This chapter assesses the interactions between law and politics in India along the porous boundary that separates them. Upendra Baxi is one of a small number of legal scholars to recognize the importance of this topic, and he was one of the first. He addressed it in an important book early in his career, in 1983, and his interest has not waned. In the mid-1990s, he co-edited a book that focused more heavily on politics (and society) than on law. He also published an important paper in 1993 on judicial discourse which offered insights into interactions between politics and law, and so on. It is thus appropriate to consider the interplay of politics and law here, in a collection of essays in Baxi's honour.

Political analysts have also paid too little heed to this topic. Pratap Bhanu Mehta cited Baxi's 1983 book as a rare exception to a depressing general trend: ‘Most studies of Indian politics pay almost no attention to courts.’ Nor do they tell us much about the broader interplay of politics and law, which is the subject of this chapter. Mehta's comment came in 2006. Eleven years later, little had changed. A study of the Supreme Court blamed both legal scholars and political analysts.

This problem has persisted even though, since the 1970s, the Supreme Court has been drawn deeply into the political process where it has exercised immense influence. ‘It is hard to imagine any major issue in Indian political life which has not become the subject of legal contestation. The Supreme Court … intervenes even in the most ordinary of political matters.’ As the legislature and the executive ‘weakened’, it intervened to produce ‘an enlarged understanding of what falls within the Court's ambit’. By setting out the basic structure doctrine, it ‘declared it suitable to judicially consider the fairness of a range of legislation … on non-procedural grounds … [so that] a range of matters that had been part of political life … were transformed into matters of law’.