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Terror trials: Life and law in Delhi's courts By Mayur R. Suresh. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. 272 pp.

2024; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/amet.13360

1548-1425

Thomas Blom Hansen,

Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence

Mayur Suresh's book is an unusually well-researched and lucidly written analysis of India's so-called terrorism trials. In these trials, men, all Muslim, were charged with offenses under the country's draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (1967) and other national security legal frameworks. Suresh frames his study as an investigation of the "legal technicalities"—the production and fabrication of evidence, the construction of narratives, procedural quarrels between lawyers and the court—that form the substance and focus of these trials. Suresh is inspired by scholars working in science and technology studies and actor network theory who are interested in the force and agency of technocratic legal forms. He notes that he resisted the temptation to look at these trials with a conventional Kafkaesque perspective that foregrounds the impenetrability and mystifying opacity of the law and authority. Instead, he is interested in Kafka's observations of the "everyday life of the law," looking at the tedium of the legal process, approaching law not "as an enigma but a field of continuous intensities, marked by desire, experimentation, comedy and confrontation" (p. 31). Although these trials are based on laws that are separate from, and that exceed, the provisions of the Indian Penal Code (1860), Suresh wishes to push our understanding of these prolonged trials beyond a "states of exception" framing, revealing the violent truth of the state, and beyond more Durkheimian-inflected approaches that frame "trials as microcosms of society" (p. 28). Instead, Suresh argues, the terror trials are embedded in the ordinary procedures of courtrooms and legal processes and are as messy, prolonged, and uncertain as all legal processes. Suresh demonstrates the power of ethnographic observation and the value of studying law and legal processes through the perspective of their everyday dramatis personae—the accused, lawyers, policemen, and court officials. Over several chapters, especially chapter 2 ("Recycled Legality: Doing Things with Legal Language") and chapter 3 ("Hypertext: Files and the Fabrication of the World"), Suresh demonstrates what he terms the "relative autonomy" of the legal field by showing how the production of evidence has less to do with ordinary truth claims than with the arcane rules of intra-bureaucratic classification and verification, making certain documents and statements admissible in court. In chapter 4 ("Law and the Vulnerable State"), Suresh shows that the collection of evidence, including witness statements, is so haphazard and riddled with irregularities that most cases coming to court are "vulnerable" to clever defense lawyers. These trials, whether ending in conviction or acquittal, are never about guilt or innocence but revolve around the technical status of the legal evidence, what Suresh in chapter 5 ("Certification and the Fabrication of Truths") calls the "paper truth." Suresh's book joins a long-standing conversation in anthropology about the relationship between social norms and legal norms. Moore's (1978) Law as Process, for example, argued that law should be seen as a "semiautonomous domain" marked by a tug-of-war between law as a relatively reified symbolic form that requires formal classification, and law as practiced and negotiated in courts and in legal proceedings. The ever-returning question in this literature is, How is law (re)produced as a distinct form of speech, discourse, and text imbued with authority and, at times, redemptive promise? Even if the law can be shown to be reproduced by many technicalities, a residual symbolic force of the law (and the possibility of real punishment) never disappears. That force, or potentiality, hovers over mundane technical procedures and appears explicitly whenever a verdict is reached in a court, when technical complexities become condensed and reified in a verdict as "law," and as legal precedent in future case law. The field of law and legal practice is peculiar in its constant and circular reification of "law" as impersonal and uniquely powerful. Legal technicalities would be mere mundane details without this reification of "law." The law in its reified form is also central to defendants and defense lawyers who claim that if the state cannot prove its case according to its own rules, a properly legal case cannot be made. By marshaling technical details and procedures, defense lawyers do not undermine the validity of the law but ultimately depend on its reified form. Law in this reified and impersonal form is also articulated in the formal hierarchies and arcane procedures governing the court system. Suresh's own material shows how the accused perpetually hope to negotiate their cases and fates with individuals and offices higher in this hierarchy. In chapter 1 ("Custodial Intimacy: Law and the Police in Two Parts"), Suresh describes two cases in which accused men, over time, develop a measure of friendliness with investigating police officers who have become familiar with many details of their lives and families. Both the accused and the officers ask kindly about events in their respective families. The accused hope that such acts of kindness and sympathy will play in their favor, only to find that police officers, without hesitation, testify against them. While it is easy to understand terror suspects' faint hopes, the most interesting aspect of this chapter is that the policemen show kindness yet depersonalize their own role, letting "the law" and the legal process unfold, almost as fate. Disappointed, one of the suspects seems to share this sentiment of the law as a reified, fate-like process when he tells Suresh, "Hota hai" (It happened). In the book's last chapter ("Petition Writing: Desire, Ethics, Mourning"), Suresh describes the vast number of petitions written by the accused languishing for many years in pretrial detention. The chapter draws on the work of Das, Cavell, and others to interpret these petitions as ethical self-retrieval by these humiliated and desperate men. While this framing is revealing, the petitions could also be read as the accused theorizing what law is as they attempt to divine its process. Their petitions are all addressed to people of superior rank and position—judges, political leaders, ministers—in a flattering style, appealing to their humanity and kindheartedness. Here, one finds a view of the law that is less concerned with a technical process and more with human fate, which may be affected and salvaged by those of superior rank who speak, make, and thus might circumvent "the law." A final word about evidence in Indian courts, which plays a key role in Suresh's account: the Indian Evidence Act (1872) grew out of a colonial regime of suspicion and mistrust toward accounts and documents produced by natives—informers, witnesses, and officers. The law instituted an elaborate system of certifying and verifying all documents and processes by senior (white) officers, one that continues into the present and was updated only recently but not fundamentally changed. The result is a uniquely labyrinthine regime of procedures that often works against the prosecution but also allows for fabrication when approved "from above" or by political intervention. Suresh is keen to avoid viewing the law and court proceedings as performances of sovereign power. It is clear, however, that most of the cases examined in this book are initiated and motivated by state authorities keen to demonstrate and indeed perform their ability to arrest, prosecute, and punish—in this case, Muslim men accused of terror-related offenses. The elaborate and lengthy investigations and trials that Suresh documents through the lens of the everyday and technical life of the law are the actual punishment, while convictions are secondary, and acquittals very common. That is true not just of terror trials but of most criminal and other cases in Indian courts, where the average trial time for punishable offenses is more than seven years and the conviction rate is consistently low.