Indira Jaising is a noted human rights lawyer and a senior advocate at the Supreme Court of India. Along with her husband and fellow Supreme Court senior advocate Anand Grover, Jaising founded the Lawyers’ Collective, a legal NGO that has been working since its inception in 1980 for the rights of the marginalised, particularly women, LGBTQ peoples, sex workers, and many more economically and socially disadvantaged groups.
Jaising has fought and won a number of landmark legal battles, particularly those dealing with Christian women’s right to inherit property, right of the mother as the natural gurdian in child custody cases, or having the Supreme Court strike down instant Triple Talaq as unconstitutional. Starting from the rights of pavement dwellers in the 1980s Bombay, to enshrining collective rights over environment in the famous Goa Foundation case, to fighting for justice and compensation for the victims and survivors of the Bhopal Gas disaster in December 1984, Jaising has traced a long and eventful journey and made her mark as an outspoken and intrepid legal interventionist, who is not afraid to call the spade a spade.
Jaising’s role was pioneering in forming landmark laws against domestic violence, against sexual harassment at workplace, among other legal interventions. She took upon herself to fight against corruption within judiciary when she exposed Justice Ramaswamy in 1989, or represented an ADJ alleging sexual harassment against a Madhya Pradesh High Court judge. Jaising also won significant cases representing victims alleging sexual harassment against powerful individuals such as former DGP of Punjab, KPS Gill.
Jaising has fought tooth and nail demanding due process, as in the case of Greenpeace activist Priya Pillai who was disallowed by the Government of India to travel to London and depose before a British parliamentary committee against a UK-registered coal mining company in 2015, when Jaising successfully defended a citizen’s freedom of expression. It is in this context that Jaising’s keen interest in ensuring the indpependence of judiciary, one of the three pillars of democracy, must be seen. Hers is a distinct and discerning voice that must be heard to make sense of these troubling times.