Bengaluru law student wins Rhodes Scholarship for 2025

BENGALURU: Among the five Rhodes scholars-elect for 2025 from India is a 23-year-old Bengalurean, Vibha Swaminathan, who is currently in the final year of the three-year LLB (Hons) programme at National Law School of India University (NLSIU). Vibha will head to the University of Oxford for her fully funded Masters in civil law.NLSIU, which used to regularly have students winning the prestigious scholarship, has got a Rhodes scholar after a gap of seven years. Vibha, after completing her higher secondary classes at Mallya Aditi International School, joined Lady Shri Ram (LSR) College, Delhi University, for a BA (Hons) in political science. The progression to law was natural, she said."I've always been interested in political science, and I think it gave me some useful conceptual frameworks to look at the world. After political science, I came to law because I wanted a way to translate those conceptual frameworks into praxis, so to say. In that, I think, there was an urgency to the sort of issues that I was witnessing around me — issues of citizenship, police violence — which I thought I would best be able to address with the law," she said."When I was at LSR, I became aware of issues of citizenship when the Citizenship Amendment Act came about. And at NLSIU, I had the opportunity to work with the citizenship clinic. Not only did we theoretically engage with citizenship in India, but also practically, we worked on cases arising out of the foreigner tribunal position in Assam," she said.As part of her work in Assam, Vibha interacted with women with no citizenship records. "They appear for the first time in public records alongside the names of their husbands and not their fathers. They don't own land, so they don't have land records. And what this creates is a unique gendered deprivation of citizenship," she said."I don't think equality law in India has directed its focus towards these gendered precarities of citizenship yet. I helped the case of a woman before Gauhati high court. Seeing her experience motivated me to work in this space both academically and in practice," she explained.After building a strong foundation in public law, constitutional law, equality law, and human rights law, Vibha plans to study MSc in criminology and criminal justice at Oxford, which has a specific research unit called the Border Criminology Research Unit. She hopes to come back to India and work in the fields of citizenship law and criminal law."Rhodes Scholarship is an excellent opportunity. It's the beginning of a lifelong engagement. It opens pathways into building the kind of future that we want to work towards. It's not just the legacy of Cecil Rhodes himself, but it's the legacy of, thousands of scholars who have come in the 120 years after him that I think inspires me more than anything.” she said.