Lecture on
“The battle for privacy rights in India”

by Suhrith Parthasarathy, lawyer and writer

Tuesday | 10th October 2017 | 5.30 pm – 7.00 pm

Organised by The International Centre Goa

Entry Free & Open to All

Suhrith Parthasarathy is a Chennai-based lawyer and writer. He graduated in law from the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata and took another degree in journalism from Columbia University, New York. Suhrith worked briefly at Thomson Reuters in New York before returning to India to establish an independent boutique law
office in 2013, specialising in public law, income tax and commercial litigation. Today, he represents a number of clients before the Madras High Court, the Supreme Court and other courts and tribunals in Chennai and in New Delhi. Suhrith is also a regular contributor to the editorial page of The Hindu and his pieces have also appeared in The Caravan, The New York Times, the website of The New Yorker, Open Magazine, Indian Express and elsewhere.

As the title of the lecture indicates this talk will concern the battle that India’s citizens have fought to secure to themselves a right to privacy. This battle culminated in the Supreme Court’s remarkable judgment, delivered on 24 August this year, in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd) v. Union of India, where a 9-judge bench unanimously held that the right to privacy is an intrinsic part of the right to life and personal liberty and the various other freedoms guaranteed under the Constitution.

During the lecture, the speaker shall concentrate primarily on why, in 2017, 70 years after Independence, we needed the court to rule on something so obvious. The answer lies, partly, in the shift in theories of constitutional interpretation and, partly, in the court’s chequered history in civil rights cases.