Daniela Berti

Hostile witnesses, judicial interactions and out-of-court narratives in a north Indian district court

This article examines the argument that people in India are strongly oriented towards litigation in court as against other forms of negotiation or advising. In spite of the centrality of the court system to Indian public life, the flow of cases arriving at court does not reflect any such fixed preference. Going to court may simply be a choice which the parties make in the first instance, but which will eventually be abandoned in favour of private forms of compromise. By drawing on the ethnography of a court case followed in a district court of Himachal Pradesh, this contribution will show how even in serious criminal cases where no private compromise is allowed, it often happens that all the prosecution witnesses deny before the judge what they are supposed to have previously stated to the police. The analysis of court interactions and out-of-court narratives will show how nonofficial forms of conciliation may internally unsettle the rules of evidence followed in criminal proceedings.

Practices of Justice: Categories, Procedures and Strategies

This collection of studies aims to contribute to a better understanding of the relationships between justice and the exercise of power in various societies of Africa, Asia and Europe. The growing awareness that we have of judicial practices around the world leads to a renewed questioning of their link with the actual power relationships structuring the socio-political field. The stakes are all the more important in view of recent changes: the influence of groups of citizens prompted by a renewed perception of the notion of justice, the will to reform on the part of certain governments, reference to international standards, are all together creating new judicial situations which point to changing power relationships within diverse societies and likewise in the relationships of the latter with a more general globalization. In this context, if the promulgation of laws and rules on the one hand and the resistance or processes of adjustment to these by people at local levels of society on the other hand are the object of regular in-depth studies, there is still often the need to better understand the interactions between the standards promoted by the state and the effective modalities that are in place for the arbitration of conflicts. Today we are seeing in these phenomena the growing hold that the judicial sector is acquiring in numerous politically and economically diverse countries, a process described as a judicialization or ‘juridicization’ of the social and political realms (Commaille, Dumoulin and Robert, 2010). This process has given rise in France to several comparative analyses (see also Commaille and Kaluszynski, 2007) at the boundary between sociology and political science, whereas studies in the English-speaking world, which tend to have a historical and anthropological focus, emphasize rather the effects of globalization and the potential resistance that judicial systems, when considered as a hegemonic vehicle for elites, could arouse (see for example Lazarus-Black and Hirsch, 2010). The implicit risk in the latter approach is to draw undue attention to a contrast, notably found in formerly colonized countries, between a state apparatus perceived as ‘foreign’ and customs seen as being ‘indigenous’. Such a dichotomy has indeed been regarded critically by some historians and anthropologists who have emphasized the fact that justice and the legal subject should not be considered in terms of legal juxtapositions or hybridity but as elements of a social

HiNDU NaTioNaLiSTS aND LoCaL HiSTory: From iDEoLoGy To LoCaL LorE

This article analyses how the Hindutva ideological programme on history-writing is concretely implemented at grass-root levels by an rss-affiliated organisation. The organisation’s name is the Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojna. The area of fieldwork moves from its rss headquarters to its Chandigarh branch and to its Kullu branch. The primary objective of the article is to shed light on the multiple forms of mediation of the organisation, which show how Hindutva influence in local society cannot be simply reduced to the direct effects of its militants’ actions. It also examines how the Hindutva discourse on history infiltrates the local conception of regional culture, merges with pre-existent conceptions and encounters specific forms of resistance. Finally, the article suggests the importance of understanding the Hindutva rereading of Indian history in the light of other post-colonial historiographies, engaged in a similar effort of placing the locality within a wider and prestigious framework.

Local Powers and Judicial Constraints in a Case of Rape in India

In this article, I analyse this contrasting relationship between the written and the oral in the production of judicial proof, in particular in relation to the problem posed by hostile witnesses. I base my findings on a criminal case which I observed at a district court concerning the rape of an under-age girl in order to analyse how judicial procedures come to be perturbed by extra-judicial power dynamics resulting from local relationships of dominance.