COMMENT
Justice that heals
MANJRI SEWAK
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We need to look at non-conventional approaches to justice in the context of social violence.
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`While it is public knowledge that many politicians and police officers participated in the riots, none of them has been held accountable.'
Bitter harvest: A protesting victim of the 1984 riots. Photo: Sandeep Saxena.
"Apology after 21 years? It is so meaningless." This was the response of Kaushalya Kaur, a survivor of the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's apology to the Sikh community in August 2005. A month later, the Delhi government's announcement of a Rs 7.14 billion compensation package for the riot victims only angered the Sikh.
Twenty-odd years after the riots, there have been only eight convictions. While it is public knowledge that many politicians and police officers participated in the riots, none of them has been held accountable.
Need for debate
The low rate of convictions in the Sikh riots or in the Gujarat carnage points to the need for a serious national debate on how justice can be delivered in a timely and efficient manner in contexts of social violence. While the complicity of the State and the low rate of convictions in many riot situations have been the subject of considerable discussion in India, little attention has been given to what may be seen as non-conventional approaches to justice. Over the last decade, experiences of horrific violence in various other regions of conflict have given a spurt to research on approaches that transcend the limitations of the legal system. It is pertinent to note that much of this research points to the widespread dissatisfaction that victims feel with respect to the ability of the conventional legal system to deliver justice. The retributive justice-oriented legal system has been criticised for deepening the already existing divisions between communities.
Added to this, the material obstacles and the destruction of evidence in the chaos that surrounds violent conflicts make it almost impossible to achieve justice through the legal system. The deliverance of justice becomes even more difficult in situations where institutions of the State endorse violence against specific communities.
How then does a justice system make democratically elected leaders accountable for their role in communal violence? Countries such as Guatemala, Rwanda, South Africa and East Timor, torn by similar violence, have experimented with diverse approaches, ranging from retribution-oriented criminal justice mechanisms to those that focus on truth telling, reparation and healing. Drawing on insights that transcend cultural variables, India could learn some valuable lessons from the experiences of these countries.
First, a justice system must do more than simply "punish" the perpetrators of the riots. Moving beyond adversarial approach, it should generate processes that facilitate individual and collective healing for the Sikh/ Muslim community, that build relationships across the divisions of conflict, and that address the injustices that took place before, during and after the riots.
Second, the perspectives of the survivors of violence should form the core of any process that seeks to deliver justice. Victims, not the State, should play a central role in the conceptualisation of "what justice requires".
Third, the experiences of many post-conflict countries have drawn attention to the potential of fields such as transitional justice, distributive justice, and restorative justice to deliver justice that is holistic and healing. They all lay emphasis on the participation of victims in a justice process and on the facilitation of the interdependent processes of healing, coexistence and reconciliation.
Each of these fields also lays special emphasis on truth telling as the foundation for any process that seeks to deliver justice. When the truth about the nature of the violence is concealed, it further disempowers victims, who feel even more voiceless. Despite the various inquiry panel reports on the 1984 riots, this continues to be the reality for many survivors.
While transitional justice became the subject of extensive research following the setting up of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and the ad hoc tribunals in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, restorative justice has been a new entrant to the discourse on social violence.
Not entirely ruling out incarceration, restorative justice sees healing and reparation as central goals. It includes a wide range of methodologies such as dialogue, acknowledgement of — and accountability for — the harm done, apology, remorse, financial reparation, rehabilitation, reconstruction and psychosocial support and trauma healing.
The time is now ripe to build a synergy between restorative justice, transitional justice, distributive justice and the conventional, State-based legal system, so that victims of the 1984 riots and Gujarat violence can at last play a central role in a process that was created to deliver justice for them.
Manjri Sewak works with the organisation Women in Security, Conflict Management and Peace in New Delhi.
Courtesy: Women's Feature Service
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