Abstract
Mass, collective violence perpetrated by members of one community on another, with or without the tacit or explicit support of the state has occured far too often in India, and in most cases, perpetrators have largely gone unpunished. While a number of enquiry commissions have submitted reports on such incidents, for reasons that are understandable, academic research-based studies are fewer, despite some high quality, sensitive and empathetic monographs, especially in the last couple of decades. These incidents, as this book under review shows, are spread across almost the entire post-independence period, and spatially traverse the length and breadth of the country. Existing studies offer insights into the long-term structural and immediate causes of violence, document the failures of the state and law enforcement agencies and uncover the deep-seated biases, prejudices and antagonisms that result in recurring incidents of mass violence, largely targeting members of the minority, lower caste, migrant and marginalized sections of the population in India. Rare are the studies which document state apathy in post-violence contexts in terms of securing justice and providing relief and rehabilitation to victims of communal massacres. Hence, this is an important and significant contribution not just to the critique of the Indian state and state apparatuses that have had major roles in perpetuating and/or turning a blind eye to mass violence, but also for comprehending the general and wide-ranging failure and inaction of the state to provide justice, reparation and protection to victims and to compensate its citizens after events of mass violence. Pointing to consistent and structural patterns of state impunity, the case studies in the book underscore a deeply disturbing trend of mass injustice resulting in large numbers of perpetrators of violence continuing to go unpunished.
Based on in-depth and intensive research by lawyers and activists in association with the Centre for Equity Studies, New Delhi, a unique aspect of the book which gives it greater credibility is the extensive use of the state’s own record, retrieved through a large number of Right to Information applications. Covering a 20-year period from 1983 to 2002, the book covers Nellie (1983), Delhi (1984), Bhagalpur (1989) and Gujarat (2002) episodes of mass violence, each of which not just constitutes a dark chapter in this history of communal massacres in India, but also damningly highlights the inaction and covert as well as overt supports of the state in perpetrating the violence and denying justice to victims of mass violence. 1 Through detailed and extensive research and examination of documentary evidence, the chapters of the book elaborate state failure in the realms of access to criminal justice, holding public officials accountable and relief, rehabilitation and compensation to the victims. In doing so, the authors and researchers successfully demonstrate that the state’s failure to provide reparations to victims of mass violence in itself constitutes a significant and gross violation of human rights. Such reparations, as international law has specified, include access to justice, access to the truth and material as well as non-material compensation, rehabilitation and restitution. The state’s consistent and continuous failure and collusion in denying justice and reparations belies modern democratic claims of a movement from retributive to restitutive forms of law and justice. Each case study offers a detailed account of the role and inaction of multiple state agencies at different scales of the grossly inadequate nature of legal processes for justice and of the institutional and administrative strategies for relief, rehabilitation and compensation. In each of the episodes of mass violence that is documented, the structural violence on women and cultural and religious symbols, the violation of civil and political rights and large scale indignities, displacements and instabilities to lives and livelihoods are also brought out.
In critiquing state apparatuses in India in the aftermath of mass episodes of violence, the evidence clearly points to the large-scale failure of, and hence the need for reforms in the criminal justice system. Further, beyond the failure to punish the actual perpetrators of violence, the book strongly advocates the need to hold public officials accountable for acts of omission and commission. Here, an explicit recommendation is made to amend laws in India to incorporate ‘command responsibility principles’ (p. 309). A key counsel that is offered is for redesigning enquiry commissions so that they better serve the purposes of justice, relief and rehabilitation for victims of mass violence. The book ends with an urgent plea for a number of reforms to diverse state apparatuses, especially to police and prosecution systems so that the long and shameful tradition of impunity is brought to an end. National standards and norms for relief, rehabilitation and compensation and response mechanisms are suggested. In addition, changes and amendments to criminal investigation procedures and related administrative protocols are advocated as reparatory and preventive measures. Through deeply sympathetic and sensitive accounts, the authors of this volume attempt to set right certain historical records in the face of state attempts to cover up and falsify history, and in the process, they offer a powerful ‘testimony to the experiences of victims’ (p. 334). The book ends with a scathing account of state complicity in mass violence against minorities and the disadvantaged in India through an interview with one of India’s foremost activists against mass violence—Teesta Setalvad. This interview also focuses on the 1992–93 violence, organized against Muslims in Mumbai by Hindu majoritarian forces in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
While some of the cases described in this volume (e.g., Gujarat 2002) are well known and documented, others such as the Nellie massacre have gradually disappeared from public consciousness. Even though many activists and scholars studying and fighting against mass violence will be familiar with the episodes described in this book, the authors have done an enormous service to the causes of equity, justice and democracy as well as to sensitive scholars by digging up and accurately detailing a vast amount of public records relating to the failure, inaction and collusion of state and judicial agencies in denying justice and reparations to victims of mass violence in post-independence India.
Celebratory accounts of the evolution of Indian democracy would do well to be cautioned by the description of state impunity in this book. The large-scale and consistent failure of the police, prosecution and judiciary point to a corrosion of the institutions of democracy in India. By presenting a different kind of ethnography using the state’s own archiving of violence and its aftermath and the state’s response to communal massacres, the book also offers a counter to academic accounts that offer simplistic cause–effect theorizations based on overviews, reviews of multiple events and demographic–criminological analysis. As chilling as the accounts elaborated in this book are, it yet offers hope by bringing to our attention the significance of the work of activists who battle enormous personal danger and risk to unearth the truth when it comes to mass violence in India. It is hoped that this book will stand as a lasting testimony to the role of the state in perpetuating injustice to members of India’s minorities and marginalized groups, and will be used as a teaching and research material to enhance our collective and individual sensibilities to minimize and eventually prevent similar incidents from recurring in the future. From an academic perspective, it is hoped that the detailed descriptions in this book offer scope to scholars to retheorize issues and problems of power, inequality, justice, victimhood, mass violence and social suffering.