Padmini Baruah

Padmini Baruah is a graduate student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where they focus on gender and comparative politics. They hold a law degree from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. They have worked in the past for the Leir Institute for Human Security, MIT's J-PAL, and McKinsey and Co. As a Samvidhaan Fellow, their project will scrutinise the constitutionality of the Foreigners Tribunals in Assam and look deeper into the grounds for reform. It combines aspects of legal and empirical research. The former entails a closer look into whether the establishment and functioning of the Tribunals withstand the test of constitutional doctrines. This will be substantiated by ethnographic work from the field where they will conduct participatory research in the premises of the Tribunals as well as carry out semi-structured interviews with those whose citizenship has been legally contested.