The case, and why it matters

The case

In 1959, a jury in Bombay (now Mumbai) acquitted Naval Commander Kawas Nanavati in the killing of his wife’s lover. The case was a media spectacle in India and in the international press: an upstanding naval officer engaging in vigilante justice, and a tabloid, Blitz, stirring up sympathy for the defendant.

The jury split 8–1. Higher court judges called the verdict “perverse” and inconsistent with the evidence, and the case went to the Supreme Court of India, which sided with them. Nanavati went to prison.

The case came to be known, not quite accurately, as “the last jury trial in India.” But it hastened the end of a system that elite lawyers and politicians saw as inefficient and ill-suited to a country as religiously and linguistically diverse as India. In 1973, trial by jury was abolished, without resistance.

Why it matters now

In the United States we often take the right to a trial by jury for granted. People grumble about jury duty and make satirical TV shows about the characters you meet in the courtroom. Yet the jury remains one of the most powerful ways ordinary people can resist a state that is punishing someone unfairly. When lawyers and judges are motivated by political interests and their own careers, the value of independent jurors becomes even more striking.

India’s history, from the nationalists who prized trial by jury under British rule to its quiet abolition after independence, shows how our sense of the jury is shaped by the political needs of the time and by what we imagine justice looks like. Seeing how another multicultural democracy weighed the risks and promise of jury trials makes clearer what is at stake for us.

The host

Sonali Chakravarti is Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and is the author of Radical Enfranchisement in the Jury Room and Public Life. She can be reached at schakravarti@wesleyan.edu.

Credits

Host & writer

Sonali Chakravarti

Editorial team

Sara McCrae

Leah Feder

Sound design & mix

Emma Munger

Cover art

Supriya Kota