The Approver's Testimony

Shahid Amin’s analysis of the judicial process regarding the Chauri Chaura incident is interesting because of the way that it delineates the construction of the Approver’s Testimony by the police.

In principle, an approved witness is one who is seeking pardon for his or her crime through confession. Shikari’s testimony however, reads nothing like what Shahid Amin calls the “discourse of a repentant rebel” and is very clearly a narrative that is constructed using the implication and condemnation principles required for a “first rate” testimony. In this discourse the individual motivations of those who are involved do not matter. Instead, the entire riot is construed as being pre-meditated, thereby making all those who were involved culpable; the second charge reads “the common object of which (the gathering) was to challenge the Chaura police…to beat, burn and kill them…”.

While it is true that setting the police station on fire, trapping all police officers inside and pelting all those who tried to flee with rocks were very deliberate acts, it is very unlikely that these actions were pre-meditated or that all who were present were aware of this “plan”. Shahid Amin’s analysis shows us that when one comes across such a narrative, one should ask, is it possible or likely that hundreds of people were part of a plan to kill so many police officers? Isn’t it more reasonable to consider the events of riot while remembering that mob violence is random? Isn’t it possible that the acts of arson were precipitated because of a single event, such as an altercation between a thanedar and a prominent member of the mob? That perhaps even if people in the mob were individually opposed to killing the police officers, there was very little that they could have done about it?

This reading is another example of how the narrators of an incident can change the very meaning an event by constructing facts and privileging certain aspects of an incident. Trouilott’s analysis of the way that silences are created through narration and the intentions of those who convey the happenings of an event is extremely relevant here. In this case, it was the necessity of providing an appropriate pre-history of the riot to make all those who were present culpable that motivated the creation of a false narrative.