become an annual routine. The framers of the Indian Constitution drew heavily by way of principles from the American constitution, but a judicial relationship that could have flowed from this commonality remained stagnant until the fundamentals of Indo-US relations began to change under Bill Clinton.
American jurists who are now regularly visiting India along the path that was thrown open by Breyer and O’Connor are discovering that they could emulate India’s pattern of extensive judicial review, including the review of executive decisions on a scale that American courts shy away from. Similarly, a recent United Nations manual on environment has the bulk of its precedents from India. For that reason, a session on environment at last week’s conference organized by the India Studies Centre at GWU drew a full house and was addressed by the Indian Supreme Court luminary, Prashant Bhushan.
Gauri Rasgotra, director of the India Studies Centre, rationalizes this interest: “Both India and the US are grappling with the legal issues presented by a rapidly changing world. The India Studies Centre will seek to create a reservoir of knowledge to help address these challenges.” The need to address these challenges to keep pace with the deepening of Indo-US economic relations resulted in an agreement between the GWU Law School and the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur to help develop India’s first intellectual property law school in the IIT campus in West Bengal. Lawrence says the GWU Law School helped design the curriculum and train faculty members at the Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law.
GWU is also working closely with the ministry of corporate affairs in setting up an Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs, a pioneering think tank in India for policymaking and research in comparative corporate law, drawing on the best practices across the globe. The ministry wants to reform India’s corporate laws, including the company law and the law governing the Securities and Exchange Board of India. Lawrence made the point at last week’s conference that the current economic crisis is an opportunity that should not be wasted, stressing that it would be downright embarrassing nowadays for Americans to go around telling the rest of the world to follow a US model in this regard.
It is obvious that there is a gap to be filled in India in this field from the Confederation of Indian Industry’s initiative in working with the GWU Law School on an innovative programme of mock trials in India drawing large audiences. As a part of this exercise, an intellectual property case is presented before a US judge under US law and the same case is, later that day, argued before an Indian judge by two opposing Indian lawyers following Indian law. The mock trials are part of an Intellectual Property Rights Summit that annually draws 30 to 40 top corporate lawyers and judges from the US.
Kiran Pasricha, deputy director- general and head of the CII in the US, is upbeat about the advantages of this exercise. “It is an effort to market ourselves before corporate lawyers as part of the drive to attract foreign direct investment. It has been the CII’s experience that when top American corporate lawyers actually go to India and see the situation on the ground, they find that things are different from what they concluded from long-distance reports.” She said the CII would not have continued with the exercise year after year if it had not been useful.
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