The Judicial Nineties Workshop

The Alternative Law Forum and Christ College of Law, Bangalore
Invite you to a Workshop on

The Judicial Nineties
May 10th  & 11th, 2008 at the Christ College of Law, Christ College Campus, Hosur Road, Bangalore 560029

There has been a sense that the judiciary has increasingly narrowed the field on issues of socio economic rights and distributive justice. Often, this is referred to as the Court's 'conservative turn', but there is little that is said beyond this, except to imply its direct linkage to the post-liberalization period in Indian history. One of the important tasks of the contemporary is to provide an account of this shift within a larger political economy narrative that seeks to locate the precise manners in which these changes are taking place via the emergence of a judicial sovereignty that does not merely adjudicate any longer but actively produces the context and conditions for a free-market friendly environment. Ranging from questions of rehabilitation to the violent reordering of urban space, the judiciary has played an active role in redefining ideas of access and entitlement. While the eighties were marked by the emergence of ‘social action litigation’ that sought to radically redefine ideas of entitlement and equality, by the mid-nineties, most social movements who relied on using the courts as spaces of social justice were repeatedly disappointed by the complicity of the courts with the neo liberal project.
    
All the extremely violent developments and transitions that are taking place in this period are unfolding very much within the law, backed by new regimes of property, and often in the name of the law. Thus the violent reordering of cities in India has seen encroachers removed to restore the land to the legal owners, and water privatized after lawful agreements are entered into between the government and private parties. The Court has proactively determined socio-economic policy and in doing so has re-written the idea of the social.

In older formulations like Partha Chatterjee’s idea of the political there was an acknowledgement of the porous spaces between the legal/illegal that allowed people to participate in democratic politics. This is effectively being destroyed by the judiciary and along with it the compact of political society. There is a newfound romance of the idea of the legal and with it, new forms of illegality and subjectivities that are being produced by the Court. In this space there is very little room for the kind of negotiations that characterized the ways in which large sections of the population accessed basic services.

Perhaps talking of the complicity of the courts with the neo liberal project is too generous a reading, and instead we should say that the law and judiciary are the neo liberal project. If this is so then is there a need to re-evaluate the relationship between social movements and the judicial process – do we now abandon the site of legal intervention?