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. We now turn to examining the judiciary, which, in the context of the ongoing war 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: We explore how the higher judiciary, through silence, delay, and dismissal, systematically undermines Adivasi rights. Rather than upholding constitutional guarantees, courts enable state and corporate impunity, creating a climate in which violations go unpunished and dispossession proceeds unchecked.
Judicial Processes as Tools of Subjugation: We further examine how the state’s arsenal of repression extends beyond weaponry to include the justice system itself. For Adivasis, courts and prisons become sites of state violence – spaces where they are dragged under false charges – targeted for their political assertion, for defending their lands, or simply for existing, and reduced to mere statistics in the state’s narrative of “victory”. The court, by routinely admitting and proceeding with trials founded on insubstantial, fabricated, or otherwise manifestly unreliable evidence, effectively legitimises the systematic criminalisation of Adivasis. In its refusal or reluctance to grant interim relief, the judiciary transforms the legal process itself into an instrument of punishment rather than adjudication. By failing to impose rigorous accountability for wrongful incarceration, the judiciary not only abdicates its constitutional mandate to protect individual liberty, but also becomes an enabler of the state’s broader project of subjugation under the cloak of legality.
Through these two lenses, our session’s speakers will provide a critical reflection on how legal institutions have ceased to function as sites of democratic accountability for Adivasi communities. Instead, they now serve to entrench a permanent state of exception -- one in which constitutional protections are systematically suspended.
Image Credits:
Various headlines from United News of India, Firstpost, IndiaSpend, Article 14, and Socio-Legal Review