Dr. Usha Ramanathan: Illegalization and the Fight to Preserve India’s Integrity

Dr. Usha Ramanathan doesn�t believe in following the beaten path. An experienced and respected independent law researcher, organization founder, teacher and law advisor, she has a sharp wit, warm smile, and engaging way of speaking. Always skeptical of the integrity of documents both legal and academic, her keen eyes for potential loopholes and any attempt to pass the buck have made her an invaluable resource to the communities she has served, as well as a protector of the often-shaky Indian democracy.

Democracy, Ramanathan believes, must have the active engagement of its citizens, otherwise it will take a path which is easy, and destructive to its ideals. Exceptional breaches of democratic behavior have become normalized time and again in India. One example is displacement of the poor by demolishing their houses and slums. During the Emergency, Indira Gandhi�s government was responsible for demolishing slums housing hundreds of the very poor in an attempt to clean up cities and move unwanted people out of the public eye. Though Indira Gandhi was not re-elected, at least partially as a result of the number of people she displaced, the precedent for such demolitions was set, and was not discontinued. The government began a process of illegalizing poverty. Beggadry, slum dwelling, and small jobs like rikshaw driving came under attack.

Ramanathan came to Yale for the week of April 28th, and spoke at the South Asian Studies Colloquia on that day. During her engaging speech: The Pragmatism of Illegality: Poverty, Criminality, Redundancy, she generally referred to her work in terms of �we.� At one point she paused, �I�m not using the royal we here,� She said with her characteristic warm smile, �I�m talking about the work of many people.� She is a part of an, albeit small, movement fighting to ensure that illegal and poor do not become synonymous.

One of her main projects today is working against the Unique Identification (UID) project that the Indian government has launched. The program, which will compile identification information on every Indian adult, was billed in the political sphere as a program to help the poor reap the benefits of the democracy. �Whenever I hear that the government is trying to do good for the poor, I have to check,� Ramanathan says. So, when no one else was paying any attention to the UID program, she was doing her best to find out what the behind the scenes motivation for the legislation was. What she found greatly worried her. Instead of a program with the bottom-line of helping deliver goods, she found that it is first and foremost a security measure with the aim of identifying and expelling illegal immigrants. In addition to this, it provides the possibility of keeping a close eye on all Indian citizens without their knowledge. After considerable research, Ramanathan found that there will be information about every citizen available for scrutiny, and that citizens will have no way of knowing who has requested their information, or of keeping their own privacy.

For months leading up to the beginning of implementation of the program, Ramanathan tried to raise awareness and get people in the media worried about the approaching breach of personal privacy. But her warnings and information didn�t fell on deaf ears until the UID program began and India saw President Patil giving her fingerprints and other identification information in a cover newspaper story. Suddenly people began getting worried about the implications of the program, and Ramanathan published several articles. However, the UID program continued as planned. Today, she is continuing to work to preserve people�s right to privacy.

Overall, her research works with the idea of illegality. In Ramanathan�s talk at Yale, she explicated the terms poverty, criminality and redundancy in relation to the practice of law in India. Legal pragmatism, when institutions use, understand and interpret laws with their objective in mind, often manifests itself as survival pragmatism, where laws and practices are undertaken for convenience sake. One common example in India today is the practice of speed trials. Courts had been getting backlogged under too many cases, and the low number of convictions made many people doubt the legitimacy of the court system. With speed trials, as many as fifty cases can be dealt with in under forty-five minutes, and made sure that convictions were handed out. The jails were too crowded as it was, and, instead of ensuring that justice was served, the emphasis was on simultaneously passing convictions and getting people out of jail. So, those who confessed would be convicted of the said crime and given no punishment, those who refused to confess would be forced to wait for a full trail, which could take months or even years. These kind of pragmatic solutions to larger legal problems pose a fundamental threat to the integrity of the Indian government. Ramanathan acknowledges that these institutions are merely trying to survive, but says that these survival techniques must be �questioned, explored, and often discarded� as they lead to the institutionalization of practices which harm the Indian democracy.

Perhaps most fundamental to Ramanathan�s message that nature of illegality is constantly evolving. Throughout each research campaign she is involved in runs the thread of the governments control over what is legal, and what is illegal. �The first lesson we were taught when we started civil law,� she says, is that �the state has control exclusively over laws and violence.� But, more important than this, she says, is that the government has control �over what is illegal, and what is ignored.� She explained that a commonly used term among those involved in Indian law is fake encounters. �People who need to be disposed of,� She says with obvious irony, �are disposed of without proceedings.� It is because of such disposals through blatant disregard of legal practices, that causes Ramanathan to fear the increased availability of public information which the UID program will provide. Poverty and beggadry have become illegal because the people who are in those situations need to be disposed of. A large portion of the wealthier middle-class, English educated population lives in cities, and they want their cities to be clean and well-run. The Indian government has found �that it�s easy to clean a city up if the poor are kept in a permanent state of illegality,� Ramanathan says. Legal rights have become a game of politics, and rule of law does not hold throughout India.

But Ramanathan does not lose hope. �People often tell us not to go out and talk about poverty and terrible things,� she told her audience at Yale. However, she feels it her duty to engage in her own democracy, to watch over the system. She talks about the �terrible things� not to hurt India�s reputation, but to move it in a direction of improvement. India, she says, �is an example of some really remarkable things that states do, and shouldn�t.�