Draft:Arghya Sengupta

Introduction

Dr. Arghya Sengupta is a lawyer and the Research Director of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, a law & policy think tank which he founded in 2013 in New Delhi, India.

He is the author of three books, including his most recent publication – The Colonial Constitution.

He has served as a member of various high-level committees set up by the Government of India (e.g. - the Srikrishna Committee on Data Protection) and the Supreme Court (sub-committee for Phase III of the e-courts project).

He is a columnist at the Times of India and the Telegraph  and has written several critically acclaimed columns on the state of law, politics, and policy in India.

Early life & education

Dr. Sengupta was born in Kolkata in 1984. He completed his schooling from St. Xavier's Collegiate School, Kolkata. Throughout his schooling years, he was an avid quizzer and won the national level inaugural ESPN sports quiz in 2001.

Academic career

He obtained his BA LLB (Hons.) from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore in 2008 as the first rank holder with 10 gold medals. He was then awarded the Rhodes Scholarship to pursue law at the University of Oxford in 2008. He pursued a Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) and MPhil from Balliol College at Oxford and DPhil from St. Catherine’s College.

His doctoral thesis was on the subject of Independence & Accountability in the Indian Higher Judiciary , which was published by the Cambridge University Press in 2019. His M.Phil. thesis was on Appointment of Judges to the Supreme Court of India , the subject of which was also the subject of a volume of essays edited by him and published by the Oxford University Press. This volume is the defining work on the subject, and contributors to it include Arun Jaitley, Gopal Subramanium, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta.

While at Oxford, he also served as a lecturer in Administrative Law at Pembroke College.

Professional Career

While he was completing his studies in Oxford, Dr. Sengupta and a few colleagues responded to a call for public comments on the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill. The idea was to make the law, as he has said in a public interview “clear, coherent, constitutional, contemporaneous and compliant” by relying not only on international best practices, but also on the implementational capacity of the Indian state.

This was the genesis for the idea of Vidhi with the mission of writing better laws for India, based on the core belief that better laws lead to better governance.

Vidhi started in New Delhi with a team of 6 lawyers in 2013. As of 2024, under his leadership, Vidhi has 82 lawyers with offices in New Delhi, Bengaluru, and Mumbai.

Since its inception, Vidhi has assisted the Central Government as well as several State Governments in drafting over 400 pieces of laws, rules, and regulations.

Litigation career

Dr. Sengupta has appeared before the Supreme Court in a series of seminal matters pertaining to constitutional law. A few notable ones are:

• Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) & Anr. vs. Union of India & Ors., where he argued that the Constitution already encapsulates the right to privacy and no separate recognition is necessary.
• Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association and others vs. Union of India, where he argued in favour of the constitutionality of the Constitution (Ninety-ninth Amendment) Act, 2014 which had established the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC).

Legal reform career

Arghya has advised various Ministries of the Union Government on several key legislations –

1. Prohibition of Discriminatory Tariffs for Data Services Regulations, 2016,
2. The Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits, and Services) Act, 2016,
3. The Fugitive Economic Offenders Act, 2018,
4. The Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management (Amendment) Act, 2018,
5. Banning of Unregulated Deposit Schemes Act, 2019,
6. The Tribunal Reforms Act, 2021

He has been invited to serve on several high level committees - Srikrishna Committee on Data Protection, High Level Committee on Arbitration, a sub-committee of the E-committee of Supreme Court, a committee to review the Specific Relief Act, 1963 and the Company Law Committee in 2019 to recommend decriminalisation of corporate laws.

List of works

Books

• The Colonial Constitution, Juggernaut 2023 - a bestseller on the origins of the Constitution of India, on which he has given over 20 talks, 7 interviews, 6 op-eds, and there have been 8 reviews.
• Hamin Ast: A Biography of Article 370, Navi Books, 2022- a historical account of the legal relationship between the Union of India and the troubled state of Jammu and Kashmir [co-authored with Jinaly Dani, Kevin James and Pranay Modi]
• Independence and Accountability of the Indian Higher Judiciary, Cambridge University Press, 2019- an academic work on appointments, transfers, impeachment and post-retirement employment of judges in the Indian higher judiciary
• Appointment of Judges to the Supreme Court of India: Transparency, Accountability and Independence, Oxford University Press, 2018- an edited volume of essays on the executive- judiciary conflict over who will appoint India’s Supreme Court judges [co-edited with Ritwika Sharma]

Select Journal Articles

• Sengupta A. (2013) "The Kesavananda Bharati Case" 129 Law Quarterly Review 451
• Sengupta, A. (2006). "Confessions in the Custody of a Police Officer: Is it the Opportune Time for Change," National Law School of India Review: Vol. 18: Iss. 1, Article 5. Available at: https://repository.nls.ac.in/nlsir/vol18/iss1/5
• Sengupta, A. (2011) “Judicial Independence and the appointment of judges to the higher judiciary in India: A conceptual enquiry” Indian Journal of Constitutional Law,  5, 99-126. Available at: https://ijcltesting.nalsar.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/5IndianJConstL99.pdf

Select Edited Volumes

• Appointment of Judges to the Supreme Court of India: Transparency, Accountability, and Independence edited by Arghya Sengupta and Ritwika Sharma, Oxford University Press
• The Working of the Indian Constitution, Routeldge, 2024

Select Op-Eds

• The Two Delhi Solution, Times of India
• The Nariman Points ,  Times of India
• A legal merry go-round, The Hindu