Introduction
Public imaginaries of courtroom trials are often shaped by cinematic representations of such events. For those fed on a diet of Hollywood classics and more contemporary representations of courts, a trial invokes images of angry lawyers arguing passionately in an emotionally charged atmosphere. Trials take on an urgency in the public mind when the perpetrator is a terrorist. Such trials tend to become a mediatized spectacle. The judiciary and the executive function in a charged atmosphere where hasty retribution to placate an angry public compromises due process. To this end, Mayur Suresh’s book is an extremely timely contribution. In a post 9/11 universe, terrorism and counterterrorism continue to be hotly debated political issues across the world. While scholars have written extensively on the arbitrary use of executive power in counter-terrorism policies post 9/11, ethnographic work on counterterrorism trials, particularly in postcolonial contexts, is scarce. Suresh’s book breaks new ground. The keenness and sympathy with which Suresh observes and narrates the everyday life of the law as it plays out in counterterrorism trials in Delhi is the biggest strength of the book. Suresh’s intimate portrayal of his interlocutors brings alive their vulnerabilities, moral ambiguities, and everyday negotiations with the law.
This thick description of the everyday itself is a novel way of understanding counterterrorism, moving beyond the grand narratives of existing theories. This book charts new ground by moving beyond conceptions of the law as a violent force. (Agamben Reference Agamben2005; Gupta Reference Gupta2012; Mbembé Reference Mbembé2003) as well as steering clear of standard liberal, legal categories such as constitutional rights. It focuses instead on the range of mundane practices instantiated in moments of negotiations with the law. Focusing on the mundane can be a productive way of understanding how ordinary people exposed to the violence of the law make sense of their precarity. They do not necessarily do so by invoking the language of constitutionalism and rights, but through shared communal experiences of injustice and expression of collective solidarity.
Since 9/11, there has been a proliferation of scholarship on counterterrorism in political science, international relations, political geography, etc. Yet much of this scholarship focuses on counterterrorism policies and practices in parts of Europe and North America. Some of this scholarship has pointed out the colonial genealogies of counterterrorism laws and their reproduction of racial, ethnic, and gendered hierarchies in the law (Doty Reference Doty1996; Gregory Reference Gregory2004; Khalil Reference Khalili2012). Postcolonial and feminist scholars have highlighted how counterterror laws hark back to the normalized and everyday violence perpetrated by the colonial state against purportedly deviant groups such as criminal tribes, pirates, and fanatics (MacKay Reference MacKay2023; McQuade Reference McQuade2020; Nijjar Reference Nijjar2018; Singh Reference Singh2012; Whittaker Reference Whittaker2015). Counterterrorism laws were also used to quell anti-colonial nationalist groups (Hussain Reference Hussain1999; Reference Hussain2007; Martel Reference Martel2017; Reynolds Reference Reynolds2017). This method of using counterterror laws persists in the postcolonial states’ use of counterterror laws to control dissent and target political opponents (Dutta and Finden Reference Finden and Dutta2024).
There has been a recent upsurge of interest in understanding the trajectories of these laws in postcolonial contexts (Dutta and Finden Reference Finden and Dutta2024; Dutta et al. Reference Dutta, Abbas and Bergh2025). Yet ethnographic work from these contexts is still sparse, in part because of the difficulties of access and the ethical concerns that fieldwork inevitably leads to. There is no denying the fact that the discourse of counterterrorism has been mobilised by states to create regimes of securitisation and target religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities. Postcolonial states have also enacted these regimes of securitisation. Yet something is left out when counterterrorism practices are framed only in relation to coloniality and the power of the state. Suresh’s ethnographic work is a welcome intervention in this regard as it traces the social life of counterterrorism laws. Suresh conducted participant observation in Delhi’s Tis Hazari district courts. The Tis Hazari building houses criminal, civil, labor, family, and traffic courts. He describes the cacophony of noises that constitute the court complex, including those of typists, notaries, book sellers, photocopying machines, and small restaurant owners. Amidst these sights and sounds, Suresh presents to us a picture of the quotidian world of courtrooms through long-time immersion in these district courts. He closely observed a total of eighteen cases over a period of fourteen months. He spent a lot of time with the accused while they waited in the courtrooms for their cases to be heard. This time spent with the accused helped Suresh establish familiarity with them and their family members. Suresh built upon this interaction to understand the networks of solidarity that grew among terror accused in jail who had been waiting for months. The book brings alive for its readers how prolonged incarceration is negotiated using information, knowledge, and strategy among the terror accused. During the long period of following these cases, Suresh also established a rapport with the defense and prosecution lawyers and the policemen. A strength of the ethnography is the granularity and vividness with which it portrays these interactions.
Suresh’s insightful study of counterterrorism trials in Delhi avoids portraying the law merely as a reflection of structural inequalities in society and delves deep into the everyday practices of law-making in counterterrorism trials. This leads to some insightful conceptual innovations that draw upon the mundane and the ordinary life of counterterrorism trials.
Terrorism Trials as “Ordinary”
Suresh’s book emphasizes the ordinariness of terrorism trials. This is highlighted by his portraiture of the courtroom itself. A spatial and affective understanding of counterterrorism trials helps us think about how the violence and injustice associated with these trials are nested in ordinary rituals. For example, sometimes the terror accused would give Suresh letters to post or request them to pass on information to their family members who had missed a trial. In the book, we come across defense lawyers and police officers who go out on smoke breaks and drink together after work. They do not necessarily take on an “exceptional” form. This is significant because of the tradition in existing scholarship of treating counterterrorism law-making as enacting a state of exception (Agamben Reference Agamben2005), a legal void where ordinary legal remedies and protections are suspended because of the state’s exercise of executive power. While these trials do entail the arbitrary exercise of executive power, they are situated within an ordinary infrastructure of courts. Suresh argues that courtrooms where these trials are conducted are everyday spaces where legal processes are enacted in a mundane way. This is brought out in Suresh’s description of the court room complex as a space where one might lose oneself in a maze of lawyers’ chambers or be harassed by locals offering to conduct legal paperwork. These people would jostle for space with restaurants, photocopying centers, and stationery shops. These are not spaces of high-octane drama. Legal power works in ‘subtle, contested, and fluctuating ways in the courtroom.
Suresh’s attention to the ordinary leads him to describe the sociality of courtroom spaces with acute sensitivity. In my reading, the most remarkable testament to his skills and sensitivity as an ethnographer is borne out by the first chapter that dwells on the theme of “custodial intimacy.” Suresh uses the term “custodial intimacy” in order to describe the relationship between the police and the accused in terrorism trials during the period of detention. The police appeared at times threatening and at times friendly to the terror accused. Suresh explains this relationship of enmeshment between intimacy and violence as a kind of friendship between the police and the terror accused, but not quite. (Suresh 2023, 38) The strength in Suresh’s description lies in his recognition of the hierarchy and the power dynamic between the state and the terror accused, even while he notes the quotidian interactions between the two. Suresh’s ethnographic work invites us to understand how people find solace in what may momentarily look like friendship while negotiating draconian laws. Ethnography can bring to the fore these rhythms of sociality missed out by a strictly liberal approach to the law, as well as an understanding of counterterrorism laws as exceptional violence. Instead, we get a picture of the law experienced as both intimate and violent.
Recycled Legality
Suresh’s interlocutors inhabit legal language through a process of trial and error and everyday learning. His portrayal of how people use legal language steers clear of a naïve celebration of constitutionalism or legality and traces instead affective communities that emerge as people are thrown together in a situation of precarity. This section of the book invites us to think about the futures made available to the marginalised in the legal language. As Suresh notes, “Inhabiting legal language in a trial is not about developing a mastery in using that language. Rather, it is about trying to maneuver through the trial and the courtroom. What is key here is the ability to use legal language, not the success or failure of outcomes.” (Suresh 2023, 72) Suresh’s interlocutors are people inhabiting the law in a situation of precarity without any formal legal training or knowledge of the law. We don’t get to know enough about the lawyers themselves in the book and how Suresh conceives their relationship to the legal process, but that is perhaps an area for future research. The book demonstrates their understanding of the law through lived experiences of learning how the law works and avoids imposing legal categories top-down on its interlocutors. This is borne out by the story of Qayoom, one of the terror accused introduced in the book. With the help of his co-accused, Qayoom filed his own application before the trial court and higher courts, learnt strategies from other terror accused, and even cross-examined the prosecution’s witnesses. Suresh uses the term “legal bricolage” to describe these processes that played out in Delhi’s courtrooms. These processes were based upon understanding the nature of the charges against the accused and the facts as narrated by the police. The accused then learnt about the existence of certain rules and constructed a narrative to demonstrate how the police did not follow these rules. These ethnographic vignettes show how legal mobilisation often resides in practices that do not neatly map on to theoretical discourses on counterterrorism laws. Scholarly work in counterterrorism studies has focused on how these laws show the exceptional powers of the state, the suspension of civil liberties, and the violation of constitutional rights, etc. Suresh’s ethnographic work illustrates the gap between these theoretical claims and the lived experiences of people that constitute the practice of counterterror laws. Negotiations with counterterror laws often depend upon the technicalities of rules not being obeyed, rather than explicitly focusing on civil rights violations. For example, in Qayoom’s case, his argument against the prosecution relied on police log books and daily diaries showing that the police had misled the court and lied about their whereabouts on the day of his purported arrest. Hence, banal details about the technicalities of the case become grounds for challenging the state’s narrative.
Terror Laws and Everyday Ethics
As Suresh’s interlocutors inhabit the legal language by drawing upon its technicalities, their practices acquire an ethical charge. The book makes an important contribution as it traces the enmeshment of the technical aspects of the law and everyday ethics. This includes granular, embodied, and tactile processes of working with legal texts. The ethical charge in the law is manifested as the terror accused uses the law to hold the state accountable for what it has presumably uttered. The law is seen by the terror accused as something that the state could be bound to, as it had “uttered it into existence.” The law can thus be conceptualised both as a source of violence that is used to prosecute the terror accused and mobilised to challenge the state’s violence.
Suresh’s preoccupation with everyday ethics is manifested in his creative reconstruction of petitions in the last chapter titled Petition Writing: Desire, Ethics, Mourning as acts of self-constitution through writing. The chapter deftly weaves together text and lived experiences to trace an act of self-constitution and self-recovery through writing. Writing in the form of self-reflection by those accused of terrorism becomes an act of self-constitution in a moment where hope is fragile. Here, Suresh’s book examines the life of the law well beyond the courtroom and the trial itself to highlight the struggles of the terror accused. The brilliance of ethnography shines through in this last chapter. Suresh captures in minute detail the melancholia, frustrations, and the deep immersion of the accused in the world of the law and documents.
The last chapter exhibits an extremely intimate ethnographic investment into the lifeworlds of counterterror trials that perhaps inaugurates a new direction of research on counterterrorism. This extends our field of inquiry beyond the courtroom and the processes of law-making itself to the afterlives of these legal processes. In an Indian context, the blatant and widespread misuse of counterterrorism laws by an authoritarian state affects not only the terror accused but also transforms society at large. What affective modes of organisation against state power and violence are still possible against the backdrop of authoritarianism and securitisation of the public sphere? Future ethnographic work will perhaps bring to light more intimacies, friendships, and creative ways of reconstituting the law that are practised on the ground against increasing state power and authoritarian law-making.
