'Durga's Court': Social Justice at Work in India

[Guest guest]

KATNA, West Bengal (September 18, 2006): We're sitting on the

veranda drinking hot sweet milky tea. It's 4.30 am and the air is

fresh and reasonably cool though I know that this will last only

another hour or so before the sticky heat sets in for the day making

the simple act of breathing an effort of will. I've risen early

because this is the normal waking time for the village. I'm in a

small village called Katna, situated in West Bengal in India, not

far from the Bangladeshi border.

 

And I've risen this early because this is about the only chance I'll

get all day to have the undivided attention of Shabnam Ramaswamy. I

want to talk to her about the work that has given her the status of

royalty in these parts. She runs a court. And when I say runs, I

mean that she's the judge, the jury and the investigating magistrate.

 

It's a court that is supposed to be held twice a week from this very

veranda where we are sitting sipping tea, but in reality the

supplicants stream in day and night.

 

The first knock on the door often starts at five or six am and the

flow doesn't stop till late at night when the judge is exhausted,

hoarse from having to out-shout the arguing parties and has barely

enough energy to eat a late meal and throw herself in bed only for

it all to start again at dawn the next day. All this despite the

fact that the judge has not a whit of formal legal training and

neither she, nor the law clerk who does the paperwork, are paid for

their time.

 

FORUM FOR THE POOR

 

Shabnam Ramaswamy is asked to rule on cases that can range from

demands for compensation for ruined crops or the return of dowries

given for later rejected wives, to rape, child snatching and murder.

The people come to her because she is their last resort. India is

famous for its sluggish judiciary; court cases on average take ten

years to be heard and even then it is notoriously easy for those

with money to make the cases go their way.

 

Shabnam's Court - the name she has given it is Stree Shakti or

Women's Power - is a forum for the poor, the disenfranchised, the

illiterate; those who have neither the money nor the influence to

grease the wheels of the official system of justice in the country.

 

Seven years ago, Shabnam came to Katna with her husband Jugnu

Ramaswamy. They had spent a decade in Delhi working in a school for

slum children. When both slum and school were demolished by

government building programmes, they decided to move to a rural

community to try the same experiment. They hoped that in the

impoverished countryside, they could make more of a mark on the

level of society that is never mentioned or noticed in the growing

media chatter about the rising middle classes of India.

 

HORNET'S NEST

 

For them, it was a natural step to move to Katna, Shabnam's

ancestral village. Largely Muslim, extremely poor, and devoid of

even one decent school it seemed that the village would welcome

their initiatives. But in fact their arrival stirred up a hornet's

nest. The village and its surrounds was highly criminalised and

dominated by a coterie of wealthy landowners and corrupt local

politicians. Previously those who were landless had been at the

mercy of the landed.

 

It was a place where people could literally get away with murder if

they had the cash to pay off the police or bribe a court official to

make a case file "disappear". Men could and did beat, torture and

abandon their wives with no redress. The Ramaswamys' arrival changed

the balance of power in the place because they refused to let crimes

go unpunished. Police officers on the take found themselves being

pointed out to their superior officers, men who beat women were

charged with an official FIR (First Information Report) and

landowners who cheated their sharecroppers were openly named and

shamed.

 

WOMEN'S COURT

 

Soon after their arrival in Katna, a young and idealistic

Superintendent of Police invited Shabnam to start a Women's Court.

Three times a week, she held sessions at the police station to hear

cases of abuse against women. Shabnam began to learn the ins and

outs of the Indian Penal Code as well as different aspects of Hindu

law and Muslim Sharia. Most of the people who came to her were

illiterate and poor but she knew that the plethora of traditional

stories in the culture touches a chord in every Indian, so in her

rulings, she referred to Muslim history tales and Hindu mythology

expressing them through her own theatrical personality.

 

"I become Durga," she says with a mischievous grin, referring to one

of the most powerful deities of the Hindu pantheon - the goddess of

vengeance. "And I tell these men that I am like Durga with her ten

hands. In one hand I have a stick to beat them, in another a law

book, in another a flower and so on…this is the language they

understand."

 

Her reputation ballooned. The demand outgrew the space the police

station could offer and eventually Shabnam moved the court to her

home veranda.

 

LAST RESORT

 

Shabnam installed a clerk to keep the records of each case. She

would like to computerise the records but there aren't the funds to

hire someone to do it. The court is officially in session twice a

week, but the villagers don't keep to the times. They are people who

have many troubles and finally they've found someone who will attend

to them without asking for anything in return.

 

I've barely finished interviewing Shabnam when a thin, barefoot

woman wearily enters the gate to the compound to talk to didi - big

sister, as Shabnam is generally known. Shabnam hasn't bathed or

breakfasted yet but hears out the woman's tearful story - her

husband beat her last night and then made off with her three

children.

 

"The youngest is not yet a year old and still breastfeeding," says

the woman, wiping her eyes with a corner of her tattered sari. Its

still before seven a.m. but Shabnam is immediately on the phone to

the Superintendent of Police - she has his private mobile.

 

"You'll send some cops to him and scare him." It is half question,

half order. "I want those kids back with their mother this evening."

 

One of the reasons that Shabnam is so powerful a presence in the

place is because of this kind of easy contact she has cultivated

with the higher-ranking officers in the district - the

Superintendent of Police, the District Magistrate, and the local

judiciary.

 

Once she's ensured that the children will be returned to the woman,

she asks Moti, her clerk, to write out a summons for the husband. He

and his wife will both be given a date to come to the court to make

their individual cases and after hearing out both parties, Shabnam

will decide who keeps the children, if the mother will get some kind

of financial support from the husband and if so how much he will

have to pay.

 

TEMPERS FLARE

 

When Shabnam summons two parties to a dispute, each party usually

comes with a supporting posse of people who all want to voice their

opinions. One party to speaks first, then the other is allowed to

rebut, but it's not long before tempers are released from already

short leashes. The rice paddies around the house ricochet with the

shouts of up to 30 people and there's much finger pointing and

tugging of didi's elbow to get her attention for a particular

argument. She lets them shout it out for a bit, even going every now

and then to attend to some matter in the house or answer her

persistent mobile.

 

Sometimes in the middle of an argument that looks like it's one

insult away from blows, she will calmly hand out orders and tasks to

the band of helpers she has working with her, or ask the cleaning

woman not to forget to change the bedcovers in the guest room, all

the while seemingly oblivious to the surreal backdrop of shouting,

tears and accusations.

 

This is surely one of the more unusual courts of law operating in

the world today.

 

GULAB INVESTIGATES

 

And then when she's judged that they've let enough out of their

system, she'll take up the reins again.

 

"Chup. Chup. CHUP. QUIET!" she bellows and silence descends on the

mayhem like a parachute. The group hushes, an unruly class in front

of the terrifying principal. If the case is straightforward, she

makes her ruling immediately. If it involves accusations that need

to be verified, Shabnam makes a date for another hearing and then

sends one of her "boys" to investigate. Has this husband really been

mistreating his wife or is she lying to pay him back for another

slight?

 

Gulab, her driver and right-hand man, will go and conduct a

background check, talking to the joint family, asking the neighbours

what they have seen and heard. Did this farmer's overflowing

irrigation water really flood that farmer's potato field and create

enough damage to require the compensation he's asking for?

Gulab will go to the fields to assess the situation. Did this woman

really have an affair with her husband's brother? Was this daughter

in law really tortured by her in laws? Did this husband really try

to burn his wife? She will check and double-check the facts before

she makes a decision. The cases can range from the comically petty

to the seriously criminal. And people will come to her, sometimes

walking up to 50 kilometres from outlying villages to seek her help.

 

THE DIDI FACTOR

 

Nowadays, Katna is a more peaceful place than it used to be. A group

of village elders tell me that only since didi came here has it

become safe to walk outside the village after dark, that although

men are still beating their wives occasionally, they now "think a

thousand times" before they do it because they know that "someone is

watching them". Jeleba Bibi, one of the village wives agreed, saying

that domestic violence has noticeably declined because even the

toughest man in the village is afraid that his wife will threaten to

go to didi.

 

The exact secret of her power remains a mystery. Once, in an attempt

to help share the load, her husband tried hear out a couple of the

cases. He was a fair man, revered almost to the point of deity in

the village. But people soon stopped coming to him. "We'll wait for

didi," they said simply.

 

He didn't have Shabnam's special alchemy that makes people not only

trust her rulings, but understand the process by which she makes

them. To them, she is indeed Durga, who vanquished evil and had the

power to make all bow before her.

 

SOURCE: Radio Netherlands. Durga's court: Social justice at work in

India by Dheera Sujan 18-09-2006 {with photos and 30-minute, English-

language radio documentary).

URL: http://www.radionetherlands.nl/documentaries/060920doc?

view=Standard