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The “Paper Case”: Evidence and Narrative of a Terrorism Trial in Delhi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Mayur Suresh Open the ORCID record for Mayur Suresh [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Through an ethnography of a terrorism trial that followed bomb-blasts in Delhi in 2008, this article seeks to understand the centrality of files and documentary practices to the production of legal truth. By following key documents regarding the case against one man I call Fahad, I argue that the truth produced in a trial crucially depends a chain of seemingly insignificant certificatory practices-the signatures, countersignatures, stamps, and seals that appear on documents. What emerges in the account I provide is that juridical truth is less a matter of finding ‘what really happened,’ and more about the competition between narratives that depend on the certificatory correctness of humble sheets of paper.

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Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 173 - 201
Copyright
© 2018 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors—especially Susan Sterett—for their helpful feedback on drafts of this article. I would also like to thank Chitralekha Manohar, Danielle McClellan, Jinee Lokaneeta, Laura Lammasniemi, Piyel Haldar, Sruti Chaganti, and Sneha Krishnan for their comments on drafts of this paper. Thanks to Chinmay Kanojia and Praavita Kashyap for their help in transliterating some of the documents. An earlier version of this paper was presented as a part of panel titled “Evidence in Question: Anthropological authority and legal judgment” at the European Association of Social Anthropologists Conference in Milan, 2014. I would like to thank Julia Eckert and Gerhard Anders for inviting me to the panel and for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this article.

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