Collective Action Between the Street and the Court: Public Hearings in India

Public hearings, in the contemporary Indian context, are public meetings organized around the implementation of a given public policy (for instance the right to education). These meetings take the form of a confrontation between the administration and the people, moderated by a panel of “experts”. This peculiar form of collective action, characterized by a deeply ambiguous relationship to the judiciary, has become increasingly visible in India in the past decade.

This paper will attempt, firstly, to trace the genealogy of public hearings, back to the people’s tribunals of the 1960s; it will show how the public hearing has since been reinvented and reinterpreted, and how it has met with a new popularity as it was used by very different types of actors and struggles. Secondly, the paper will describe and analyze the dynamics of public hearings in order to highlight their hybrid nature, in between the community meeting and the lawsuit. Finally it will try to understand the sources and the limitations of the efficiency of public hearings as a mode of mobilization.