Honey traps: lawfare as business

Abstract

This paper looks at cases of honey trapping where the threat is produced through the making of ‘fake legal cases’ with the collaboration of lawyers, police, judges, clerks and medical doctors. The setting is a district in North India. Understanding such phenomena requires broad appreciation of the complexities of the quotidian manipulation of the law and the local grammar of intimidation and leverage. Honey traps are explored against the emic practice of ‘thana kacheri’ (police/court work) and related popular uses of the law.  It is argued that the latter should be understood as a vernacular form of lawfare which facilitates interpersonal projects of capitalist extraction.  Ultimately the weaponisation of the law offers an ethnographic entry point to further elaborate the concept of  ‘intreccio’  (interweaving)  beyond economic and political domains, opening up  new ways to explore the dynamics of kinship,  sex, gender and power in everyday forms of micro accumulation and projects of social mobility.