The tick-tock-tick of justice

On February 22, 2011, the judgment on the Godhra train tragedy was delivered. While the media desperately searched for bytes, a different drama was being played out. It was a drama collaged out of silences; the relief of the body, of hands thrust out in prayer, snippets of sentences sounding like telegrams to a long-lost home. Sixty-three people were released as innocent after a span of nine long years. The only question one repeatedly asked is what does waiting mean and what does waiting do to the ideal of justice?

The rule of law is one of the great ideals of any society. It has its rituals from the act of witness to a demanding logic of evidence. It demands an understanding of the rhetoric and procedures of the law. As a character in a recent movie said, the beauty of law is that it occasionally produces the miracle called justice.
In fact, for all its paraphernalia the law rarely seems to deliver justice. The waiting becomes endless.
I admit, as citizens we are a foraging and scavenging economy. We are used to waiting. We wait in lines, we wait at bus stops. Waiting is a basic ritual of our society. Even our boredom is an act of waiting, waiting for something to happen. Waiting is a sign of longing and scarcity. But of all the ridiculous kinds of waiting, waiting for justice is what I find unforgivable.
No decent society can tolerate this form of waiting. It is the most silent of tortures.
Waiting has its own metaphysics. Waiting has its own ethnographies of time. As a woman once hinted, waiting for justice is more excruciating than waiting for a baby: “You can feel the baby grow, you can sense its messages, you can feel your body change metabolically”. The baby as a narrative has a rhythm and the beauty of the final gift transcends the pain and scars on the body.
Waiting for justice has no social rhythms. All you do is get marked out and even the markers are ambiguous. You can be an under trial prisoner at the age of seven and lose your childhood for a crime you may not have committed. In fact, a person waiting for justice becomes a non-citizen or, what George Orwell called, a non-person.
One is not talking merely of people waiting in jails. I am also referring to victims of atrocities. Our newspapers are replete with stories of women raped during atrocities or violated during riots. Once the aura of attention dies, a silence descends. It is a silence that goes beyond all metaphor; it is a silence that marks your descent into hell. What makes it bitter-sweet is the expectation, the hope. I remember talking to Teesta Setalvad, the activist. She was referring to the aftermath of the Gujarat riots. Women who filed cases of rape against men found them sitting contemptuously in court. The trauma of it is almost impossible to describe.
Think of Bhopal. Almost 27 years down people still wait for compensation as an act of justice. It is the women of Bhopal waiting for justice who once said something beautiful. They said they didn’t want to confuse compensation with justice. They suggested why don’t the workers in Carbide plant in America spend a week with us, just visiting our homes, talking to us. Justice can be impartial but it needs a face. Justice has to be a conversation of possibilities.
I do not know whether leading philosophers Immanuel Kant, John Rawls or Paul Ricoeur wrote about waiting for justice. I know they wrote about the aesthetics of justice. Kant wrote about judging and about the act of judging being an act of taste. It is odd that despite the hearing of witnesses, the seeing of evidence, it is the third sense, taste, that goes into the aesthetics of judgment. Taste is more than cognitive; it goes beyond objectivity to a truth one senses as both intuitive and beyond concepts. Taste communicates the sense of justice. But the taste of justice as an aesthetic formation has to understand the taste of waiting, the salt of tears, the dryness of silence, the shrinking of expectations. Justice needs a mirror. It should be one not constructed by philosophers, but be a mirror of responses of people waiting. The monumentality of law becomes mere pomposity when it does not understand waiting.
One of the children of the released persons in Godhra said, “Who will return those eight years?” The question is, who will return all the stolen time not just to the person waiting but to all those who wait with him. Waiting savages the mind, it corrodes the soul. Waiting to me is, in fact, one of the most heroic forms of courage. When I watch the women of the Bhopal gas disaster, when I listen to the survivors of Gujarat in 2002, whenever I listen to the long silences after every atrocity on dalits, I feel humbled. There is courage about the survivor, a power to the stamina of waiting which humbles justice.
One senses it when one looks at justice, at the delivery of the judgment as a performance. The judge unfolds like the main actor, people discussing the judgment treat it like a football match, more concerned with the scores. Lawyers play with other possibilities. The only people sidelined are those who wait. Waiting is that final injustice that is sidelined to the back stage.
As a writer, I am forced to write about news. The audiences demand that it smells of history and scandal. I feel more and more that the biggest news is not history or the big politics but the everyday happenings of survival and the non-news of waiting. There are novels waiting to be written, fables which would diminish the monumentality of law. I want to salute the courage, drama and irony of the eventless event that we call waiting.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist