Government · Sonali Chakravarti
The Last Jury Trial in India
by Sonali Chakravarti
It's April, 1959, a respected naval commander comes back from time at sea to find out that his wife is having an affair. Despondent and angry, he drives to the apartment of his wife’s lover to talk to him. The lover ends up dead. The murder trial of Commander Kawas Nanavati captivated Bombay, but when the jury verdict came out, many were outraged. They thought the jury system was to blame. The trial came to be known as “The Last Jury Trial in India” and it became a lightning rod for concerns about the jury being corrupted by prejudice and the media. In this four-part series, Sonali Chakravarti, a professor of political theory at Wesleyan University, follows the idea of trial by jury from colonial India to the drafting of the Constitution to India’s courts today, and asks what is lost when ordinary people no longer decide who is guilty. Find more information on the series at https://lastjurytrialpodcast.com/
