Maja Daruwala has been an activist for human rights and social justice for over four decades. Born in 1945, as the second daughter of Field Marshal Sam Maneckshaw, Maja grew up in the cantonments of India, where her early syncretic experiences impressed upon her the fraternal and plural nature of India, then still a young nation.
Maja Daruwala went on to study law in England and became a Barrister at Lincoln’s Inn. Her interests have always lain in protecting civil liberties, gender equality and systemic reform. For over twenty years, Ms. Daruwala was the director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, an international NGO that advocates for the protection of human rights across the Commonwealth with a special focus on prison reform.
In more recent years she has been the Convenor and the Chief Editor of the India Justice Reports. These reports are the first of its kind report that measures the standards of the Indian Justice System – the police and prison systems, the judiciary and legal aid system in India. The report leverages a comprehensive data set to see how the system has shifted – for better or worse – over time.
Maja Daruwala is in conversation with Gautam John, a fellow lawyer and CEO of the Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies. In this free wheeling conversation they discuss Maja’s early inspirations, her work in law, and her important contributions to reforming and improving upon India’s mammoth justice system.
Grassroot Nation is a podcast from Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and has been produced by Vaaka Media.
For more information, including additional resources please go to www.rohininilekaniphilanthropies.org.
AUDIO USED: Black July Protest in Downing Street | tte protest by Lanka Media News The CHRI JOURNEY: IN OUR OWN WORDS | CHRI by Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative Legal awareness material ‘Apnar Legal Aid’ A Play on the Right to Legal Aid of Indian Prisoners by CHRI India Justice Report: An Explainer by Tata Trusts
TRANSCRIPT:
HOST
Welcome to Grassroots Nation, a podcast from Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, a show in which we dive deep into the life, work, and guiding philosophies of some of our country’s greatest leaders of social change.
Maja Daruwala has been an advocatefor human rights and social justice for over four decades. Born in 1945, as second daughter of Field Marshal Sam Maneckshaw, Maja grew up in the cantonments of India, where her early syncretic experiences impressed upon her the fraternal and plural nature of India, then still a young nation.
Maja Daruwala went on to study law in England and became a Barrister at Lincoln’s Inn. Her interests have always lain in protecting civil liberties, gender equality and systemic reform. For over twenty years, Ms. Daruwala was the director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, the NGO that works to protect human rights with a special focus on prison reform.
In more recent years she has been the Convenor and the Chief Editor of the India Justice Reports. These reports are the first of its kind report that measures the standards of the Indian Justice System.
Maja Daruwala is in conversation with Gautam John, a fellow lawyer and CEO of the Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies. In this free wheeling conversation they discuss Maja’s early inspirations, her work in law, and her important contributions to reforming and improving upon India’s mammoth justice system.
This conversation was recorded in Delhi, at Ms Daruwala’s residence.
GAUTAM
I don’t know if I’ve ever said this, Maya, but at 19, I joined the National Law School in 1997 and the first year of internships is optional, but a lot of people want to do one. And in 1997, as it was in the years before, the two hot internships were either UNHCR or CHRI.
MAJA
Really?
GAUTAM
Yes, and I wasn’t fortunate enough to get the CHRI one. I got the UNHCR one in Jor Bagh.
MAJA
And did so well after that.
GAUTAM
Well, you never know how life would have ended up. But for me, I had friends who did the CHRI one and in a way it was kind of transformative, because we joined law school at 18, right? It was transformative for them because it left such a deep impression. And from the three people from my batch who did the CHRI internships, all of them are practicing lawyers now. Of the four of us who did the UNHCR ones, none of us are.
So I do think that the CHRI one was transformational. It’s left such a deep impression on them. As I’ve gotten to know you better, your work has left such a deep impression on me. I’m just curious about what your early influences were, that kind of shaped your commitment to justice but also, what was early life like?
MAJA
When I look back on early life, not then, but looking back on it now, it just was plain privilege. But not privileged in the way that the woke people use it, it was just a very un-self conscious comfort level, happiness, safety. In every way an easy family life. Perhaps now, looking back on it, you might say it was very sheltered, but it didn’t feel particularly sheltered. I grew up as an army brat, and we grew up in all these one horse towns. My earliest memories are growing up in Ferozepur and then in a very small sort of building, which was part of… In those days, there used to be those officers’ lines called Sangli Mess and Princess Camp and all those. So that was in Delhi, but in Ferozpur, I must have been about five, six. It was a border town. We had this huge compound and a house. One of these old colonial type houses with 20 foot ceilings, or felt like 20 foot ceilings. And for a child of my age, we almost never went out. Everything was in the house. And whatever little tutor we had, or I had, because my sister was about six years older, came to the house every two days. So the whole universe was the house, the garden, the land around, and I believe it must have been an acre and a half, two acres of land. So at one end there was the house, and right at the other end of a large garden with a well and buffaloes, and all, was the guardhouse. We had the sentries living there and the staff living there.
And you know, what I do remember very well and have learned to absorb it and make a sort of more sociological thoughts about it, is that in the milieu of people who lived in the house, there were Sikh guards, there were Gorkha guards, there was my father’s army driver, who was a Brahmin, there was the lady who looked after me and her husband, who were Christians, and there were gardeners and stuff like that that you had in those days. And I remember that in the evening when my mother and father would be out, they would sit during maybe 6 o’ clock, 7 o’ clock as the sun was going out, in a circle, and the driver would tell stories from the Ramayana or even from Kabir and stuff like that. And everybody would sit around and listen. And then occasionally the cook would kind of come in with a story from Christianity. And in those days, you know what a chillum is? The chillum used to be passed around and everybody would have it. Now, I didn’t get a sense then of exclusion, which today I am very, very aware of. Now, that’s a childhood memory. What does it mean? I have no idea. I’m just telling you what I remember.
GAUTAM
That’s lovely. Just to offer something as a reflection, you said Firozpur was a one horse town, it could feel monotonous. But there’s this incredible diversity of culture and conversation inside the house. You said you were an army brat. So what did that bring to your childhood? This diversity, but also the structure and regimen of your father being in the armed forces. What was daily life like?
MAJA
You know, people often ask me because they see my father as an extremely successful military man. And with that comes this notion of, as you say, structure, discipline, somehow militaristic discipline. But honestly, there was my father and there was my mother and two girls in the house. So there was very little militaristic discipline. What there was, was an expected standard of behavior. And since we had my mother and father as the exemplar over there, when I reflect back on it, it looks like something that I should be conscious of but while it was happening, it just seemed that this is how everybody lived because we had no other experience. So did we keep to militaristic timings? No, we didn’t. But did we have breakfast, lunch, dinner, studies, playtime, all of those things structured into the day? Absolutely, absolutely, we did. We all sat down for a meal together. Nobody missed a meal.
At the same time, in the evenings, we were always together if father was there, because he had a tremendously busy life. And my mother had the life of an army wife, which was in the evenings you went and played badminton or tennis, you went and fraternized with the other wives of the same age. There weren’t a great many of them, by the way, because from what I remember, my father was usually the senior person. So if he was a Brigade Commander and there was another Brigade Commander in the vicinity, that’s how we met. And they may have children of the same age, but then the junior people were much junior, so you didn’t actually really meet them. Probably the adults did, but there was no peer group for me.
GAUTAM
So in that setting, I’d love to hear about the relationship you had with your sister, what explorations you all got up to, what did that look like in this context?
MAJA
Frankly, we were not the Enid Blyton type of person. We were just very… She was six years older. So when you’re five or six, twelve or eleven is a long, big distance and you’re psychologically also distant. She had much more of a social life with my father and mother than I did. I stayed home much more or was left at home much more because in those days children were to be seen and not heard. So you didn’t go out in a way that now I see my grandchildren going out with their parents for everything. We were not like that, you know, you stayed at home with the aaya and you amused yourself as you could.
And as I told you, the universe was the house. And luckily the house was big enough for you to run around in the garden the whole day, pick vegetables, sow vegetables, do agriculture, because in that house, I remember, we grew aniseed, cotton, potatoes, carrots. And so the beds had to be made, the waters had to be put, the fertilizer had to be put. And my father was one of those very rounded people who got other people to do all sorts of things, but also involved himself in it. So he involved himself with the cow, he involved himself with the buffalo, he involved himself with digging a great big pit for fertilizer, a fertilizer pit, for digging up the garden and making the beds for the potatoes. So naturally, he was doing it and he had all of us doing it.
GAUTAM
Any hobbies or habits from that time that still hold? Whether it’s working with your hands or any of those?
MAJA
Reading, I think, mostly. Music, a lot of it. Being involved with everything and everybody that you are with at that time, being really involved, making little distinction, though, of course, one does make a distinction between yourself and the staff, but having more a contractual relationship with them than a status relationship, though in India, of course, the status relationship comes in no matter what you do.
GAUTAM
If I might ask, what are you currently reading? What are you listening to?
MAJA
What am I listening to? The last thing I listened to yesterday was Ravel’s Bolero, but the one before that was some… I don’t know what it was called. It was a bunch of Persians, I should say, Iranians, it was a bunch of Iranians and Syrians who had been displaced and had developed an orchestra of six people together. So I was listening to that. Actually, my refuge is YouTube, that’s what I listened to. In our house as technology improved, we had really good speakers. And even after I got married, my husband and all of them were so keen on just Hi-Fi sound and had to be the best and so on. But now I listen to YouTube on two small speakers. It’s the music that matters. But I have quite eclectic tastes, like, I thoroughly enjoy pop music. I love classical music, I love classical Indian music. And I like Coke Studio, if you like. That makes me very plebeian, but that’s what I am.
GAUTAM
No, that’s lovely. And if I just might draw a thread from the schooling that you had at home, the environment, how did law come to be part of your journey? What did that transition from schooling to choosing to pursue a career in, well, at least in education in law look like?
MAJA
It didn’t. Let me tell you, it absolutely didn’t. I have a lovely story to tell you about how I got to law. I don’t often tell it, but when you’re asking I’ll tell you. I got married at 21 and before that I was an air hostess for two and a half years, two and a half – three years.
GAUTAM
Was that with BOAC?
MAJA
With BOAC, yes. That shows how ancient I am. And before that I had finished what was then known as the Senior Cambridge or class ten. I went to work after that and I didn’t go to college.
So when we were in Singapore, my husband had been transferred there. I recognized that I was more and more discontented because you couldn’t get a good job. As it is in Singapore, your husband could work but you couldn’t get a work permit. But I was extremely lucky that Singapore at that time was changing from, putting a great accent on speaking English well. So anybody who spoke English had a place where they could go and work.
So I started to teach at Polytechnic part-time. And they wouldn’t make me permanent because they said I didn’t have any qualifications, quite rightly. But my very kind head of department said, “If you can show me that you are studying something, then I can keep you on.” So I enrolled myself to do my A-levels and I did my A-levels. And Gautam, you can imagine how unaware I was that I didn’t even recognize that you take two years to do your A-levels. So I did it in one year without honestly knowing.
So I did my A levels in one year. When I went to get my results at the Ministry of Education, there was this small, thin Tamil man. And when he gave me my results he also gave me a form which said ‘English’, ‘Economics’, ‘Law’. So I looked at it and said, “I don’t want to study anymore.” And he said, “How old are you?” So I said, “I’m 25-27.” And he said, “Don’t you want to do anything with yourself?” And I said, “Yes I do.” So he said, “Well tick one of these and do an open degree.”
So I was about to tick the English and he said, “You want to be a teacher?” I said, “No.” He said, “Have you got math?” I said, “No.” So he said, “Put down Law. Be something, get a profession.” And I said, “Okay.” And honestly that’s how I did law. I ticked the mark, the bookmark that said ‘Law’. And he was such a nice man. He said, “Don’t go home, go instead,” there was a publisher called Maxwell House. He said, “Go to Maxwell House before you go home. There will be a bunch of secondhand books for first year law, pick them up before you go home, otherwise you’ll never do it.” And that’s exactly how I did it.
MUSIC
MAJA
And the first time I opened a law book, the first time was a Criminal Law Case book. And the case I read was called The Queen v Collins, and that made me fall in love with the law, with the idea of jurisprudence and all the inchoate sense of justice that I had, eventually had an outlet.
GAUTAM
Do you remember what that case was about?
MAJA
Yes, I do. It was a wicked case. It was a case on rape. It was a man who had climbed onto the windowsill of a woman’s bedroom and entered it in the dark. And she had welcomed him thinking it was her boyfriend. He had meant to be a burglar, but finding a welcome, he continued. A, was it a case of deception? Was it a case of consent wrongly given? B, how much of him was in the room, standing on the windowsill, before he created the intention of sleeping with her?
And for me, that was fascinating. And the judge in the excerpt begins by saying, “If I was not sitting here in my cap and gown, I would imagine that I was in a farce.” And I thought to myself, “What a brilliant judge, what an amazing case.” And how did he decide it? I don’t remember how he decided it, but it made me think that here is logic, here is morality, here is social mores, and here is a conundrum that you have to solve according to a game of rules, and the rules themselves have to be just. And that was, for me, the luckiest day to find my metier, it was purely luck.
GAUTAM
So what was that journey of opening the first book from Maxwell House, reading this case, and then the journey to becoming, well, maybe not a lawyer, but having a degree in law?
MAJA
Well, first of all, I always think of myself as a lawyer, not a counselor or what you call it, an arguing counsel but I definitely think of myself as a lawyer. And from then on it was a question of balancing my married life with two children with studying law. And that was three years. And I knew that I wouldn’t be able to go to a regular school so I had to do it at an open examination in London from London University. Again, that was very lucky because you could do that. I enrolled myself and found from Singapore University, a bunch of very young lecturers who loved teaching a group of six or seven of us late in the evening. We would start at seven and finish at eleven. And they loved teaching us because we were the committed and the deeply involved students because we wanted to get somewhere. Their daytime students were completely uninspiring but all of us would do a full day’s work and then come and study with them.
And so we had a sort of roster and a group of six or seven people and we studied together off and on. And for me I would do my part time English teaching, one semester and the exam semester then I wouldn’t do it. It was quite strenuous. But I took it in my stride because I just wanted to do it. And it was also usual to fail because you were doing it at an open university, you were doing it late at night, you were doing it with other preoccupations, but I didn’t fail in either first, second or third year.
MUSIC
MAJA
And when I got my third year results I remember getting the phone call and the telegram saying that I had passed and passed quite well and I looked up from it and I said to my husband, “I’m going to become a barrister and I’m going to take a year off from my family and go and study at the Inns of Court School of Law in London.” And he said, “How are you going to do it? You’ve got two kids, I’m here in Singapore, how are you going to manage?” But again, you know, luck plays a great deal of part.
My mother was willing to look after my youngest son. My eldest son was of an age where I could take him with me and put him as a day scholar, as a weekly scholar in school in London. I had a cousin whose house I could stay in in England. And the luckiest thing was that my husband was in the airlines so we could fly back and forth inexpensively. So I had a year in London. The first year, well I would say the first six months were very tense. I was away from my family for the first time in ten years, I was feeling very guilty about leaving my young son with my mother. Every Friday night, after a huge week of pressured studying, you’d have to go to the station, fetch your son, make sure that he was on the Monday morning train back to his weekly school. So it was hugely tense and strenuous and difficult.
GAUTAM
Do you remember what London was like at that time? Was it your first time in London when you-
MAJA
No, I lived there for four years with my husband.
GAUTAM
Oh okay, so what was London at the time like? What were the social, political and cultural mores?
MAJA
It was pretty cool. The law school was very friendly. There were injustices in law school, let me tell you. They made sure that the overseas students didn’t get the qualifications to work in England. And we actually, myself and a group of Asian students, we actually made a representation to the School of Law at that time, but they were having none of it.
I used to live about 20-22 miles away from school, so I had a little car and I would drive there and back. It was very expensive because parking in London is very expensive. But it wasn’t an option to come in by train or tube because I lived very far away, near the airport.
Most of my London time was going back and forth from home, looking after my son. There was hardly any entertainment or anything else. It was just head down to your books. And the knowledge that you were making four other people, well not uncomfortable, but that they were giving up something, so you had to succeed. So that was my whole preoccupation. And London itself was London – full of opportunity, full of entertainment, full of movies and theater. And I think in the whole year I went to two plays because there was no question of anything but studying.
GAUTAM
What was your peer group like? The fellow students that you-
MAJA
That was a bit strange because there was very few students who were mature students. They were all people who’d finished their LLBs and come for that one year to be a barrister. We had this strange thing of eating dinners, you had to eat 12 or 24 dinners. I chose Lincoln’s Inn as my inn. So we had that.
The peer group wasn’t really a peer group because I was much older and I was married, everybody else was single and knocking around. And many of the British students, the local students, were on scholarship and so they had stipends etc., which I didn’t have. So while I was saving my pennies, they were going out. And I remember a friend of mine taking me off to a shop and saying, “Oh, I’ve got to buy a pair of dark glasses.” And he bought these dark glasses for about 40 pounds. And I was like, “40 pounds? That’s my whole two weeks allowance!” So it was like that.
GAUTAM
You mentioned the dinners and Lincoln Inn. I’d just love to hear a little bit more about what the dinners were and what was the idea of the inn?
MAJA
The food was caberous, but the inn was, it’s old. The whole place is full of tradition. That whole Holborn, Lincoln’s Inn, Fleet Street, Chancery, they are all things that, almost Dickensian. The buildings are beautiful, the libraries are elegant and silent. Greens are beautiful places where you could sit in summer. The whole thing is steeped in that tradition. Now, I’m told that the fashion of the day is to make fun of that tradition or to reject it as being colonial, etc. But it has a tradition and a logic of its own.
It used to have, at least when I was there, I don’t know anything about now, high standards, both of ethics and good behavior and what is expected of you. So that was something that you fell into. At the same time, there was a collegiality which could do with replication in our circumstances. I would be walking across the quad, and this has happened to me more than once, and Lord Denning, who was somebody whose feet I would normally be at, would walk across the squad and say, “Come here, come here! Are you from Lincoln’s?” And I’d say, “Yes”. And he’d say, “Hmm, what’s your name?” And I would say my name. And then I’d say, “Lord Denning, can I take you across the quad?” And he’d say, “Don’t call me Lord Denning, call me Dennis.” And I was like, “Never, never in my whole life will I call you Dennis.” But then he would say that, and he did, he saw me walking across the green with my mother, who had come to visit, and he said, “Your mother is here? How long are you here for?” And he didn’t know us from Adam. And she said, “Oh, I’m here for a week.” He said, “You must come and listen to me read tonight.” And so we went to the small, I can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s a small area of the benchers’, sort of, cafe, or it’s not really a cafe, it’s called something – rooms. We went there and there was a little mic and these two senior judges of the appellate court were sitting there and reading excerpts from poetry and inviting you to come and have sherry and chat after that. They knew who they were, they knew who we were – junior or anything. But for that occasion, on that meeting, there was none of that. We were just people who belonged to the same inn who were having a social occasion together. This you don’t see here.
GAUTAM
I hear you. The first six months, you said, were hard getting used to it and adjusted. What was the end of the year like? Once you finished your year at Lincoln’s Inn, where did that take you?
MAJA
Well, it’s interesting. In the last year of my study, I took all the relevant Law that I required for shipping – commerce and shipping, because I thought I was going back to Singapore, where my husband was. The night I got my results, he told me that we were actually transferring to Sri Lanka.
I was horrified because I’d done all this admiralty law, thinking that admiralty law would be the niche where I could be, you know, at my age, have a specialization, you know, pay my dues and then be in a thin, narrow end of the law, which many people didn’t do, and make lots of money and be happily ever after. But he told me the night that I got my results that we were moving to sleepy old Sri Lanka, and you would think that it would be an island nation and there would be shipping, but there wasn’t.
GAUTAM
So once you landed up in Sri Lanka, what was that part of the journey like?
MAJA
Ugh, the first few months were amazingly terrible.
GAUTAM
Where in Sri Lanka were you?
MAJA
Colombo. Dhan had joined… My husband had joined Air Lanka, and he was getting his feet deeply involved in everything. I was deeply involved in setting up the house and feeling that everything that I had done for four years had come to naught because there was no work permit, there were no high flying law firms, and there was certainly no shipping law. There was one admiralty lawyer, and he was not looking for anybody to help him, he barely had a practice of his own. The courts were all higgeldy piggeldy and I’d come from shining aficion – Singapore, so it was culture shock on steroids.
But Sri Lanka is a very, very friendly place with very kind people. So in about three or four months, I found a law firm. Again, I tell you, Gautam, it’s also luck. I didn’t find a law firm of sharks or unethical people or mediocre people. I fell in with a group of people who did law as a professional thing, but whose avocation was public interest, civil liberties, human rights, good governance, constitutionalism. And he was the best brain in the country, so I couldn’t have gotten luckier. I studied or learned my constitution and learned my sense of equity, justice, etc. from that law firm.
GAUTAM
Do you remember his name?
MAJA
Oh, yes. His name was Neelan Thiruchelvam.
GAUTAM
Have you ever met him after?
MAJA
Oh, yes. I mean, he became a friend for life. He, his wife, his two children. Sadly, he was assassinated by the LTTE just before he was to leave for a stint in Harvard. He was also a politician, he was with the TULF, and he knew that he was in danger, and he was leaving because it was too much. And they assassinated him, I think, nine or ten days before he was to go there.
GAUTAM
Oh, dear.
MAJA
It was a terrible time. It was a terrible time.
GAUTAM
Just two threads I want to pull on. The first is India, London, Singapore, Sri Lanka, all Commonwealth countries. There is the journey from law to the practice of law to a larger sense of justice. And then there were also these clearly inflection points about the assassination. Looking back, what would you say was the pivot for you from thinking of the law as a system of rules to thinking of it as a mechanism of justice, of rights? Where did that come from?
MAJA
I think I always had that. Even as a child, my mother would always say that I had a sense of fair play and justice. She would always say that. I didn’t know what it meant then. And there was nothing in my environment that was not based on fair play, equality, justice. As I told you, my parents, not only my parents, my grandparents, my aunts, uncles, they weren’t lawyers, but they had a standard, they had a sense of equity, if you like. We like to call it, it’s a bit old fashioned, I know, now, to say it, but you like to call it standards or good manners or good behavior.
MUSIC
MAJA
But good manners and good behavior are not only about picking up a knife and a fork in the way that you should, but in how you behave with others. The kind of respect you give to each other, respect you give to children, respect you give to animals in your household. I was the lucky participant in those things. So when you learned the formal rules of justice and law, and as I told you how lucky I was to fall in with these constitutional people in Sri Lanka, then it was just a question of honing it, refining it, reaffirming what you actually believed and being able to articulate it.
GAUTAM
And what were the defining opportunities and experiences in this process of refining and sharpening your sense of justice?
MAJA
Well, as I told you, in Sri Lanka, this firm of Tiruchelvam Associates also had a side thing called Law and Society Trust, which was an NGO. And for some time I was the cook and bottle washer for that. And that was creating legal literacy materials, doing seminars, bringing people together on things like mental health, which in those days, I mean, talking about 30 years ago, was not on anybody’s agenda. Improving prisons, trying to advocate for betterment of things that people had not then thought about, or not to that extent.
And certainly I was an acolyte, so I came into it thinking I was the only one who knew what to do about these things. And so we did a lot of that. I, in fact, made a film which I have since lost – a 30 minutes film on the conditions in a prison, Velikade prison in Colombo. And it never got shown because somebody or the other banned it, but I’m amazed that I could make it. And, you know, it also comes from a complete lack of awareness of the politics around things. You just do things because you think you can and because you feel yourself… nowadays you would call it empowered. But it wasn’t that. Suddenly I woke up to being empowered, I just felt because of my upbringing or my circumstance that you could do anything you wanted to. And so I did, but quite unconsciously.
GAUTAM
And what was the next destination after Sri Lanka? Both as a family but also for you individually in your own journey of-
MAJA
Well, you know, things were very bad in Sri Lanka around 1983 when there were these big, big riots. And a lot of people I knew were harmed because of it.
ARCHIVAL AUDIO
[Audio of Black July protests by TFTE in Downing Street in 2019 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi1NPlkWf8A]
HOST
The 1983 Riots in Sri Lanka are generally seen as the start of the decades long conflict in the country.
MAJA
My doctor was Tamil in a part of town which was badly mauled by the riots. And when I came back, I wasn’t in Sri Lanka during the riots because I happened to come to India. And when I came back, I went to see him to commiserate and I saw that his entire clinic was just… You couldn’t walk in it because, A, the walls had been burnt out and B, all his unguents and his chemical stuff and all was broken and there was glass for an inch and a half on the floor, just glass.
And my eldest son and I went there and, this is what I mean about being unconscious, we went there and we saw this and my eldest son said, “How can he work in this place?” And so we took a couple of broomsticks and began to clean up the place. We didn’t even know that there was danger or we shouldn’t be doing that or we were in a bad part of town or anything. And I think that that was also a lesson for my son, again, completely unconscious. I don’t like to even talk about it because it sounds so noble, but it wasn’t ever noble. It was just the thing to do at that time.
So going from there, it was a bad time. 83 to 86 there was a lot of tension, assassinations, the JVP on one side, the LTTE on the other side. Air Lanka, not knowing whether it was going to keep its expatriates or it’s not going to. And so eventually we thought it’s best for me to leave. By that time, my elder son was in boarding school, my younger son and I came to Delhi because, again, practical stuff, there was no way that we could have afforded a home in Bombay. My mother and father were living in Kunur, my sister was living in Chennai. But the law courts, the Supreme Court and the whole romance of public interest litigation drew me to Delhi, so I came to Delhi.
GAUTAM
What was Delhi like in the mid eighties when you landed, particularly from a point of view of, you know, the community around law and justice?
MAJA
Oh, it was quite exciting. It was quite exciting because there was Justice Bhagwati and there was Justice Desai, and there were all sorts of other people. Public interest litigation was, well, I can’t say it was in its heyday, but there was a lot of public interest litigation going on. And I had met Nandita Haksar in Sri Lanka, where she had come, and that also tempted me to come here. I fancied that I would be able to work in a public interest law firm. And I turned up. I knew no one here. I had been away for too, too long. Nobody knew me, there was no hereditary legal heritage that one could depend on. I went and interviewed with many people and settled on a small firm, mostly because there was no hierarchy in the firm. We were all struggling to be. Struggling too much, to be, actually, we didn’t do very well. So I worked with these people for about six years, six-seven years. I didn’t like litigation. I was perfectly articulate at litigation, but I didn’t like the courts, I didn’t like the atmosphere, I didn’t like the ethics. I just thought I was wasting my time. And that’s more on me than on the atmosphere. I just couldn’t fit. So eventually, they were looking for someone to work at the Ford Foundation. And I interviewed for that and I got that job. And again, the job was in social justice, and that was just perfect for me. And so I had four years there.
GAUTAM
What were those four years like?
MAJA
Lovely. Wonderful. It was amazing. It was a very good place to work. It was all about empowering other people and supporting all the good things that they were doing. So you fell into a virtuous circle, which you were only augmenting by supporting them. And because you’re a funder in.. you know, people don’t like that word and people say all sorts of critical things about it, and it’s almost a bad word. But it’s only a bad word, I think, out of a little bit of envy, and you’ve got the money nobody else has, so the power equation is not so good, and so you tend to scorn it while taking the money. I’m sure that you have some experience of that. But what happens is that you have a bird’s eye view of the sector that you are working in.
Governance, human rights, social justice, women’s rights, discrimination. And because you have that, you can make… sometimes you make bad choices, but you can make very holistic choices and you can really help to press a button that will open up many more things.
So I felt I was doing good work, virtuous work, which suited my temperament. And I hope that I could say that I encouraged burgeoning things, which would then go on to becoming institutionalized. For instance, I remember one of the things I funded was the law school at Bangalore to open a Child Rights Center, a Women’s Rights Center. And now, 30 years on, one can judge it or not judge it, or whatever it is, but at that time, you did it and you did the right thing and it was okay.
GAUTAM
And in this four year journey, the Ford Foundation, in this view of the landscape you had, what were the spaces that were empty, that called to you?
MAJA
Women’s rights was not empty, but it could have done with support and it got it. The rights of vulnerable people, Dalits, those kinds of things, institutions like the law schools and all, which were burgeoning at that time, now there are so many. I think I was always interested in legal literacy, spreading legal literacy and good governance. Accountability and changing systems, rather than the amelioration of one or the other sector.
GAUTAM
And where did the road lead you to from the Ford Foundation?
MAJA
After four years? I keep saying this to you, Gautam, its happenstance, its luck.
GAUTAM
Serendipity.
MAJA
Serendipity. Thank you, I needed a new word – serendipity. And just being in a place where some opportunity hits you. I was quite happy to go back to litigation, but I think I decided I wouldn’t do litigation, but I would do counseling, table work. And I would have been quite happy doing that, provided that it had something to do with public interest. At that time, Mr. George Verghis and Soli Sorabjee had brought from England, where it was first conceived, to India, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative.
HOST
The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative is an international non profit organization that advocates for the protection of human rights across the Commonwealth. Established in 1987, CHRI has had a particular focus on the global south: with its headquarters in Delhi, offices in Accra in Ghana and a presence in London. CHRI’s main areas of work lie in protecting the right to information in its member countries, improving accountability and transparency in the judicial systems and police and prison reform.
MAJA
And why did they bring it? It was because there was a realization among the people who had started CHRI that the Commonwealth lives in the south. 8/10ths of the Commonwealth lives in the south. I mean, there are just hardly very few developed or northern countries in the Commonwealth, and so the headquarters should be here, and so they brought it here and they tried to set it up.
And the first three years of it, when I was not part of it, was very difficult for them to set up. They got all their licenses and trust and all the formalities done, but there was really no one to begin running it. And just as I left Ford, Soli, who had been sort of guiding this ship in a one man sort of way, said, would I take it up? And I said, “Yes, I would, provided that I could have my head in running it and bringing it up to scratch.” I had no idea whether I would be able to or not.
It was practically non-existent, there was, I think there was a little bit of money, very little bit of money. There was certainly not enough to pay the salaries of, say, six people or four people, not at all. There was one room in somebody else’s organization, one broken down computer from his office, and an old gentleman who had been in the government, but who was now old and could not work anymore, who was a sort of all-purpose secretary. That’s it. There wasn’t even an intern. And then there was one intern who is now a Vice Chancellor, let me tell you.
GAUTAM
What was the remit CHRI had?
MAJA
Remit was to promote human rights and human rights awareness across the commonwealth. It was a big remit.
ARCHIVAL AUDIO
[Audio about the CHRI’s journey – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQGvZP9AbSQ&t=148s]
MAJA
What they used to do till then, because it had been started with tremendously eminent people, including the Foreign Minister of Canada, basically all generals and no soldiers, but they did a good job, in the sense that every two years, they would bring out a report on the status of human rights in the Commonwealth. But as time went on, and these people also got older, they really needed a secretariat to bring all the good counsel of these people together to write these reports.
So in the first year that I was there, we brought out a very slim report on, I think, freedom of speech and expression. But after that, every two years, we would bring out a report called the CHOGM report. CHOGM is a horrible word, but it means the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. So in time for that, to advocate for something, one or the other issue that was topical at the time, we did that.
It was not enough to do that, but the important thing was to find something that was common to all Commonwealth countries, which you could validly say required repair. And the issue of, say, a minority in Rwanda and a minority in India was so far apart, the circumstances were so far apart that you couldn’t bring it together. So one had to think of systems, what were the systems that actually could be impacted, but had both common roots in the colonial system of law, the common law system of law and structures that were similar, and at the same time had dysfunctions which were preventing development, good governance, progress, and were actually vehicles for discrimination. So that’s how we decided or honed in on access to justice, on the one hand which was about violation, and access to information, which was about empowerment, transparency, participation, accountability. What would bring this about, what would make governments accountable, at the same time, empower people to participate in governance, in their own governance. And that’s how one chose or came to a consensus on access to justice and right to information, access to information.
GAUTAM
That’s a lovely articulation of the structural nature of the challenges and the systems of justice, as you said. I mean, over the journey with CHRI, CHRI’s worked on systems of prisons, systems of police and systems of justice, the courts itself, in those journeys, what did it take to work in those journeys as an individual, but also as the leader of an organization? These are deeply contested spaces, multiple competing interests. What was that journey for you as someone new in the space, but also someone deeply invested in justice as a fundamental construct, as you started to engage in these contentious systems?
MAJA
Gosh, that’s such a big question. I knew that, not I knew that, but, you see, the law has to be equally applied. These are cliches, but they are cliches because they are also true. They have to be just in themselves. There has to be mechanisms that are trustworthy, that can apply these laws.
MUSIC
MAJA
And when you look at one of the fundamental mechanisms, basic mechanisms that will allow the law to function as it should, it’s the police.
It is both a locus of power, governmental power. It also should be a place of protection for the public. And that is where the government and people should meet – in the police- as the mechanism of fairness, which will uphold the law. But instead, in many, many jurisdictions, it is a mechanism of oppression, and it is a mechanism of enforcing rules and regulations which go by the name of law, but which are inherently unfair, and where the power equation is so unequal that abuse is almost built into it. So on that analysis, it seems to be the basic thing that you should work on to make it better. If you reform the police, then you can reform many other things. There’s a sort of multiplier effect on the ground. And in the Commonwealth itself, you have examples of some of the best practices in policing and some of the worst. So there’s a lot to borrow from and there’s a lot of exchange you could make. You can really develop this, the exchange of ideas, etc., it lends itself to this. So that’s why we started to work on police.
Prisons were simply because everywhere, even in the West, even in the East, even in the South, prisons are bad places. And so the very badness of it and the neglect was a challenge that you had to address. And it was part of access to justice, because what are prisons? Prisons are the dumping ground for all the dysfunctions in the justice system. You will see the same thing in Fiji, as you will see in Ghana, as you will see in Kenya, of overfilled prisons, terrible conditions, people who haven’t been brought to trial, abused people, and all of these people have no champion. So that was one of the reasons to be there.
ARCHIVAL AUDIO
[Audio from a play ‘Aapka Legal Aid’ conducted by CHRI as legal awareness for Indian prisoners – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOUfX43qMeo&t=324s]
And the access to information, of course, for me was, you can’t do this alone, the more people of civil society, the more active citizens you can create, and you can empower them by getting information freely available. In an information age, you can’t have… Power and information are the same thing, in my view. So you had to release this power, and releasing it meant getting a right, a legislative right for people. And one of the wonderful things that happened in India was that not only did the Supreme Court say that there was a right to information because of the work of many, many more people than myself. And whatever little part I have to play in it, I will always be most grateful for. But they didn’t say, as in the West, like in America, that this is an administrative thing. They said it’s a fundamental right.
So as a fundamental right, then it’s much safer. Now what may be happening on the ground today, etc., those are things that are going to be challenges for decades to come. But the fact that it was declared as a fundamental right meant that there was a working frame and a basis on which we could take it forward.
And one of the things I think I’m proudest of is that what happened in India, we could take to Ghana, we could take to Kenya, we could learn from South Africa, we could take to Rwanda and Tanzania. And they owe a debt to the Indian experience when they took it on.
GAUTAM
I want to focus on one particular part of this journey that I’d love to hear your take on. Whether it’s working with prisons and prison reform, whether it’s working with police and police reform, my sense is that there are going to be multiple competing interests and in some way multiple tensions to balance. In some way, your role would have to be the person who creates, like, some uncommon ground for this work to happen. Progress depends on creating some alignment of interest. What was that process like of inserting yourself into complex spaces with many interests and many actors and then trying to create a sense of common purpose, collaboration?
MAJA
You know, international collaboration in some ways was easier. Here you are too close to the ground, and I’m not saying this very well, for access to information there was a big coalition already working. So what did one bring to it? One brought a certain strip of law, of good practice from all across the Commonwealth, for instance. And you were accepted for that. So you found your niche, if you want to say it that way. Nobody was hostile, but people had been working in that space for a long time, so you had to prove yourself to be a legitimate actor and companion in the space and not take up other people’s space. I think that would be the trick of it.
In other jurisdictions, like Ghana, it was introducing this new concept and saying, “Look at the benefit of it”, and bringing people together, some who were already working on it and some who you were working with – is that what you meant by contested spaces?
GAUTAM
Yes. I mean, like you said, there are many people who have been working on it. Entering a space as a new person, as a new entity, is not easy. So navigating that was…
MAJA
You’re right. And, you know, I always say this, that when you’re navigating spaces like that, you must recognize other people. You must recognize and respect them for whatever they are doing. There may be disagreements, and too often there is ideological nitpicking and you have to somehow get over that.
But another thing that really works to make collaborative partnerships is process. I think that many times we neglect the process idea. You think, “Oh, I know, I know Gautam, I’ve worked with him for a long time. I’ll phone him up and I’ll tell him this, but the next time he sends me an email, I ignore it because he’s a friend.”
That breaks a process. You have to build trust, and some people have been working together for five years, ten years, they build trust. Other people are bringing in some new elements, it makes for discomfort. But if you have a process and you’re honest and true to yourself, and this sounds like a cliche, I know, but you’ll fit, and you may not fit completely, but as long as you are pushing towards some objective and you can see and respect the contribution, your own and the other person’s, I think you might get there.
GAUTAM
That’s lovely. I wanted to pick up on the access to information and the right to information work that you talked about. It was fairly new at the time. While there was a large civil society coalition that had led it, it was still a new idea that was being incepted into India. Was there skepticism? What was that, what was the conversation around the right to information in its early stages?
MAJA
In myself and my organization, there was no skepticism. There was just a passion to do this and a recognition that if we got it, it would be a prize, it would be huge to get it. And it was extremely empowering in the sense that government is always seen at a height and people are seen as a sort of mass which is being governed over rather than governed with.
MUSIC
MAJA
And it was this notion of participation. You could be a participant in your own governance. I remember the first time giving a speech somewhere, I said that, you know, “Information belongs to you because it is gathered only for a public purpose. It is gathered by people who are paid from your exchequer, it is gathered from taxpayers money. It is retained, organized, arranged, all for the purpose of what? Of not hiding it, but of making it available for governance. And therefore it is your information.” And I could see the notion light up in people’s eyes that I don’t have to run around for it, I don’t have to beg and plead for it, I don’t have to pay money for it, it is mine. Now how fundamental is that or how corny is that? I don’t know, but that’s how I came to it.
GAUTAM
And if I can build on that, I mean, you talked about the information being of the public, by the public and for the public, but also a sense that it was raw material for the public to use. Do you want to just draw out on that, that the information was both an end and a means, of I might. And I’d love to connect it to the idea of the India Justice Report, because I feel like there’s a thread through it, that the information is valuable, but also a starting point.
MAJA
What’s your question?
GAUTAM
Just how you see information as being raw material for citizens and what you might like to have seen citizens do with that?
MAJA
Well, you know, every citizen has need of some information, right? And when you’re denied that information, you are that much less of a citizen. If you see a citizen or a human being as not only a bundle of skin and bone, or an anatomy, but you see it as bundle of rights, and you don’t know your right…
For instance, a good example in our own country is every citizen, or nearly every citizen who is an adult knows that they can go and vote. Many, many people know they can vote in secret, that they don’t have to tell about the ballot. Even really, really unaware people know that. But I guarantee you that the largest part of the population does not know it is equal to the other part of the population. This is information at large, broadly, it’s information.
A woman in a village, or a laborer lady who is unlettered, or a child in school doesn’t know that he needn’t be beaten. That a policeman, for instance, because I work with them, can’t slap you around. Nobody, even your Mercedes Benz man doesn’t know that. So that’s at a broader level, at other levels, more technical, if you like, before I go there…
Civil society. Civil society is a cohort of active citizens in the country. They want to be active in their own governance. Why should they be denied information? If information is power, why should a citizen have less, potentially, power than a bureaucrat? A bureaucrat is, after all, a civil servant. He is a public servant, he must get respect that is owed to his chair or his position. But so must an ordinary citizen, especially one that wants to be active in its own sphere. So why not?
In law courts, for instance, there’s something called discovery. When you’re in the middle of a lawsuit, there should be no surprises. You put in everything you know, I’ll put in everything I know, we’ll put it in front of the judge and he’ll give us a fair dispensation of whatever it is. So that’s another kind of information.
And now you have information about systems. The more you know about a system, the more transparent a system is. Then you’re going to get that much more, even playing field. Otherwise you’re stuck in the dark, why should you live your life stuck in the dark? You were asking me about the India Justice Report. That’s an extension of all this.
HOST
The India Justice Report is a report that measures the state of the judicial system – the police and prison systems, the judiciary and legal aid system in India. The report leverages a comprehensive data set to see how the system has shifted – for better or worse – over time. Maja Daruwalla is the Chief Editor of the report.
GAUTAM
So the importance of access to information, indeed a fundamental right to information for citizens, is something that you’ve articulated very strongly and something I appreciate. How did this idea of information about government, information about systems and structures find its way into the India Justice Report, which is something that… you’ve been passionate about the India Justice Report for the last five years now. How does it tie together your work on legal literacy, on access and right to information and citizenry?
MAJA
Well, just to give you a little blurb about the India Justice Report, it was a sort of brainchild of myself and many other people, we came together – Daksh, CHRI, Centre for Social Justice, Vidhi, TISS Prayas and Common Cause. They came together and I became the convener and the Chief Editor. And because they had those specializations, we were thinking it through and we thought, “Everybody complains about the criminal justice system and the justice delivery system. But many, many, many people don’t know the structures of these, the internal structures – how are they funded? How much manpower do they have? Do they have the infrastructure? What is their workload? What is their kind of diversity? And each of these entities work in their own silos. So how can we bring it together to make a composite picture of what is the capacity, the structural capacity of these institutions? And if they have this kind of structural capacity, are they designed to respond to the needs of the public?” So that’s how we were looking at it, and it was quite unique.
And then we came up with this idea that we should rank it, we should look at who is responsible – states. Basically, the states of this entity called India are responsible for delivering justice. If you look at the holistic picture of a state, where does it rank vis a vis other states? So that’s how we came to do the Justice Report. So we rank large states, 18 of them, small states, seven of them, and then the states which for a long time have been under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, we don’t rank them though, we give all the statistics.
ARCHIVAL AUDIO
Audio explaining the Indian Justice Report by Tata Trust – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvmYKNXEPHQ&t=65s]
So now how are we to do this work? We didn’t want to be subjective, we wanted to be statistically correct. Now how do you get statistically correct? You can’t make up your own statistics, so we decided to look at publicly available statistics of the government itself. So that’s where the information comes in. It’s all data, it’s all out in the public. So as good as the data is, that is how good our analysis or measurement will be.
GAUTAM
And what has the reception of this been within various levels of the government, the bureaucracy, the criminal justice system, the police system, what’s the reception been?
MAJA
In the first one we did, I think it was the uniqueness of ranking and bringing everything together in one place and having so many statistics, but at the same time having the gist of it and showing large trends that got the attention of the newspapers, the media and therefore the bureaucracy. And I think there was a surprise but at the same time, you know how it is…. States that have done well wanted to say that they had done well, and states that had done not so well were willing to listen to a voice that had done a measurement which was, in their view, valid. I think that is a crucial thing to say because in their view, it had to be valid.
And then, of course, the states that are not doing so well have been sometimes critical, sometimes quiet. We are rigorous in our methodology and we review it all of the time. No one has come back with terrible critique. There are bound to be critiques. And as I said, the measurement is only as good as the statistics available. There are gaps in statistics. When there are gaps in statistics, you end up not measuring something that might be quite vital, but it’s not available.
On the other hand, the very granularity gives you the ability to point to something which, were it repaired, would repair many other things – kind of a domino effect. So it’s those kinds of things that you get from a database thing.
One of the challenges that we have, and I struggle with, is how to make all of this really simple so that the largest amount of people can find it relevant and useful.
GAUTAM
In this five year journey with the India Justice Report, what are signs of progress with your stakeholders, with these stakeholders that have given you a sense of hope?
MAJA
This is the third report. Now, in November, December, or maybe in the beginning of next year, we will have another report. It is slowly gathering an audience and people are looking forward to it. It was interesting, when the third report came out and we were advocating, you know, disseminating it to the media, everybody was awaiting it as a regular thing and nobody was saying, but why are you questioning this or why are you ranking it? That was all accepted. What they wanted to know was, “well, whose rank?” So the interesting thing was to see whose rank, which shows its acceptability. Acknowledgement has come from two or three things – one is it is cited in parliament, in assemblies. I’m told that the finance minister quoted it the other day. Then we are called or invited to policy level dialogues sometimes, sometimes not.
The NITI Aayog, the DOJ, State Chief Secretary will see you. It depends on how busy they are, what they want to know. It’s a lot of circumstances that come together, and so we can advocate for A or B or C. I’ll tell you some of the stuff that we want to advocate for, we do advocate for.
The third level of acknowledgement and also, I think, impact, but I’m tentative about saying these things because attribution is so difficult, is that I see a lot more of the statistics that we use in the media, used in debate, used in discussion, even used to say, “I don’t think they’re right about this”, but it is used. So statistics, data, etc., has become more common in usage.
And one of the things that the IJR wants to encourage is to bring people together who use data to interrogate justice delivery. So that’s something. The Chief Justice, I believe, has used the IJR and the judge who was talking about legal literacy and legal aid has also quoted it. So it’s being taken seriously, but more importantly than that, it’s being taken credibly.
If I can give you an example, in some states, there are more than 60% vacancies of doctors in prisons. So either you do something about it because it is so horrendous, or you find a way around it, like developing paralegals, developing collaborations between the local hospital and yourself. So there are points of repair and you can start those conversations.
Then the amount of people that there are in prison – it’s just mounting and mounting.
MUSIC
MAJA
So when we talk about it, people like us talk about it, we are joining in the conversation with other people, many other people. But those many other people have now got statistics to use, and they do use them, and because they use them, they become more credible. And when you get to the table of Government and you’re talking with them and you are using their statistics, then the conversation becomes more real.
GAUTAM
I just want to draw this long arc – from Singapore to London to Sri Lanka to Delhi, from law being a moment of serendipity, to a greater recognition of the systems of justice and injustice, and an articulation of your role in that, and the path of using information as a way to drive action – what’s Maja Daruwala’s unfinished agenda?
MAJA
First of all, I see my role as very small, tiny and very limited in all that I have done. When I see all these wonderfully virtuous people around me who win cases, who change notions of justice, etc., frankly, I don’t see myself in that firmament.
But what I do see is that I could have spent my life doing admiralty law or playing canasta, and I would have been equally happy, I think. But I have been given this opportunity, and whatever my limited talent will allow, I have done, and I’ve been privileged to do. I know it sounds all very corny and very cliche, but I honestly feel that. I feel that there’s so much to do. If I had another life to live or if I had known what I know today and started out from that end of knowledge, I think I would have devoted myself to legal literacy, to being much more focused on perhaps one cohort of people who I felt I could contribute to, like women’s rights.
MUSIC
MAJA
But I think what I like doing is bringing people together, to work together or to work towards some objective, provided I am acceptable to those people. I also feel that when you have done something and built something, like, I feel that I did contribute to the building of CHRI from this small place to an international organization which was very well recognized in many, many countries, etc., that you must know when to leave and also build a succession. Not easy to do, because inevitably you build in your own image, and then somebody else coming in becomes difficult, you know? And I don’t think that in India, at least, in the civil society space that I work in, that we have mastered the art of succession.
GAUTAM
I love that. One of the things that people often say, and I think is true, is the, often, how to say, how daunting work in human rights and justice and all of these things are. I mean, either even at the level of the individual or the level of the system, for you, how have you kept yourself grounded? How do you replenish your own spirit? How have you cultivated resilience and avoided burnout in this space for so long?
MAJA
I think while I was in the middle area of my career with CHRI, I think there was space. So for instance, in the right to information, you knew that you were moving a little bit every day, and eventually there was the law, eventually you could take it to other people, eventually you could show it as good practice. So that was tremendously empowering.
On the other hand, with prisons and policing, you worked day in, day out, day in, day out, and you got very little purchase. And so you looked for the little bits of light in large areas of darkness. But you strive on because you know that there is darkness, you knew that in the beginning, so why are you weeping about it? You knew it, you know it was hard, and you know that you are not going to get to the journey, the end of the journey, but there will be other people who are affected and affected well, and you will be able to assist with that.
And then there are other moments of actually on the ground seeing a change. After years and years and years of working in prisons, more than me, my colleagues managed to get through a sort of stream of children and parents in Calcutta prisons who had been separated from each other and also who were Bangladeshi, and nobody was paying attention to them. They had overstayed their visas or didn’t have a visa, whatever, they were so poor, they were so uneducated, but nobody to advocate for them. And you actually got some of them back to their families and that was tremendous. You never forgot that feeling. You can work on systems and everything, but this was pure carbohydrate, you really enjoyed it. So you had that kind of thing happening occasionally.
GAUTAM
Maja, if you could go back in time, what wisdom would you give your younger self?
MAJA
Oh, I don’t know. It’s not that I didn’t… There was so much that I didn’t know, so much. And had I known it, had I had the width of reading, the companionship that I have now accumulated at my age, had I had it at the age of 30, my goodness, you could have conquered the world. But you don’t get those opportunities, you just learn from experience. So I think there’s no substitute for experience, but the way that nature has made us, we get the experience, and by the time you get the experience, you look back and you’re 200 years old.
GAUTAM
Well, maybe another way to phrase this, then, is, you know, like in 1997, CHRI and you at CHRI were the destination of choice for first year students from India’s premier law school. Your life and your story have inspired many in the pursuit of rights and justice in India. What would you tell them?
MAJA
I would tell them, “Don’t do law if you don’t have a mission. And if your mission is not that of public service, that’s perfectly alright. Go make money, enjoy. Provided, of course, you’re ethical. But to those of you who are coming into this,” as you said, they’re coming into CHRI because they want to learn something about public interest, “don’t give up on your mission, don’t expect reward for your mission. Your reward has to be something that is self generated. And there is no such silly choice… I’m talking about what I see as the liberal, progressive, accommodative person. And so hone your skills. It’s not enough to have passion, you have to have skill. And what skill does an advocate have? If you abjure violence, which is the alternative, then you have… Your skill is your language, your ability to communicate, your ability to persuade, and you must hone that, you mustn’t be mediocre at that. You must work at it and develop it and build it, and you must keep the company of good people. Don’t compromise because you’re working with a senior who’s a bit dodgy. Don’t work with him or her. Find someone who is better than yourself for you to be mentored by.” That’s what I would say.
GAUTAM
Well, thank you, Maja. You’re an inspiration to me, you’re an inspiration to dozens more, many of whom you know, many of whom you may never meet. But thank you for your time.
MAJA
Thank you.
HOST
Thank you for listening to Grassroots Nation. Stay tuned for our next episode. To know more about any of the guests or their work, please go to www.rohininilekaniphilanthropies.org or join the conversation on social media.
