The opening scene of the 2009 film Slumdog Millionaire shows the Indian police torturing Jamal, the protagonist of the film, who was suspected of cheating on a game show. This powerful scene is a reminder of the routine use of torture in Indian police stations. Decades of reports by civil liberty and democratic rights groups have documented the torture, custodial deaths, and extrajudicial killings that continue in contemporary India despite the formal legal safeguards. These incidents of violence are primarily denied or explained away as aberrational acts by police and prison officials akin to the U.S. officials holding the “few bad apples” responsible for the torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in the Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq or Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Transnational Torture focuses on the legal and political discourses on torture in India and the United States-two common-law based constitutional democracies-to theorize the relationship between law, violence, and state power in liberal democracies. Analyzing about one hundred landmark Supreme Court cases on torture in India and the United States, memos and popular imagery of torture, Jinee Lokaneeta compellingly demonstrates that even before recent debates on the use of torture in the war on terror, the laws of interrogation were much more ambivalent about the infliction of excess pain and suffering than most political and legal theorists have acknowledged. Rather than viewing the recent policies on interrogation as anomalous or exceptional, Lokaneeta effectively argues that efforts to accommodate excess violence-a constantly negotiated process-are long standing features of routine interrogations in both the United States and India, concluding that the infliction of excess violence is more central to democratic governing than is generally acknowledged.
This book would be of interest to political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars, human rights activists and policy makers.
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