Justice for Torture and the Question of Temporality

Abstract

In this paper, I focus on justice for torture in relation to time as a normative value in a liberal democracy. Drawing from theorists of time and temporality, I examine the infamous case of Jeyaraj and Bennix- a father and son duo who were brutally tortured and killed in custody in Tamil Nadu in 2020, and analyze how temporality mediates the entire investigative process and how time as a value of democracy may help us centrally rethink paradigms of justice. Here I also draw from my own interviews with activists, police & lawyers conducted in 2013-14 as well as ethnographic observations from a more recent project in 2022-23 on the role of magistrates in first production and remand in magistrate courts. Here the three main contexts of time- in terms of the 24 hours rule for producing the accused in front of a magistrate, the time given for police remand or judicial remand, and time for interrogation becomes extremely important. While debates on the ticking bomb scenario often focus on immediacy of the information as a justification for torture, justice for torture is often delayed by the need to extend custody beyond what is legally allowed or not. It is only because Jeyaraj and Bennix died in custody and there was public outrage, and evidence of medical evidence in the postmortem that justice was possible to some extent and yet the justice is contained to the few bad apples as opposed to ensuring justice for the routineness of systemic torture.