Speakers:

Nandini Sundar, Professor of Sociology, Delhi University, India
Megha Bahl, Lawyer and Researcher committed to working on Indigenous people’s concerns in Jharkhand, Doctoral Student, Department of Anthropology, Rice University, USA

Session Introduction: Lotika Singha, InSAF India

This session critically examines the role of the Indian judiciary as an instrument of state power, enabling the dispossession of Indigenous Adivasi communities from their lands and their criminalisation through fabricated charges and the suspension of fundamental rights.

In earlier sessions, we examined the architecture of state violence and its links with extractive development models that seek to erase Indigenous lifeworlds. In this session we looked at the judiciary, which, in the context of the ongoing war on the people in the region, functions not as a site of redress but as a pivotal cog in the machinery of dispossession, through two interlinked modalities of judicial complicity: the politics of inaction and judicial processes as tools of subjugation.

Image Credits:
Various headlines from United News of India, Firstpost, IndiaSpend, Article 14, and Socio-Legal Review