BOOK CHAPTERS
COURT
Criminal law, court architecture, and the space of justice: Stakeholder perceptions of ‘special’ courts used in child sexual abuse trials in India
More than (Just) Words: Legal and Non-Legal Narratives in the Courtroom and Beyond
2025
This chapter focuses on the stakeholder perceptions of the legal reform brought to improve the trial experience of the child victims of sexual abuse in India through a special legislation - the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act 2012 (POCSO). The law focuses on providing a child-friendly trial space with the help of purposely built customized ‘special’ courts. Several questions, thus, arise: what do POCSO special courts look like? How do they operate? Do these courts provide the child-friendly trial space required by the POCSO law? I examine the materialities of the special courts that have bearing on the nature and function of criminal trial space, and thereby on child witnesses, by analysing the stakeholders’ perceptions and experiences of using these courts. I also examine court architecture, the use of paintings and technology, and how they organise courtroom narratives and interactions between courtroom actors during child sexual abuse (CSA) trials. It is based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, i.e., legal professionals such as judges, defence lawyers, public prosecutors, as well as support persons, and observation of POCSO special courts and trials. As the stakeholders identified, the geography of the trial has significant implications for access to justice for child victims during the trial. Findings suggest severe disparity within the country in terms of implementation of the reform. The stakeholders believe that reforms such as changes to courtroom design (e.g., establishing a vulnerable witness deposition room (VWDR) or the use of a video link for trial) have improved child witnesses’ experiences, but also highlight that such reforms will remain superficial if other factors such as the socio-legal culture around the adversarial trial and CSA, and stakeholder training, do not employ a trauma-informed care approach.
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CARE
The Rebirth of Delinquent ‘Adult - Children’: Criminal Capacity, Socio-Economic Systems, and the Malleability of Penality of Child Delinquency in India
The Palgrave International Handbook of Youth Imprisonment, 2021
This chapter investigates the historical and sociological aspects of childhood, child delinquency, and the social reaction and State response towards children in conflict with the law (CCL) in India. Beginning from the ancient period to the present times, I trace how various social systems have shaped childhood. I analyse how different social, economic, political, and legal factors have contributed to the shifting age boundaries of children so as to criminalise their behaviours. The chapter also explores the conventional institutions of child social control by reflecting on roles played by family, community and locality. I examine integrative mechanisms, specific to the Indian socio-economic context that dealt with children’s behaviours in non-penal ways. I juxtapose this history with neoliberal child carceralism post-mid-1980s that produced delinquent ‘adult-children’, and penal populism and ‘carceral’ feminism after the Nirbhaya gangrape and homicide. I present an abolitionist critique of the ‘adultification’ of children and of deployment of punitive measures by the State to deal with CCL by the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2015, to first ‘reproduce,’ and then ‘reform,’ what I call the delinquent ‘adult-children’.
CHANGE
Thinking Beyond Penal Reform in India: Questioning the Logic of Colonial Punishments
The Routledge International Handbook of Penal Abolition, 2021
This chapter is an abolitionist critique of penal ‘reform’ in India, wherein I suggest a reinterpretation of ‘reform’ not as an extension but rather a process of replacement, dismantling and elimination of the existing penal structures. Tracing the presence of principle of non-violence (ahimsa) as an instrument of response to violence (himsa) and inegalitarianism in the Indian subcontinental cultural history by navigating through precolonial and colonial periods, I argue, by thinking through postcolonial and subaltern frameworks, that the existing penal structures and punishments are colonial products. Highlighting the role of the relationship between different social systems and rationalisation of violence in law for caging the subalterns and marginalised people, I contend that India needs decriminalisation, diversion and decarceration as apparatuses to decolonise criminal law so as to take the recourse of social justice and not criminal justice as a response to social deviance.
CONSTITUTIONALISM
Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer and Expansive Interpretation of Fundamental Rights
Human Rights, Constitutionalism and Rule of Law: Contemporary Issues and Challenges, 2017
Padma Vibhushan Vaidyanathpuram Rama Ayyar Krishna Iyer is a name that has carved a niche for itself in both the social and legal fraternity. Krishna Iyer has contributed hugely to society and the legal fraternity through his liberal interpretational skills, which in itself has become a discourse in the arena of constitutional interpretation. It is worth mentioning here at the very outset that his humanitarian expansive interpretation of provisions of Part III of the Constitution of India is unparalleled and cannot be aped in the near future. As Mahatma Gandhi has said that “You must be the change you wish to see in the world”, Krishna Iyer was a person who has tried throughout his life to be such change. He was a Karmyogi, an intellectual, a pro-poor, a crusading maverick and along with all these, as the literature world considers him, a genius of vocabulary.