Left turn to legalism: fact-finding inquiries as political critique in 1970s India

Abstract

A defining feature of governmental abuse of power is that it is rendered invisible; official records conceal the suffering of the victim. To claim justice, activists have to first establish and document those acts of abuse. This article looks at the practice of voluntary and independent fact-finding investigations undertaken by first-generation civil rights activists in India. Such fact-finding exercises multiplied in the aftermath of the Naxalite movement (1967–1972) and the imposition of the Internal Emergency (1975–1977). The article examines the practice of fact-finding in the 1970s as a mode of activism, and what it reveals about the variegated nature of left political praxis in India. It examines the narratives I collected by conducting interviews with activists and analysing some of the earliest fact-finding reports from the period. The most distinguishing characteristic, I argue, of the practice of fact-finding in this period was that it was a hybrid of liberal legalism and left politics. This practice was a unique strategy that was liberal legalist in its form while retaining an affinity with movements on the far left that denounced ‘bourgeois’ state and law.

Keywords:

• Left legalism
• activism
• social movements
• fact-finding inquiries
• South Asian politics

Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful to Prof. Nandini Gooptu, Prof. Faisal Devji, Prof. Rochana Bajpai, Prof. Sudipta Kaviraj and Prof. Neeladri Bhattacharya for their comments on the earlier versions of this article. I also extend sincere thanks to the guest editor Harry Verhoeven and the two anonymous reviewers for their generous comments and constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In 1991, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly adopted the Declaration on Fact-Finding under the field Maintenance of International Peace and Security. In 1998, the UN special procedures mandate adopted the Terms of Reference for Fact-Finding Missions by the Special Rapporteurs/Representatives of the Commission on Human Rights. In 2015, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights published a manual as a resource for fact-finding in the context of an international commission of inquiry. See ohchr.org, accessed October 25, 2017, http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/Pages/COIs.aspx

2 The committee consisted of M. K. Gandhi, C. R. Das, Abbas Tayabji, M. R. Jayakar and K. Santanam. See Indian National Congress, “The Congress Report on the Punjab Disorders,” gandhiserve.org, accessed Dec 27, 2019, http://gandhiserve.org/cwmg/VOL020.PDF.

3 In February 1925, Percy E. Glading, a prominent member of the British Bureau of the Red International of Labour Unions, visited India with the primary mission of making a study of Indian labour conditions. He also helped organise a labour party and worked with Indian nationalists such as Lala Lajpat Rai (Haithcox 1971, 53).

4 Several reports of police torture in the jails were anonymously published in the journal Frontier as reports by correspondents. See “Behrampur Jail Killing,” “Dum Dum Jail Massacre: A Case Study,” and Study of a Jail”, in Naxalbari and After: A Frontier Anthology, ed. Samar Sen, Debabrata Panda and Ashish Lahiri (Calcutta: Kathashilpa, 1978).

5 The term for a coordinated police action to restore the breakdown of law and order. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as ‘an occasion when a large group of police run forward in an attacking movement carrying their sticks’.

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Ankita Pandey

Ankita Pandey teaches political science at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She recently finished her DPhil at the University of Oxford. She is principally interested in democratisation in South Asia, which she examines by looking at social movement politics, evolution of citizenship as a practice, and interactions between law and society.