Mayur R. Suresh’s monograph Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi’s Courts is an ethnographic enquiry into 18 terror cases between the years 2011 and 2013 in Delhi’s Tis Hazari Court Complex that explores how individuals creatively use and inhabit law on an everyday basis. Suresh sees law as neither an instrument shaping society nor a product of society but as having a sociality of its own. Challenging the assumption that accused persons lack agency, the book urges its readers to recognize the potential of legal technicalities to provide “conditions of possibility of life” actively resisted and engaged with by those accused of terrorism (14).
Terror Trials exposes the subtle, hardly dramatic, yet contested and fluctuating ways of judicial procedure, where procedural law and its composite technicalities decide case outcomes in a manner that ideally aims to ensure “factual accuracy while simultaneously restraining arbitrary governmental action” (11). However, Suresh complicates these ideals of legal procedure by showing that “facts” are often fabricated through investigative and courtroom practices. Drawing on a range of approaches, including Science and Technology Studies and Actor-Network Theory, Suresh shows how a network of “material and non-material and human and non-human actants” inspires legal technicalities to take on a life of their own. In the process, these legal technicalities breed a composite, always contingent “juridical truth” (12). Suresh observes how the defendants weave possible paths through the nitty-gritty of law by learning legal language, generating their own meanings for legal texts, producing alternate realities through court files and deploying various means of legal writing. Suresh’s thorough excavation of the everyday practices of the trial courts is presented through critical engagements with the police (chapter 1), legal language (chapters 2 and 3), paperwork (chapters 4 and 5) and testimony (chapter 6).
The police-defendant relationship is understood beyond its obvious iterations of oppressor-oppressed or perpetrator-victim through the author’s proposal of a “custodial intimacy” between the parties. Thus, law is depicted as “vulnerable and negotiable,” in addition to “violent and overwhelming,” while its technicalities open up a field through which everyone – the defendants, the lawyers and even the judges – finds their ways, thus enabling a complex and composite everyday “life to emerge” within the courtrooms (5). In the same vein, Suresh uses the concept of “recycled legality” to encapsulate the ways in which legal materials and texts are “copied, repurposed and deployed” by the defendants to produce legal meanings outside of formal modes of “jurisgenesis” (76). Going beyond assessing a case for its success or failure, Suresh shows how accused persons cultivate the ability to maneuver legal language through contingent and creative processes of knowledge production. These processes place the state on trial instead of, or perhaps, as well as, the accused, making the former vulnerable to the letter of the law produced by the state and paving the way for the accused to gain an acquittal.
Terror Trials also illustrates how file-building and other certificatory processes generate alternative realities in court. The technicalities surrounding file production – the log books, signatures, counter-signatures, stamps, seals and so on – enable the state mechanism to build particular crime narratives, which, in the book’s context, overwhelmingly target Muslims, Dalits and civil rights activists. Interestingly, Suresh finds that the defendants in these cases engage the same technicalities to produce their own versions of reality, confronting the prosecution’s narrative. The pursuit of justice against fabricated charges then becomes a technical ordeal of fighting paper truths with paper truths.
The book also details how the law enables the human voice to emerge as an “expression of vulnerabilities, passions, pains and demands” (169). Moving beyond how petition writing allows for claim-making, Suresh shows how legal language, diaries and prison memoirs function as a record of events outside the technical legal terrain. The defendants are compelled to inhabit the world of law through an act of mourning, especially when passionate pleas for legal intervention elicit no replies.
Suresh offers two seminal advancements to law and anthropology scholarship concerned with terror jurisprudence – first, instead of parroting the “extraordinary” nature of terrorism laws and reproducing dominant tropes such as state of exception, withdrawal of law, silent emergency, criminalization of fundamental rights and erosion of democracy, the hyperlegality involved in terror jurisdiction is flagged, detailed and illuminated. Next, Suresh contends that the setting of terror laws engenders modalities of a unique sociality. The defendants and their “bare lives” slowly start to inhabit this sociality and use legal procedures to their advantage despite limited success. Thus, Suresh posits that the state of exception paradigm may indeed shed light on fractures in the idea of Indian citizenship, communal identities and anxieties of the state, but state of exception fails to engage the tekhne of the law. Society and politics do not subsume legal processes in their entirety. Instead, these forces emerge in the courtroom only to be conditioned by the everyday technicalities of law.
Suresh’s monograph urges scholars to pay more attention to the particularities of the legal process because the outcomes of cases often hinge, not on political metanarratives, but on mundane technicalities. Thus, instead of imagining law solely as “forms of epistemic and material violence,” Suresh demonstrates that the law “engenders forms of life” through its technicalities (208). Like a potter with clay or a carpenter with wood, the law needs to be felt, understood and dealt with to see how it can evolve and what it can do.
The book is a worthy example of what legal anthropology can achieve through courtroom ethnography. Critiquing legal scholarship’s preoccupation with substantial law over procedural law, Suresh represents those accused of terrorism as active participants instead of passive victims. Suresh’s work, a fascinating read, will interest the students of law, sociology, anthropology, and political science as much as the general reader. A credible addition to the ethnographic scholarship on Indian court systems, preceded by notable works by Pratiksha Baxi (Reference Baxi2014), and Daniela Berti and Devika Bordia (Reference Berti and Bordia2015), Terror Trials offers a research template that may be applied to gauge the peculiar socialities thriving in myriad everyday courtrooms. Future research could also delve into the roots and genesis of mundane technicalities written into legal form by the state. The answers may lie as much in the philosophy of law as they may in the discourse on statecraft.
