edia in India has been a disappointed role as it has failed to take a position on certain vital issues. In fact, it is interested in fanning controversy without taking any firm stand in favour of multicultural landscape of the country. Media lacks political will and also intellectual capacity to explain the inconvenient facts. Inconvenient facts are given a poor treatment by the media. On the other hand, the judiciary has been, in its role, less than satisfactory in sharing with people the events, episodes with full explanation. It does not cover the full dimension of the events. Whatever it covers, it is put in a very technical language that could be understood only by a few ‘experts’. Thus, judiciary caters only to the need of a few ‘kala coat’ wallas. The general public is left out from this judicial interpretation. In view of these constraints, the people have adopted ‘jan sunwai’ as the route for addressing grievances and thereby strengthening of democracy in India. The enormity of the communal holocaust and the intensity of caste atrocities cannot be captured by the media or judicial mechanism. Hence, the social forces, which feel constrained in sharing the magnitude and intensity through the judiciary, have consciously chosen this route. There have been several jan sunwai events that have been organized by particularly people’s initiatives around the issue of communalism, decimation of minorities, dalit atrocities, land issues and gender exploitation. And the response to such events has been very encouraging. However, these events seem to be differing from each other both in terms of politics and theoretical orientation. I am going to raise the theoretical significance of jan sunwai and also its political relevance. I seek to do it by rainy the following set of questions.

It is important to ask the question, what is jan sunwai? What is its location? Does it exist between the political parties on the one hand and official judiciary on the other? Is it different from the regular court hearing? If yes, in what way is it different? Second, in the second section, I would like to raise the question why jan sunwai? What are the background conditions that give rise to jan sunwai? Do different conditions give rise to different forms of jan sunwai? (Majalgaon prototype) In the final section, I am going to argue what are the implications of jan sunwai for deepening democracy? Does it help in bringing a sense of concern within the non-dalit middle class? Does it achieve larger political mobilization of the people both outside political parties and also the courtroom? Or does it remain confined to the event managers or it simply becomes a ritual or an event that dissolves into insignificance without any backup or necessary follow-up? These are certain questions that will be discussed in the following sections.


What is Jan Sunwai?

Let us argue that etymologically jan sunwai has two components in it: jan (public) and sunwai (hearing). Jan, if not carefully defined, would appear as quite amorphous and loose category. If one chooses to define in bourgeois terms, it can be defined against the private sphere. Private is quite secluded from closed system of relations. Similarly, jan, as understood in the current context, can be defined separate from the public authority i.e. the state. Jan does not have any public authority as its basis. It does not have penal authority. Of course, it has the moral power to influence the state, civil society in favour of the democratic spirit. This moral orientation is clear fro the slogan of Lucknow jan sunwai which says ‘From the dalits of UP to the citizens of India’. We will discuss more about it when we discuss jan sunwai as such. Jan is also different from the public which provides the platform for grand reception of the powerful (offering reception in ship, aircraft or in the streets). Neither is it a spectacular display of affluence or power. In fact, the dalits use this public, to use a local metaphor, for the ‘open bombabomb (a cacophony) to expose several defaulters – the twice born civil society (TBCS), state, judiciary, etc. Thus, the language of this counter-public is against the more careful polite speech act. The jan as defined by dalits, tribals, women, displaced does not have any affinity with this polite public discourse’ of the middle class. Finally, the jan of the subaltern is different from the more narrow, in camera and close courtroom which is also public. Although the legal is close, in camera, paradoxically it is also public as it is codified in a universal legal language. This jan has its own language which has ontology of its own. Counter jan is also defined against the upper caste private i.e. ‘agrahara’ which is organized around the line of purity-pollution. It is interesting to note that even the major Indian cities produce and reproduce such ‘agrahar’ or to use Bourdieu’s term the ‘cultural habitat’. Agrahar by definition is hierarchical, private and closed. But it also gets public character rather deceitfully. It is projected as public through the market. Thus, one can conclude that the jan defined from the certain point of view can be counter of the mainstream understanding of jan i.e. public.

Let me deal with the second part of the term jan sunwai. What is sunwai? In English, sunwai means hearing. This sunwai is different from the official version of sunwai. In the latter case, sunwai is a procedural and has an institutional basis. Sunwai involves the legal authority and also the barristers. In an official jan sunwai, it is always the dalits who have to stand all the time in the witness box. But in an authentic form of jan sunwai, dalits do not need to stand in the witness box. In fact, they are in the chair of the judges and barristers and they put the upper caste, landlords, state police and banking and forest officers in the witness box. In this sunwai, the dalits through their own representation call the convict to appear before the court. They, thus, are contrary to the representation of them by the ‘kala coat’. They do not see sunwai as the moral embarrassing situation. On the contrary, sunwai is not embarrassing but very much empowering. The official sunwai is opaque as it is a procedure is transmuted into a technical language that requires a specialist to make sense to dalits. This technical language does damage to the victim at two levels. The official sunwai seeks to objectify the victim by dominating the latter through the very privileged access to technical language. Secondly, this jan sunwai colonized the time and space of the victims. The sunwai subordinates the victim to the time of the expert. But in the counter sunwai the people who depose have complete control on their time. They are not vulnerable to any kind of dictations. In terms of possession of space, in the official sunwai, the dispossessed choose to occupy the remote and often insignificant corner of the court premises. Whereas the rich and the powerful occupy the center or the prominent place of the premises, victims, in the official sunwai, has the shrinking body language.

Exactly opposite is the counter sunwai since there is a desirable absence of any expert and hence no chance of objectification of the victim. In fact, sunwai restores to a person an agency which operates and acts without any outside help and dictation. The kala coat is absent here. They represent their case without anyone’s technical assistance. This notion of sunwai interrogates all kinds of representation – the NGO, the kala coat. Let us understand it with the help of the poem that is composed by one of the leading tribal leaders from Maharashtra. The name of his poem is ‘Stage’. Let us see what he has to say about representation:

       You asked us to sit in the front or wait outside the courtroom and wait for the hearing endlessly,
       While you kept on occupying the stage that is enacted to address our problems and grievances,
       You kept on talking about our problems without making them your own.

In the official sunwai, the victims are forced to require the kala coat but in jan sunwai, the kala coat is replaced. Thus, this sunwai is different from official in as much as it restores agency to the person. In people’s hearing, it is the victims who are in charge of genuine sunwai. I am already suggesting that there could be absence of agency. Certain NGOs may be instrumental in bringing dalits to the stage just to build up the case of these self-styled activists like some of the dalit NGOs would have stake in bringing the victims to the stage. This can always improve the chances of getting funds of such dalit activists. Thus, in view of this, it is important to introduce distinction between different kinds of jans. Some of them offer space for the emergence of agency while some of them may not. Thus, jan sunwai can be defined in terms of the counter public whose primary aim is to make a statement on the official hearing. The question that why jan sunwai? What are the background conditions of jan sunwai?


Background Conditions of Jan Sunwai

I am going to argue that the jan sunwai has to be understood in terms of the conditions that produce this particular necessity. One of the basic factors that is rather negatively responsible is the very nature of the judicial system. Dalits/women/tribals and the other kinds of marginalized sections find the judiciary rather constraining for two reasons. First, the elite perception of the judiciary fails to redress the grievances of the dalits. The dalit elites claim (D. N. Sandanshiv) that the official legal system is like the sun for which no situation is forbidden and it can reach everywhere even it can penetrate the small shanty huts of the dalits/tribals. But dalits are not convinced about this claim. They argue that this sun disperses its rays so discriminately that these rays do not reach the huts of dalits. And hence, the need to illuminate oneself or the civil society outside the official legal channels. Most of the dalits find this channel quite constraining because it tries to mummify the most vibrant concept like self-respect or dignity. It is interesting to note that one of the well-known laws professes that the dalit community was forcefully arguing against the idea of dignity as the potent force of mobilization of those who are put to indignities by the TBCS. He said right to dignity has already been codified and duly incorporated in Indian constitution and hence there is no need to speak of dignity elsewhere. He suggested that law will automatically take care of dignity issues. It is this reification that provides the background condition for the jan sunwai.

As a corollary to the first, the police department is supposed to facilitate the regret to equal access to law. This in turn demands that police need to register the FIR so that the case can stand in the court. Since the police force in this country has been found guilty on this count as in most of the cases particularly by dalits/tribals it has refused to even file the FIR. Police has been responsible for closing the legal channel. This role of the police has brought a huge amount of frustration that was so vocal in the Lucknow jan sunwai. Thus the negative passivity role of the police forces dalits to search for alternative channels of representation of their grievances. Thus, the inactive police or the actively repressive police force provides a negative reason for the victims to raise their discomfort/protest from the platform like jan sunwai.

In addition to this, suppose some of the dalits force the police to file an FIR and the case can even enter the legal fortress. This by itself does not provide any guarantee that the dalit would get justice. In most of the cases, they lose the cases not because they have no truth or substance in their case but because their case is purposely weakened by the ethical problems created by the barrister-kala coat wallas and the adversaries of the dalit against whom the case is filed in the first place. I am going to argue that there is an unethical tradeoff between the kala coat wallas who have been hired by the dalits and the adversaries of dalits. As a result, dalits’ frustration increases manifold. These play a passivity and repression by the police and the unethical tradeoff certainly pushes the dalits towards finding out alternative forums which are not intimidating.

I have listed some of the background conditions that are negative in character. Let me also outline some of the background conditions that offer positive justification for the organization of jan sunwai. The breaking down of the village court with village lord at its apex has helped dalits to at least matter in the new legal system. In the village legal system, at ways of acting autonomous, used dalit only as the ‘dawandiwalla’ (person calling the guilty and announcing the name of the guilty with the help of the halgi, a musical instrument). In such a setup, the dalit never had the chance to get a hearing or to have his case on the board. No sunwai for him. The judgment was delivered on him with giving him natural justice. In most of the cases, he would get a conviction. The standardization and decentralization of the judicial system encouraged him to matter in the judicial system. Secondly, the crumbling of paternalism that replaced the need on the part of the dalits to approach the court against the patron, the ‘silent, sweet killer’. Paternalism with a face of benevolence made dalit not to go against their patrons. In fact, this benevolence also led them to resolve their internal petty disputes in such courts headed by the village lord. Now, the amount of individualism has replaced this paternalism with autonomy that empowered dalits to confront the lords. The case of 16 districts in UP where dalits went against the landlords, forest officers and bank officers. In some cases, dalits not only stood against local lords but they threaten to take legal action against them. As far as UP is concerned, it has to be acknowledged that the BSP led government installed confidence among the dalits to speak against the local lords. In addition to this, the leadership of activists like Ram Kumar, Ashok Choudhury from Sahranpur, Ramaji from Sonbhadra and above all Prithvi Singh have played a significant role sustaining the courage and confidence of dalits, women and the tribals to break the shackles of constraining paternalism. These are some of the background conditions that can explain why jan sunwai. The last question that needs explanation is that in what way does jan sunwai deepen the democratic spirit among the dalits and the civil society or citizens in the wider context.


Jan Sunwai: Deepening of Democracy

I am going to argue that jan sunwai not only creates egalitarian aspirations among the marginalized but it also leads to the liberating body language of the victim. It makes the victim occupy the public space not for achieving personal victory or performance but to achieve an egalitarian impact over the citizens. Thus, the jan sunwai entails a democracy with moral dimensions. Let me explain this in the following sections. Jan sunwai achieves the reversal of the legal relationship, in which dalits do not continue to be the guilty, but those landlords, upper castes, forest officers, bank officers, police and other state officials who in the formal legal system hardly get the chance to appear in the witness box. This asymmetry of relationship, which hides in the overall framework of procedural democracy, gets subverted in jan sunwai of the kind that we are talking about. Jan sunwai also seeks the democratic expansion or democratic resurgence of the dalits who otherwise find themselves consigned to an insignificant corner of the official legal court premises o the one hand and the dalit ghettos on the other. Jan sunwai thus, provides a mediating space that converts the immediate dalit corner or ghetto into a universal abstract institution that really treats everybody without discrepancy, distinction or discrimination. As all the jan sunwai show, those events do not suggest any hierarchy. The Lucknow jan sunwai on the 5-6th October 2001 indicated such comprehensive collapse of all the hierarchies based on time and space. For example, the time of those dalits who came forward to depose was absolutely important. As mentioned earlier, in the official hearing, the time belonged to the judge and the ‘kala coat wallas’. But the people’s court empowers dalits, women, and tribals to control their time.

Jan sunwai as the mediating space or the medium of communication between dalits and several institutions of oppression including the twice born civil society generates desirable moral impact on the erring elements. Jan sunwai has the moral capacity to achieve this without deploying penal punishment. It inflicts moral indictment through the radical pedagogy. Thus the moral economy that creates so much of moral/cultural impact on the tormentor and also the spectators ultimately serves as a powerful pedagogical device. Jan sunwai as the pedagogical device rather than the primitive legal structure democratizes the appropriate structure that seeks to positively ignore dalits/women and tribals as the bearer of rights, justice and dignity. Te deposition of Mukesh Kumar, the victim of upper caste atrocities in Aligarh district sufficiently suggests this. Or take the deposition of Walmiki who has to carry the night soil of the upper castes from all the religions. Jan sunwai thus provides the victim to make a statement on the civil society which has unending capacity to be barbaric and also to commit frauds and atrocities against a large number of people.

The question that needs to be raised is how does jan sunwai enable the victim to make a statement so as to morally overwhelm the recalcitrant and hence Brahminical public sphere in India? What is the language (both as speech act and also the body language) that is used by the victim to make this statement? Is their body language shrinking like the one that one notices in the premises of the official courts? Do they feel constrained to use a particular language of ‘My Lord’ or the polite language of the middle class or the technical language of the kala coat wallas? Jan sunwai as the counter of the official deliberately violates all these language protocols and deploys its own authentic language, which to the many would appear to be rude cacophony. One can also argue that this language has its own ontological character. The dalits/women and tribals who came to depose used the same language that they used in their own authentic spheres. The usage seems to be traveling across several spheres from village to police stations at the taluka to the cities without any gap, distortion or extrapolation or embarrassment in language presentation. For example, almost all the victims who deposed on both the days had no problem to introduce themselves to a gathering of 2000 people who had come to hear the narratives of discrimination and atrocities with their social background that otherwise caused painful embarrassment to the middle class dalits for example. Some of the dalits also narrated their stories that involve humiliating events and shattering ends. For example, the narratives on scavenging by Girdharilal, (village Naya Parwa, tehsil Nanpara, district Bahraich) was freely flowing, causing embarrassment to the others. Let us take another example of Vijaylakshmi, a schoolteacher from village Mahipura, block Puwarka, district Sahranpur who narrated how she was intimidated and humiliated by the upper castes when she demanded her salary. While she was speaking, all of them presented with determination and confidence and without ant stammering or interruptions. They never required any kind of prompting or nagging persuasion. Obviously, they did not require any assistance from the kala coat wallas. Neither had they learnt their lessons from the law books. Although there were interruptions from the juries, it was only to shed more light on the magnitude of lies and ignorance. Definitely, cross-examination was completely out from the jan sunwai. However, the question that needs to be answered is that will it be correct to understand this confidence and robustness is a natural quality that dalits and tribals automatically possess? Are the dalits born with this rude cacophony? It would be a mistake to think so. It is not the case that dalits/tribals and women possess this capacity to appear in the public hearing without the sense of shame. They do not have the sense of embarrassment because of the following reasons:

First, those who come for deposition are effortlessly confident because they possess the truth. They are in possession of unmediated truth. They know that they are exploited (materially and sexually) by the dominant forces (bank officials, forest officials, landlords, pandits and police). They are duped by the state. They are humiliated by the upper castes. Their land and water is confiscated by the local landlords. This statement has a strong element of truth because it honestly appears in the speech ac. It is attached to his/her body which is frail eaten up by poverty and other circumstances. The truths of chamar identity which cannot be separated from the body does not require discursive device to bifurcate it from the body. It is this truth that cannot be accessed through concepts and the law texts. It cannot be articulated by putting hand on the sacred book ‘The Geeta’. Thus, the confidence emanates from the association of the truth with the body. It is due to the lack of discrepancy between the self and the material reality that makes the body language absolutely authentic and vibrant.

This can also be explained by citing the example of a middle class dalit who would lack this confidence to narrate the truth in a jan sunwai like the one under reference. Since the middle class dalit is not sure about the recognition from the others preferably a Brahmin or s/he has become suddenly self-conscious about the caste gaze of the other since s/he suffers from the constant surveillance of the other, s/he cannot demonstrate a moral capacity to make a statement about the indecent and barbaric character of the TBCS. Since this channel is avoided by the elite dalits and tribals, they maintain within themselves a painful discrepancy between their self and their body. But the jan sunwai offers a unique opportunity to the common fighting dalits to remove this discrepancy with ease. In fact, this honest and frank statement seeks to embarrass the others particularly the upper caste who are sentient beings.

Secondly, the common dalit rightly imagines the reproduction of the ‘dirty, hierarchical and indecent village’ in the cities as well. S/he does not see any ontological difference. In fact, s/he locates the continuum in the logical relationship between the real (dalit) and the ideal (Brahmin). It is this continuum that makes the dalit more confident to make a case against this logical relationship. To put it in different words, a dalit imagines the presence of Brahminism existing both across the time and space. In other words, the jan sunwai offers the dalit to firmly define and concretely locate the adversary as an undifferentiated (casteist, discriminatory, humiliating, coercive, other) self. Jan sunwaiserves as the powerful medium to articulate and transcend this reified relationship between real and the ideal. Jan sunwai, which is basically aimed at creating the possibility of reconciliation, seeks to transform this reified relationship into a relationship based on recognition. However, jan sunwai does it without compromising with the need of justice. Secondly, it also rests the moral leadership with the dalits and at the same time it also offers an invitation to the others to join this endeavour that is seeking the transcendence of the mutual reification. Jan sunwai thus, neither surrenders to the official public nor makes the people in question succumb to this official public or sunwai. In fact, it has a promise to change the discourse on the notion of public and public hearing. It has a capacity to flatten the hierarchical or the segmented sense of the public. The question that needs to be answered is how is one going to seek this transcendence through jan sunwai? Should one use jan sunwai as the platform to empathise with the victim?

The purpose of jan sunwai is to take the issue both outside the official framework of hearing right into the street for the political mobilization of all those who have a stake in crating a decent society. However, the social contract to reach a rational reconciliation does not or cannot serve as the basis of such mobilization. As we have already noted, social contractarian notion of legal system has created paradox than it solved the puzzle. By adopting equality before law, it certainly dissolves all forms of domination and hierarchies in public domain. But at the same time, it also crated newer forms of domination and resultant public frustration. It is no doubt rational and universal as it is not based on anyone’s will. But it is also elitist, constraining, frustrating and disciplinary. It in fact tends to codify the core issues like dignity and self-respect. Law intervention relates to individual grievances while the issue of dignity is the issue of a collectivity that is despised by the TBCS. And hence it requires political solution.

In order to generate radical politics through jan sunwai the case has to be taken to prevent jan sunwai from either becoming a mere yearly rituals or an event that some of the leaders are ever ready to manage more for their personal gains than to achieve concentization of the people. One could see this happening in some of the recently held jan sunwais organized for farmers, dalits, women and tribals. One could also see the mainstream political leaders using such events for narrow political ends. After having had the experience of such sunwai particularly after the demolition of the Babri Mosque, it has to be acknowledged that there is no serious and sincere follow-up of such efforts. They remain merely events that cannot serve ant radical political purpose. It has to be always kept in mind that such sunwais are not arrived at delivering justice or resolving problem but to concentize the victim and the spectators that there is a bigger struggle outside jan sunwai. Jan sunwai provides only the background conditions for such struggle to become a possibility.


Limits of Jan Sunwai

As the records of jan sunwai of the recent past shows, almost all the jan sunwai are about the issues that have roots in rural contradictions. Be it land, Panchayati Raj institutions or wages and the discrimination and atrocities. The tormentor has rural orientation and location. Given the spectators of these discriminatory practices who, in fact, enjoy the dalit being tormented are also from the rural areas. This location aspect therefore demands that jan sunwai be organized in the rural India. They also need to be institutionalized. Should gram sabha or gram panchayat provide an institutional background or they need to be institutional arrangements? The jan sunwai with urban orientation serve a limited purpose and may depend on the mood of the media which may treat rath yatra with much more interest than jan sunwai. Hence, jan sunwai has to be started from the bottom-up rather than the top-down.