The long-routinized application of anti-terror laws in contemporary India belies the most accessible theorisation of them as being representative of a “state of exception,” marked by an overall absence of law. These laws are firmly anchored to norms of legality rather than being predicated on their suspension but are still vastly different in their effects from ordinary law. It is in understanding such contrary shades of anti-terror laws and working out alternative theorisations of them that Mayur Suresh’s ethnography of terrorism trials in Delhi in the late 2000s becomes important. Suresh’s book Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi’s Courts (published by Fordham University Press in 2023) is concerned with underscoring the role of legal procedures and technicalities in such trials. He argues that what makes anti-terror laws exceptional is that they bring into force special rules of procedure and evidence (longer pretrial detention, stricter bail conditions, easier admissibility of evidence etc.) which are loaded against the individual, and it is often on such technicalities that terrorism charges are fought. In a larger sense, therefore, this book is about the potential of technicalities as discovered by the terror-accused and their lawyers during their trials which allows them to productively engage with the law, inhabit the space of the courtroom, make claims upon the state, and hold it accountable to the law.

Suresh attempts to capture a variety of experiences from the point of view of the terror accused, with whom he seems to have interacted closely during the time he followed some 18-odd trials at the courts of Tis Hazari. The first chapter addresses the relationship between the terror-accused and police officials which he finds hard to characterise; it is marked both by intimacy, owing to having been in proximity for years and through the several stages of detention, arrest, and trial, as well as uncertainty. Suresh develops two aspects of this relationship in this chapter, the first speaks to the monstrous presence of the police in the life of the accused defined by the cruel acts that they are capable of, and the second is something which he sees as tending towards friendship but never quite there which speaks to the counterintuitive cordial, almost friendly, interactions between them.

The second and third chapters are perhaps the most interesting for they give us a glimpse into how the terror-accused come to grips with their new reality, which takes the form of a creative engagement with the law. Suresh here uses language theory to interpret the law, foregrounding legal language as a means for the accused to both inhabit the courtroom and imagine alternative futures. For Suresh what appears to be crucial is not just the tactical use of law by the accused to secure an acquittal (which by no means is certain), but the successful navigation of, and feeling at ease in, the “normative universe” of law. In the third chapter, Suresh shows how the accused interpret the written word of law as an “utterance” of the state, that is, something that it said and now must follow. The state is thus seen as vulnerable to its own utterances, that is, the law. This idea is explored in the chapter through a rather interesting UAPA case in which the defence sought to prove non-compliance with the two-step bureaucratic process of approval for prosecution in such cases mandated by the latest amendment to the act. The success of this strategy in court inspired several similar challenges.

Chapters four and five discuss the centrality of paperwork to the trial, showing how reality itself can only be “real” if there is a paper trail to support it. These chapters talk in detail about documentary practices and their potential to make or break a case; the defendants on their part can win if they can discredit the police’s version of reality, which comes out of its investigation, the integrity of which depends on the authenticity of the documents that it presents. The final chapter is on petition writing and the several meanings attached to it, both legal and personal.

Suresh’s work is important in three respects: i) it reclaims the significance of procedure in studying the working of law more generally and anti-terror laws in particular; ii) it intimately captures the experiences of the terror-accused and their engagements with the law; and iii) in a somewhat Thompsonian sense, it asserts the relative autonomy of law vis-à-vis both the state and society. Moreover, the emphasis on tekhne and the perlocutionary dimensions of law in this book forces us to look beyond what the law is in such cases to the possibilities of what it could be. Where this otherwise fine book loses its edge, however, is that the disparate discussions on technicalities do not always feel securely tethered to the context of the terrorism trial; the unique relation between technicalities and terrorism trials could have been articulated more forcefully in this work.

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Srishti Narain is a PhD scholar in the  Department of History, University of Toronto.