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Mumbai Police’s crackdown on beggars is colonial nostalgia and a constitutional nightmare  (Part I) Shushovan Patnaik , Dev Vrat Arya; 2nd Year, B.A. LL.B(Hons.), West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences Kolkata   Author’s Note: The NUJS Legal Aid Society has been dedicatedly working on the cause of decriminalisation of beggary in West Bengal for three years now and has undertaken advanced research into the subject. In 2018, we filed applications to the Controller of Vagrancy under the Right to Information Act, 2005, through which we were able to gauge the grassroots implications of such laws, and their persisting usage against the most economically depressed, politically dismissed, and socially marginalised population in Kolkata. Currently, we are in the process of filing a writ-petition in the Calcutta High Court, challenging the constitutionality of the archaic, classist, and constitutionally untenable provisions of the Bengal Vagrancy Act, 1943 and its cor...

  MUMBAI POLICE’S CRACKDOWN ON BEGGARS IS COLONIAL NOSTALGIA AND A CONSTITUTIONAL NIGHTMARE  (PART II) Shushovan  Patnaik , Dev Vrat Arya; 2nd Year, B.A. LL.B(Hons.), West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences Kolkata     [In Part I, the authors established that the recent crackdown orchestrated by the Mumbai Police upon Mumbai’s beggars has a legitimate legal foundation in Indian jurisprudence, and further, that much of this foundation is colonial. They further noted that the Mumbai police’s objective of eradicating child beggary by waging a brutal onslaught upon both voluntary, and involuntary beggars violates intrinsic fundamental rights. Part II is dedicated to analysing the emerging jurisprudence on beggary in India, its relationship to the current crackdown in Mumbai, and the necessity to develop an appropriate rehabilitative model in this context] Incompatibility with an emerging, progressive jurisprudence It is interesting to note that...