Question of Dignity: Interrogation as an Instrument of State Repression

by SHIV VISVANATHAN

[ THURSDAY, DECEMBER 23, 2004 12:00:00 AM ]

The act of conversation is central to the idea of community. When you talk, you reach out, include, and celebrate the other. Writers from Gandhi to Emmanuel Levinas have celebrated conversation as sacred and sacramental. Thus, any attempt to disrupt the conviviality and civics of conversation becomes sinister.

Two perversions of conversation exist in our polity which are deeply disturbing. One is the atrocity which vitiates the sense of the human. But there is a category which pretends civility, promises justice and yet is deeply violative of the human and the democratic. It is the official interrogation.

The interrogation carries the smell of the official expertise. There is a built in asymmetry between official power and the vulnerability of the person. Unlike the cross-examination the individual has no right to respond or be silent. The interrogation is intrusive. It enters the domain of the private self. It can be more ruthless, intrusive, impersonal, and invasive than the gaze, which whole generations of political sociologists have immortalised. Just as the gaze dissects the specimen, the interrogation tears open the private self of a potential victim. By pre-emptively criminalising the self, we often forget that those subject to these rituals of interrogation may be innocent. The trauma of such humiliation lasts long after the official file is closed. The interrogation does not need a rationale. Mere grounds of suspicion will do. A rumour is enough to trigger the intensity of intrusion. Yet this act of obscenity justifies itself on grounds of being official and is legitimised as an act necessary in the pursuit of a public function. Legal fictions like public function and national purpose need to be defined, or is the ambiguity of definition part of the power of the ritual?

An interrogation is a legal exercise designed to obtain the truth, to fill an official gap. But this aura of the official only creates a pretext for harassment. Nothing specifies the content of questions, the manner of questioning or the duration of interrogation. The grammar of a rite of separation of the individuals demands a re-incorporation into normalcy. Otherwise the victim remains in an ambiguous position, his integrity in a shambles, yet completely helpless to protect himself. These rituals of interrogation as rituals of violation appear in three forms today.

There is first the police interrogation — more limited but with its own mystique of fear and embarrassment. Second is the income tax encounter. There is finally a third form of encounter which many people do not even include in this set. It is a trial or interrogation by media.

Human rights activists have done a lot to visualise the police interrogation. Police interrogations are formalised in law. The framework of prescriptions and proscriptions exists and often a policeman can feel helpless interrogating a criminal don.

Beyond those who can meet threat with counter-threat, a police interrogation immediately stigmatises the person. Police rituals in India often swing from conversation to torture. They rip open the divide between confession and truth opening the question of whether a confession extracted under duress is true. Finally, interrogations need official closure and the problem of police interrogations is that there may be none.

There is a middle-class variant of a police interrogation that is called a tax investigation. A leading professional or businessman is suddenly subject to a raid. He is asked to open up his privacy to intense questioning. Every decision, budgetary act has to open to scrutiny. The raid is publicly conducted ritual which enables gossip and rumour. The nature of questioning turns it into a humiliation ritual for any professional. Heart attacks or trauma are so common that they become a ritualised part of the event. A symbolically intact bourgeois or professionalised world is left in a shambles. A sliver of Stalinism enters into the idea of democracy where harassment justified in terms of public good does not ring true.

Why do democracies create these rituals of harassment? The goal is hardly truth. The target is a rival, opponent or dissenter who has to be made to toe the line. The tax investigation is only a pretext for a more sinister political text. One can't build socialism on the assumption that every rich man is a dishonest man.

Less diabolical than the above two is trial by media. Media interrogations destroy public selves through private questions. Any young aspiring journalist asks a set of troublesome questions and before the person can answer them, the journalist has moved on. It is trial by innuendo, by insult without a full right to reply.

You can be made to be communal, incompetent, and irresponsible by a string of loaded questions, many of which we may not deign to answer in an ordinary conversation. The ethics of image management becomes crucial here. It can be a simple issue like one's right to be Hindu without being branded communalist. Can TV take it away? The recent picture of the Sankaracharya breaking down during interrogation and weeping is one such example. Even if you think he is guilty, is such a curiosity or voyeurism necessary?

The above three rituals of debasement threaten the vision of communication in democracy by debasing citizenship and devaluing dignity. Democracy faces an institutional paradox when the vehicles of protection become the core rituals of humiliation. The real challenge is how to unravel this conundrum.