 Ms. King, ladies, gentlemen, and colleagues, it is an honor and a great pleasure to introduce to you a woman who has been a beacon in the field of human rights law over the last three decades in India, Vrinda Grover. Vrinda's work reflects the ethos of Sahas in so many ways. Through cases of sexual harassment, rape, custodial torture, and extrajudicial executions and targeted violence against minorities, Vrinda has been striving persistently to secure justice for the most marginalized and challenge the impunity of the most powerful. Her fight for justice, most notably where there is an element of state complicity, aggression, or impunity, has made her contributions stand out far above the pulpit of procedural legal practice in India. Vrinda's own career has mirrored the unfolding and some would say unraveling of the integrity of India's democratic institutions to date. Having witnessed the emergency and the suspension of civil liberties during the mid-1970s under Indira Gandhi's Congress as a school student, Vrinda observed at close quarters abuse of state power against her father, who was a prominent lawyer. She developed a keen interest in law from a young age in the face of centralizing political power. It is these forces of power, whether through the Congress party's era of authoritarian reign or through the rise to power of the current majoritarian regime, which as we speak is refashioning the very notion of rights in India. Vrinda has since the 1990s not only taken on cases but has probed many structural obstacles within the legal system itself. The central theme underlying Vrinda's work is the relentless challenge to cultures of impunity, particularly in sites of communal attacks, killings by men in uniform, brazen violations in the name of national security in conflict zones and pervasive sexual violations of women's bodies. Her work on targeted violence against religious minorities has been influential. The 1984 anti-sick massacre that took place for three days in Delhi, India's capital, has now been documented by human rights organizations to show the role of the ruling party members in the attacks. Thus pogrom rather than riot is now used to describe these events. Vrinda's seminal research highlighted the gaps in law and the underlying institutional bias as reasons for the failure to hold the state functionaries accountable for the complicity in the violence unleashed on Sikhs. Now 34 years later, Vrinda's representing victims of the 1984 pogrom in court in their fight for justice. Vrinda analyzed the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat as a state-sanctioned attack. In her must-read article, The Illusive Quest for Justice, Delhi 1984 to Gujarat 2002, that highlights institutionalized impunity and collective memory of targeted violence, Vrinda has etched the patterns of state complicity through acts of omission and commission in the targeted attack on Muslim minorities. Vrinda has engaged in drafting and advocating for a law to challenge state impunity for targeted communal violence and to provide reparative justice to the victims. Never has there been a greater need for legal work like Vrinda's than in today's India with sporadic attacks and public lynchings on Muslims through mobs and vigilante groups met by state silence. Even where state authorities have directly committed the atrocities, Vrinda has waged legal battles for justice. The 1987 Hashem Pura custodial killings in the state of UP is one such example. When 19 personnel of the provincial armed constabulary abducted 42 young Muslim men, transported them to the outskirts of town, shot them dead and dumped their bodies in canals. Vrinda has been the lawyer of the mother of Ishrat Jahan who in 2004 was killed in a so-called encounter, an official tag to what Human Rights Discourse describes as extra judicial killings. She pursued an investigation which concluded that it was a fake encounter, a cold-blooded murder involving a conspiracy between the top brass of the police and their political masters. Vrinda has also fought against the abuse of the criminal justice system to target and contain communities in areas deemed as conflict zones. Following the murder of the visionary trade union leader Niyogi in 1991, Vrinda represented the Chattisgarh Mukti Mocha in the trial against a powerful industrialist cartel. Also in Chattisgarh, she appeared for Adivasi leader, Soni Sori, who was subjected to custodial sexual torture, chemical attack and falsely implicated in multiple criminal cases. Vrinda has taken on particularly egregious cases related to militarization and operation of extraordinary laws like AFSPA, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in Kashmir, where there have been injuries including blinding caused by pellet guns used by the Indian security forces for supposed crowd control during street protests in 2016. She has also provided legal assistance to the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, the APDP, in raising the issue of enforced disappearances and torture before courts and the UN. In 2012 to 13, she was at the forefront of a seeking a change in the law on sexual violence through the advocacy of the women's movement. This resulted in the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 2013, which secures women's rights to bodily and sexual autonomy. She represents survivors of sexual harassment and rape in court, particularly when the accused are powerful. It is not surprising that the powerful wish to silence her. In retaliation for uncompromising commitment to represent such victims, she is currently facing civil defamation proceedings, which is what the powerful do and is also a further testament to the good work that she has been doing. Her relentlessly bold stance in protecting freedom of speech, thought and expression can be seen in her defense rather than JNU's student union president, Kanhaiya Kumar, in 2016, against a heavy-handed nationwide crackdown on university campuses in India on so-called anti-nationalism and voices of dissent. SOAS, which embraces and represents dissent, will no doubt be a very comfortable place for Vrinda. Regardless of which ruling political party has been in power, her persistence in holding the state accountable is a testament to her integrity and commitment to defending human rights and civil liberties through engagement with law. As a member of regional national platforms, Vrinda has sought to forge solidarities across South Asia and raise human rights concerns through UN mechanisms. Vrinda's career as an advocate in India symbolizes her efforts to push the frontiers of law to envision and secure human rights, and it is with respect to her and for her work that SOAS is honoring her. Ms. King, it is my privilege to now present Vrinda Grover for the award of Doctor of Laws and to invite her to address this assembly. Thank you, SOAS. Thank you, Navtej, for conferring this honor, which I accept with humility, and congratulations to each one of you who have successfully completed your degrees today. I believe many of you in this hall are associated with the discipline of law, the field and practice from which I come. Law, as you know, is the instrument through which power is mediated. More particularly, it is in the silences of law that power is congealed and embedded. Law is thus a site of intense contestation. It does not provide a level-pilling field, nor is it a neutral arbiter. A refugee, an immigrant, a retrenched worker, the dispossessed indigenous community, a rape survivor, a transgender person. All these are likely to experience the law and the legal system more as the state of exception that Agamben spoke about rather than as a forum of justice. In such difficult and despairing times, I draw my inspiration and my strength from quote-unquote my clients. When a young indigenous Adivasi woman leader who has suffered custodial sexual torture five years of incarceration and a chemical attack to disfigure her face says she wants to file a complaint against the superior police officer in the district and wants him to be punished. When a 64-year-old Muslim man, survivor of a lynching, engineered on a false and fabricated rumor of cow slaughter, says to me, if God has kept me alive, it must be for a reason. I want to go to court and testify. When the workers of the entire automobile plant refused the special lunch offered for the festival and instead keep a hunger strike in solidarity with their trade union leaders who have been falsely implicated and imprisoned, when the superior court summarily dismisses the appeal against the acquittal of a rape accused for they interpret the refusal to consent of a woman as a feeble no and she says to me, you keep doing what you are doing and slowly things will change. That is where I draw my strength from. I want to end with a few lines which I've translated and I'm sure it's not an excellent translation from Hindi of a revolutionary poet from the northern state of Punjab who writes under the name of Pash. The robbery of your labor is not the most dangerous. The beating of the police is not the most dangerous. Betrayal and greed are not the most dangerous. The most dangerous is the death of our dreams. Wishing you all dreams, hope and resistance. Thank you.