ABSTRACT
The author's observation is that, by and large, defenses of civil liberties are not premised on a general suspicion of the exercise of state power, and the scope for its abuse. Discussions of civil liberties—regardless of the substantive ideologies of the people or groups on whose behalf civil liberties claims are made—have thus tended to take place without a consistent position on the limits of the exercise of state power as such. CrossRoads’ adoption of the mantle of defending civil liberties in the face of government repression was also mirrored by another journal of a very different ideological persuasion. Chatterjee was also a member of the Calcutta Civil Liberties Committee (CLC), set up following the ban on the Communist party imposed by the B. C. Roy government in 1948. The harder question for a contemporary civil libertarian is a theoretical one.
