What is Justice – for you, me and hum?

By Dr. Raina Ghosh Research and Advocacy Division, Digital Empowerment Foundation

To understand justice, one must move beyond the conventional scales of rights and wrongs into a wider sphere of affective lived realities, unveiling the structural and personal blindfolds of the domain of law. Acknowledging the subjective interpretations of what justice means in the everyday experiences of diverse sections of society gives us a people’s repository of vocabularies around justice – one that is rooted, contextual and emergent from the grassroots.

As a child, justice seemed to be an incomprehensible domain, a far-away concept that exists on paper, in law books, in the courtrooms, and is entirely in the interest of a “criminal”. Why would a “good” person even bother to think about it? However, as I grew older, this relatively narrow and reductive understanding of justice was transformed, mainly due to the influence of books, personal encounters, and people’s stories. I started seeing justice in the context of its nemesis — in the ordinariness of unfairness, when injustice seeps, creeps and challenges the freedom of the individual, the collective.

On a sunny morning in Bhopal, at Agami’s JusticeMakers Mela 2024, I began a curious, introspective journey in collecting meanings and building a self-curated, multilingual people’s dictionary of justice. This interest stemmed from my short tryst with the development sector, which made me realise how ambiguity and the layered, intersectional experiences of communities and community workers make interpreting, seeking, and achieving justice a polysemous exercise. The quest, I figured out, can act as a metaphorical exercise for all of us who are part of this sector in knowing about realities different from ours, in driving a humbling journey to understand how we can effectively become a voice of the community, protecting the agency and integrity of the people without suffering from a saviour complex?

The ABCs of Justice: A for Agony, B for Belonging, C for Collective…Z for Zindaa

For instance, to Rani, a community worker with a Madhya Pradesh-based non-profit, the thought around justice comes with a deep rush of sheer ‘agony’ and suffering of the community women she works with. Gulal, a graphic storyteller, finds justice in the solace brought in by the ‘homecoming’ of their lost cat after weeks of scurrying across neighbourhoods. Homecoming is significant here, for it quenches the thirst after days of being denied something in its search for water and home. Pragya, a sexual assault survivor, finds a ‘cathartic’ refuge in her art, in the genderless stick figures, to express the grief and trauma she felt once and to connect with many others who have gone through similar experiences. Dhoop thinks justice is a queer process – for it lies in the messiness of the everyday conundrum of finding a voice, losing a voice, in grief, anger, hesitancies, shame, and stigma. In short, justice is when Dhoop, the ‘warmest sunshine’, finds a way into the mind’s kingdom of darkness and dilemmas. These discernments of justice are deeply intimate — defining justice as pursued, lived, and mediated in the ‘everydayness’ of societal existence. However, while collating these meanings, I also learned about aspects of justice as a verb - the need to unlearn our set conventions of doing justice, transcending personal boundaries to the powerful, ‘collective’ political acts of justice-making. Take, for example, the chilling oral histories of feisty resilience from the margin lands of Sunderbans and the floodplains of Bihar - of strength, persistent fights against caste atrocities and heinous crimes like sex slavery. To mallah women (fisherwomen) like Parul Devi and Uriya Devi from these regions, justice seems to be as simple and powerful as “zindaa rehna” or mere being – a solid affirmation of their everyday subaltern existence, visibility and resistance in the local power matrices. ‘Being’ also refers to a sense of ‘belonging’, an attempt towards bekhauf (fearless) living, to regain one’s customary rights over their community land, forests, and water. In the melodies of Dashug’s Ladakhi folk and Kabir’s dohas, justice seemed to weave not one, but uncountable, multilingual philosophies of our existence. For you, me and hum, sometimes justice is the act of healing over time, sometimes it is an incomplete journey - like leaving a book halfway while colouring it, and often, it is the clouded perspective of deep-rooted inhibitions that keeps us stuck in our fat cauldron of unfairness.

Listening and engaging more, I wondered how people’s conflicts, disputes, and contestations in community spaces have been dealt with in local contexts. Walking barefoot on the lush green lawns of Khushabhau Hall, I soon stumbled upon the keyword ‘Koodam’ – wafting through the air as a soft breeze blew from the talab (lake) nearby. The socio-cultural practice of Koodam (from Tamil, meaning ‘gathering place’) –an old method of dialogue, mediation and consensus building is believed to be effective in bringing breakthroughs to institutional deadlocks. In the Koodam model, justice-seeking is usually preconditioned by forming a collective to assemble and democratise information flows and decision-making. At the institutional level, this entails pedagogic experimentations in ‘doing’ justice by navigating deep-rooted power relations, hierarchies, and institutional bureaucracies and facilitating solutions for grassroots governance challenges.

Justice as a ‘safe space’ by design?

While a classic dictionary would limit itself to semantics around justice and practices as means to reach these meanings, I realised that justice also thrives around our mental mappings of space – as a design metaphor for inclusivity, openness, and neutralisation of power dynamics. Koodams, in their functioning, can sometimes end up in moralistic outcomes, reinforcing existing faultlines of caste, class, gender and religion. However, this very concept and ethics of a ‘dialogic, experimental space’ can allow diverse groups to discuss and dissent, resonating with similar spatial models of Chaupals (village meeting places) or Panchayats (village councils or assemblies). Therefore, as justicemakers, community workers or change-wishers, creating and preserving these inclusive spaces is necessary. Agami’s experimentation with the Mela format proved that existing vernacular spaces, modes of conviviality and gathering places like aangan (courtyard), baithak (meeting), chowks (square), can be nurtured as non-confined geographies of facilitating dialogues around justice, to even out the structural societal fault lines of caste, class, religion and so on.

But what about those topsy-turvy pot-holed roads that lead to these spaces of gathering, where no wheelchairs can reach, where disability access remains an afterthought? Justice, then, is not only about creating spaces for dialogue but also about integrating a justice ethic that is rooted in care. It goes beyond accommodating various forms of non-normativity with mere special measures, but actively makes accessibility a core principle of design. Care and accessibility as justice frameworks ask: Who can enter? Who feels safe in these spaces? Who is left behind? It challenges justice to move beyond intent and towards accountability by reimagining the conditions of justice itself.

Is Justice about information literacy?

Sitting on the corners of the grand corridors was Sujata, from a faraway Adivasi village in North Bengal’s tea gardens. She calls herself a SoochnaPreneur (an infopreneur) who, with her magic wand of literacy, makes a livelihood by providing information and services through digital centres to her communities at nominal charges. Beside her sat Mohammad from Nuh. Having fought poverty and disability all his life, today he takes pride in making their entire village digitally ‘saksham’—financially capable and socially empowered by disseminating information, digitally linking fellow community members to social security schemes, and busting misinformation and myths on the internet. To millions in this country, literacy is a precursor to justice, for it helps them access soochna or information. I quickly added these two terms to my dictionary – as crucial tools that empower communities to fight against prejudices and equip them with knowledge about their due rights in the pursuit of fairness.

Weaving the final covers for my Dictionary

In the course of this exercise, one thing became evident. This quest brings out undoubtedly subjective, nuanced and complex meanings of justice, conditioned by the vantage point of who looks at it and how. It dwells within an in-betweenness of knowing, in the hundred shades of greys between an absolute right and an absolute wrong. When I finally weave these many entries under the rubric of justice, from my impromptu meaning-hunt exercise, an index to this dictionary of justice sounds like:

To my fellow country (wo)men, ‘I’ for Information opens the ‘O’ around Opportunities that unlock the uncountable ‘P’-s in the Pathways to achieve the ‘F’ in Freedom and Fairness. Justice is that ‘W’ in the Wish to change the status quo of things, either earned through active resistance by the ‘V’ of Voicing fearlessly or working towards the ‘M’ of the Modus-vivendi. Justice is thriving to build that ‘N’ of the Network, propelling more conscientisation around the ‘R’s of Rights and helping you, me and hum to take these slow strides towards the ‘S’ of ‘Samadhan’ (resolutions). In its most plural sense, justice is that seven-lettered, satrangi transcendental journey for the ‘U’ of Utthaan – from the kaleidoscope of injustices surrounding each one of us – at each moment, at each corner.