ABSTRACT
The Prevention of Terrorism Act Repeal Act, 2004 and Unlawful Activities Prevention Act Amendment Act, 2004 have affirmed the shifting contours of jurisprudence in India through an intermeshing of the ordinary and the extraordinary. It is argued that the procedural changes and a separate system of dispensation of justice that extraordinary laws espouse, validated by hegemonic discourses of nationalism and a simultaneous construction of ‘suspect communities’, and the process of intermeshing and overlap with ordinary laws and legal practices. Like other anti-terror laws, Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) worked on the principle that terrorist acts cannot be proved in the normal course and they require extraordinary measures. POTA, therefore, permitted the inclusion of evidence that could not otherwise be admitted under the ordinary law, e.g., confessions to a police officer and telephonic interceptions. The inclusion of extraordinary provisions into the ordinary law of the land not only gives permanence to measures that are otherwise brought as temporary measures.
