[Reader-list] Of Trials and Trails

[Jeebesh Bagchi]

Dear All,

Commentaries have started appearing on the recently launched Penguin  
book on the events surrounding December 13. A recent television  
program staged a debate, with panelists discussing before a studio  
public, various positions around the time scale of pardon decision  
(need for urgencies vs natural procedural delays) for people on death  
row. As if they are discussing some latest pension scheme!

These commentaries and shows want to show that there are just two  
lines of argument - one legal, the other pragmatic. Some insinuate  
vile motivations to the book. Such views distract from a serious  
engagement with the terrain that the book opens up.

The commentators in the book use available but dispersed public  
documents and materials to stitch together an interconnected  
narrative. The documents are all available in the public domain. They  
are court judgments, trial documents, affidavits, petitions, news  
reports, TV footage, films, public service ads, editorials etc. The  
authors bring these materials in relationship with each other and ask  
questions about gaps, erasures, silences and oversights. A kind of  
work that historians would be doing in the archives. Contemporary  
commentators need the historian's crafts of reading documents and  
materials more and more urgently now. This is a very critical aspect  
of the book.

The other aspect that comes out loudly in the book is the 'fusion' of  
the State and media networks in moments of 'security emergency'.  
Barrage of false reports, spectacular media events, suppression of  
footage, sustained campaign based on police versions, dramatisation  
of events based on custodial confessions etc. The custodial  
confessions are being telecast even now. This 'media question' raised  
in the book is compelling. To pursue it further - is it just the  
political economy of media organizations that produces these kinds of  
'fused moments', or are there other explanations? (A simple answer to  
this is difficult. Many of the essays in the book have appeared in  
magazines and papers that also have large commercial interests to  
hold on to.)

Having said that, a few questions can be asked about the 'forms' of  
the commentary in the book.

The event around 13th December was produced as an urgency and an  
'excess' by the State and the media. There was a surfeit of images,  
investigation reports, security mobilization etc. This 'excess' was  
instrumental to, and made legitimate, many of the actions that  
followed the event (military mobilization, POTA etc). This is well  
recorded in the book. But, while recording this, the texts also un- 
reflexively reproduce the 'excess'. Would not this 'counter-excess'  
make for a reading that leaves the reader disoriented about and  
withdrawn from the larger circumstances of power of state craft and  
media effects, and work against persuading a critical reading of  
events? The State and the media look too all-powerful.

The seams of the 'police narrative' tore as the case moved upwards in  
the legal hierarchy and as some people asked difficult questions of  
the materials that fabricated the narrative. This unravelling  
happened slowly over time, itself tells another story, is important  
to detail. The `forms` of the writings in the book often do not make  
space for recognizing the multi-site and multi-act process of the  
tearing down of the 'police narrative' over four years.

The writers have done excellently to show the 'fused' nature of the  
media and the State during the course of the unfolding of the event.  
But, many a times one feels in the mode of arguments or emphasis, a  
nostalgia or a desire for a 'sovereignty of the media'. I would  
think, if we give up the idea of 'sovereignty' around media, and face  
it head on, we may be able to see more cracks, interest/faction  
battles, exhausted producers, tired ideas, desperation of hierarchies  
of news control and inability to comprehend the world around. The  
search for the missing 'sovereignty', on the other hand, produces the  
counter image of a 'monolith' that is either sold-out, or too-scared,  
plain cynical, or just lethargic. (With such apriori dismissal,  
whither the analysis?)

One critical question that the book opens out, is the nature of  
'media events'. What are these 'events'? How are they staged? When?  
Who stages them? How are the directions of the fallout controlled?  
Since we will have to live a large part of our lives under the  
influence of these 'mediatised events', it will be in our best  
interest to develop a critical commentary on them.

The appendix of the book by itself makes one wonder about the nature  
of the fast track 'trial' that was carried out under the full gaze of  
cameras and reporters, and the uncanny trails that were left behind  
by a highly publicized case.

best
Jeebesh