Smita Narula

Smita Narula is a human rights and international environmental law scholar. She is the Haub Distinguished Professor of International Law and Co-Director of the Global Center for Environmental Legal Studies at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University in New York. She is a living public figure, and this profile is limited to her published work and professional record.

Her career, as the Pace faculty profile gives it: India researcher and then Senior Researcher for South Asia at Human Rights Watch from 1997 to 2003; co-founder in 2000 of the International Dalit Solidarity Network; Associate Professor of Clinical Law at New York University School of Law, where she was Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice; and, from 2008, legal adviser to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food for the six years of his mandate. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where she edited the Harvard Human Rights Journal.

Her writing on Punjab and the farmers' morcha

• In "Confronting State Violence: Lessons from India's Farmer Protests" (Columbia Human Rights Law Review, volume 54, issue 1, 2022) she argues that the protests answered not only the three Farm Laws but decades of state-sponsored ecological and economic violence. She reads the movement through four headings: Roots, Resistance, Reform and Reconstruction.
• She traces how the Green Revolution left Punjab's small and marginal farmers unable to afford the new technology, so that many lost their land. She also writes that Dalits are about 32 percent of Punjab's population, yet only 3.5 percent of Dalits own agricultural land.
• She records the Republic Day tractor rally of 26 January 2021, when some protesters entered the Red Fort and raised the Nishan Sahib. The Samyukt Kisan Morcha condemned the "unacceptable events" of the day and distanced itself from those who broke the agreed route. She notes farmers' groups' claim that more than 100 people went missing afterwards.
• She describes the langars at the protest sites, rooted in the Sikh tradition of free meals for anyone regardless of religion, caste, gender or ethnicity, and the Trolley Times newsletter, printed in Gurmukhi and Hindi. She cites reporting that the public rejected the BJP's efforts to label protesting farmers "Khalistanis."
• Her account runs from the Dilli Chalo campaign of late 2020 to the repeal of the Farm Laws, which Narendra Modi announced on 19 November 2021, almost a full year later.

She concludes that the farmers' reformist demands do not fully address ecological harm or caste inequality, but that the alliances built across caste and class could open the way to deeper change. Earlier she wrote on caste and bonded labour, including "Equal by Law, Unequal by Caste" (Wisconsin International Law Journal, 2008), which her 2022 article cites for bonded labour in Punjab.