“Chasing social and environmental justice with good people from all over. Capoeirista in training. Let's deepen democracy.”  Like the man himself, Vivek Maru’s 17-word Twitter bio is clear, compelling, sincere and spirited. We are living with a global epidemic of injustice, but we've been choosing to ignore it. The seeming disconnect between law school and the struggles of ordinary people discouraged him enough to seriously consider dropping out. Fortunately, Maru stuck it out and went on to forge an unconventional path. One that eventually led him to co-found Namati— a non-profit that in a little over a decade has built an impressively muscular movement of grassroots legal advocates. People who know, use, and shape the law in far-reaching ways, to restore power, dignity and justice to the people. Through its cadres of community paralegals or "barefoot lawyers,” Namati has supported over 65,000 people in eight countries protect community lands, enforce environmental law, and secure basic rights to health care and citizenship. The Legal Empowerment Network they run connects over 3300 organizations and 13,000 individuals from over 170 countries, all working to advance justice for all. An instrumental figure in this remarkable movement, Vivek is inspired by the genius and soul force of Gandhi, and other civil rights giants, the joyous resistance of his Capoeira training, as well as by his Jain roots. In his work and life one sees the interplay of a profound commitment to seeking justice in the outer world, and an awareness that the most powerful forces of transformation stem from within.

For those interested in staying in learning more, and participating in the movement, Namati's Legal Empowerment Network offers many resources and starting points. For those who missed the call-- below are some extended 'nuggets' from the conversation:

Early Life & the Influence of Gandhian Thought
I grew up in suburban Connecticut, and remember watching the movie Gandhi in my living room, and watching it in the kind of way my friends were watching Star Wars. I was walking in circles pumping my fist repeating the lines. You know Luke Skywalker and Gandhi have a color scheme in common; off-white on off white :) Here I am this child of immigrants in Connecticut, and here is this Indian dude, small in stature like me, who stood up to the British and won— and his weapon was love. That felt so profound to me then and it still does. I had a personal connection as well---my mother’s father was a Gandhian, he was part of the freedom movement, and spent time in prison. Later he ended up running a publishing press to make a living, but also to disseminate these important ideas. So besides Ben Kingsley, I was influenced by long walks with my grandfather and his stories.

Why The Law? Why that Tool?
I’ll tell you why I went to law school — I had studied social theory in college. My thesis advisor was Pratap Mehta, he was also my best mentor and teacher in college. And today he is one of the best known intellectuals in India. With Pratap I studied people like Marx, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Adam Smith, Foucault, Max Weber, Habermas— that canon of social theory, Max Weber especially was big— this was the social studies department at Harvard, and the law comes up in all of those writings as the language that translates between these big ideas about democracy, freedom, and the kind of society we want to build on the one hand— and on the other hand, real life.  And I will tell you — that was a terrible reason to go to law school — it’s so abstract! Yeah, so what if law came up in those books?That wasn’t a reason to pick up this trade! Because law is a trade, it’s a practice. So that was a mistake. And if anybody out there is thinking about studying law, I would say find a few people who studied law and are doing something with it, people whose lives you like, follow them around ask questions about what they do. If you can find three people of this trade whose lives you like that’s a more practical reason to take this path than the reason I had :)

In between college and law school I lived in Kutch for a year- [the region in India] where my family comes from. I lived in a hut of dung and sticks with people who were struggling with very basic things. Trying to get the rain to stay in the ground rather than run off to the sea. Kutch is very drought prone, and I was there after several years of drought. I was there studying the living legacy of Gandhian social action. I had written a thesis  about Gandhi with Pratap Mehta and after these experiences, law school just felt like the wrong place for me. It felt so contrary to the ideas and struggles that had inspired me.

Mohandas, Malcolm X, MLK: On Violence Culture and Meaning

In my thesis I was trying to take their thoughts and put them in dialog with one another. The writing in my thesis makes me cringe now— but those people and movements and ideas have stayed with me. They have a lot to teach us for the moment that we are in now.

In terms of a foundation I think religion is a thing the three have in common- much more so than the law. Part of what I was exploring is the learning that happened with the Civil rights movement, really looking to Gandhi and Indian Independence movement as a model. Dr. King explicitly cites Gandhi, but the connections are deeper than that. Bayard Rustin who was a mentor of Dr. King, traveled to India to study Gandhi’s movement, and considered himself a Gandhian. He became a key advisor, and one of the architects of March on Washington. James Lawson, he was in India studying Gandhian social action, and then he read about the Montgomery bus boycott in the Nagur Times, and that led him to come home and seek out Dr. King, and he ends up leading civil disobedience in Nashville and Memphis, and is one of the mentors of what became the SNCC. So there was this amazing learning happening, and this set of ideas, this approach going from one land to another. And of course Gandhi himself was inspired by Thoreau for example…so ideas were crisscrossing the oceans

And on violence in particular— the belief they shared is radical. That it is worth it on its own merit to commit to nonviolence and love. That this can be a very powerful lesson for an individual journey, a community journey and ultimately a means to shifting the course of history, Malcom X had disagreements with them about that, but on the role of cultural liberation and the importance of that on the journey to freedom I saw more similarity between him and Gandhi. I saw them both as really emphasizing that step of reclaiming a certain pride and heritage that they both shared.

On Being a Near Drop-Out
I had almost dropped out of law school but some friends convinced me to hang in there. I was very close to walking away.  There I was putzing around- I clerked for a judge on the 9th circuit, and worked with Humans Right Watch but hadn’t yet quite found a home.

I ended up moving to Sierra Leone right after the end of the 11 year, brutal civil war that had torn the country apart. It was a senior civil rights lawyer who convinced me to come. He won an award that Human Rights Watch gave. There was interest from a few domestic fledgling organizations to do something like legal aid. They agreed that the reason for the war in the first place, was a breakdown in basic governance. It was unfairness and arbitrariness that led young people to go to the bush and come back with guns and do unspeakable things to their own people. So it was like a Never Again campaign. We need to find a way to deal with injustice in daily life so we don’t go back to where we came from. And this guy [who invited me there] who later became the Anticorruption Commissioner for the whole country, he had done some courageous work getting news out about abuses during the war— and he just had this hunch there was a moment now when things had fallen apart, a chance to build something better, that was different from what had come before.

Looking back it was sort of ridiculous. I didn’t know the language, I wasn’t from there — what was I thinking to show up with a mission like that? And basically the mission was to help these organizations figure out what legal aid could look like in that context. What saved me from total failure and embarrassment was meeting some really amazing Sierra Leonians. And listening - and learning, I did learn the language.

I had this  fourth hand little red Nissan Sunny - by structure the same kind of car that people there use as taxis. So I would just pull over an pick people up and they would so appreciate the free ride and they would teach me Krio (the lingua franca there) So I learned while running sort of a free taxi cab. And I found this young lawyer there and the two of us worked on this from the very beginning.  When I moved there, there were a 100 lawyers total in the country. And out of that more than 90 of them lived in the capital Freetown. So in the countryside even a rich person couldn’t get counsel. A lawyer based model would have been untenable. So what we experimented with instead was this idea of a community of paralegals who can be a bridge, and who can demystify law and make it simple and accessible even in this post war setting

Thoughts On Law as a Weapon of the Colonizer.
I don’t think we should operate anywhere from an assumption that the laws we have on the books now are a recipe for justice. Law has often been designed to repress, and traditions of exclusion and unfairness have been written into our rules and often times they are imposed. The law is a legacy of colonialism. A very stark image of that, if you go to Freetown, these lawyers are wearing white wigs, and it’s 90 degrees out  - why? They’ve inherited this British tradition that in so many ways does not make sense to the place it was imposed on. All that being said, those are the rules we’ve got. And I’ve learned that starting with what you’ve got is important. And that even in places where the law is extremely adverse, we have always found that within the legal framework there are hooks and levers that people can invoke to advance justice.

It’s almost like climbing up a rock face, and scanning the rock face looking for a toehold. A place for two fingers, and then you pull yourself up, and reach and find another one. What are the tools we have that constrain power? For all of its flaws and all of the repression woven into it, law is one of the few things we have today that does have the ability to constrain power. So starting with what we’ve got is just a really important departure point.

Personal Source of Inner Strength
I have learned so much from community paralegals all my life. They are organizers who are deeply rooted in their places who have trained and learned some basics of law and they are problem solvers they find practical solutions to real problems. For example, there was a lease agreement in Sierra Leone that was negotiated for 75,000 acres of rainforest without the permission of the 20,000 people who live in that place. The chief, who was illiterate, put his thumbprint on this lease- effectively signing it away for 50 years at 2$ per acre per year., Basically it was robbery. When the people realized - there was this woman in the community, Mita Moinya Jalloh, she had been a refugee during the civil war. She had to flee with her family to Guinea and didn’t want to do it again. This is a grandmother in her 60s from a traditional Muslim family, who’d never been to school. Doesn’t know how to read or write, but she knows how to fight. She started a residents association, and they reached out to a couple of our paralegals and they helped the community to translate the lease agreement. They put it in simple terms and analyzed that against the land law, which at the time, in 2016 was totally imperfect, so many problems, but there were several footholds. And armed with that information about the violations they confronted the company, they demonstrated en masse, they invoked law with specificity, and the company realized they weren’t able to go forward — the company admitted the lease wasn’t valid,  and the community was able to preserve their land.

How Do You Train that Level of Consciousness in People?
We train each other and I’ve seen beautiful learning journeys between paralegals and lawyers - paralegals are organizers and bring that mentality of collective action that lawyers can learn from, and vice versa the paralegals can learn a lot about law. They teach each other. We believe the culture of how you are walking down the road is as important as any technical information that a community paralegal might know. And we are not here to solve on behalf of people which is how law traditionally works. The message is not, "Put some money on the table and I’ve got this for you.” The paralegal’s message is, “We are going to solve this together, and feel empowered so that we are stronger together for the next time.” And that ethos is something you don’t teach in a classroom. You learn by doing and walking together.

One of the most important things is bringing together paralegals and communities to reflect on the journey we’ve been on. Collective reflection process is built in everywhere, and I would emphasize that this is a pathway anyone can walk. You don’t have to be a paid community paralegal at an NGO, Anyone listening can take part in this process, it’s about learning the rules, making them simple and then invoking them to address problems near by.

Could this Work Be Brought to the US?
We work in the mid-Atlantic region with partners in Delaware, Virginia, Maryland and DC. We started Namati a little over ten years ago and from the beginning we were committed to grassroots justice everywhere, rich countries and poor countries. Injustice plays out in our society in ways that echo across the development spectrum. US has perhaps too many lawyers, but yet we have an acute access to justice crisis. Less than 10% of the people who need legal help in the face of grave problems are able to access it. But our model has been lawyer dominated. There are “Unauthorized Practice of Law” restrictions that make it illegal to do what the community paralegals do. We need to decriminalize legal empowerment  There is actually some movement underway on that front, and there are footholds, there is room for change.

Dr. King certainly felt like it shouldn’t be America exporting learning exclusively instead he took something that he found of value from the Global South. The spirit of mutuality, learning across borders and recognizing the injustice that abides in all of our societies is so crucial for us to tackle this into the future. I live in the US and am conscious of this tradition of exceptionalism, of trying to export US ideas as if they are the best ones. And at Namati we have tried instead to build a reciprocal globalism -building a global movement based on solidarity not hierarchy. We are not missionaries bringing the Word. We are all on a learning journey and there is so much work to do in richer places. These days it’s not hard to convince anyone of that because we have such dangerous forces in powerful positions pushing for so many things that Gandhi, MLK and Malcolm X fought against.

The Origins of Namati
I spent four years running Timap for Justice alongside an amazing team, and then I worked at the World Bank for a few years. To my surprise the World Bank had given us a grant for the for Timap for Justice [an effort to provide basic justice services in the region]. I didn't see that coming whatsoever. I  had gotten tear-gassed protesting the World Bank when I was in law school as part of the the debt  relief movement! There was this young person at the World Bank who really inspired me, she was the one who got us that money. She was sort of a doer and an entrepreneur within that big system, and I was just  impressed by what she was able to get done. So she and others convinced me to work  there for a while.

There's something called The Justice Reform Group where we were supporting  governance reforms in different countries. I did some work in India at the time, and everywhere I went, I encountered people grappling with a similar question to the one that my friends in Sierra Leone were grappling with, which is, how do we make access to justice  meaningful in the context of systems that are often broken and adverse? How do we democratize law? How do we combine the power of law with the power of community organizing? I was struck  by how disconnected a lot of these efforts were.

There's a long history here. I didn't by any means invent Community paralegals. They go back to the 1950s in South Africa where paralegals were a big part of the freedom struggle and would help black South Africans to navigate  that very codified system of Apartheid. There's long traditions in the Philippines, in Indonesia and around the world of this kind of work. And yet I would meet people  who'd almost be trying to invent the wheel.

Meanwhile the World Bank did not  feel like a long-term hme for me. One of the things that happened when I was there is that they approved a 200 million dollar loan for a 4500 megawatt coal plant in Kutch ,in the district that my own family comes from, and this was 2011— long after the science  on climate change was clear. There was opposition from local community members and yet they still went forward, which made me wonder what I was doing there. So I started Namati alongside several dynamic justice leaders from around the world, including people like Marlon Manuel, Maja Daruwala from India and many others.

The Relevance of Namati's Work & Mission
We are trying to build a global movement for justice, which we desperately need right now. There are deep commonalities in the challenges that we face. Things we can only solve together and there is also an unintended consequence of the rise of authoritarian movements. They say, "Forget the rest of the world." And they offer a pretty dark narrative of what the nation is. I wonder sometimes if the people on the other side, the people trying to resist and insist on democracy, we get pulled into a domestic outlook because there's so much going wrong at home, and also authoritarians weaponize any kind of international solidarity. They accuse you of leaning on foreign support, or not truly being a patriot. We cannot let that happen. In light of the common challenges we need to build a connected movement for justice across our borders, one that recognizes our common humanity.

The Offerings of the Legal Empowerment Network
The three things we offer each other are solidarity and community — that sense wherever you are you are not alone, people are standing with you even if you’ve never met them. Secondly, concrete learning from one another. There is so much possibility when we compare notes and adapt strategies in other places. I taught a Legal Empowerment Leadership course and each year we would have around 50 people from all over come together for one week at a university in Budapest. An electric atmosphere-- people from the South Bronx, Brazil, Pakistan, such different contexts and yet people found so much in common and went home and did big things based on what we learned together.

On Capoeira & Other Rooting Practices
Legend has it that the enslaved people brought from Africa to Brazil were forbidden to practice their traditional martial art. But they didn’t give it up- they disguised it to look like a dance, they added music and continued to train without the knowledge of oppressors. And eventually used these techniques to break free. So Capoeira was a tradition of resistance in the midst of Atlantic slavery— one of the most brutal institutions in all of human history. And these people were able to respond with joy and grace and perseverance. And every time we play we invoke the spirit of those ancestors. When I go into that studio we put the music on and we play music as well do the movement and everything falls away,. There is a kind of meditative quality it’s a huge source of sustenance to me. And I have tried to stay rooted in my Jain traditions as well. We get on Zoom on Sunday evenings with a wonderful vol in MP and I have enjoyed going back over the basics with them and a few other kids in this patshala, Jain Sunday school. Those Jain values of nonviolence, compassion and nonattachment and interdependence - those just continue to be a source of inspiration. Something to circle back to, and try to stay rooted in. And my mom- she worked for the labor department in CT and helped enforce conditions for safe work places. Now that she has retired she’s dedicated herself to Jain pursuits, and one of the ways I stay connected to Jainism is by listening to my mom and asking her questions.

Reflections After a Decade of Work
On the positive side the bread and butter of our work is solving problems at a local level. And what we have seen is -- building from for instance, that rain forest case - building from those individual struggles towards fundamental shifts in laws and systems. Changing the nature of the law. The ultimate goal is to fundamentally transform systems. We had a watershed moment last year where Sierra Leone passed two groundbreaking bills that transform communities’ ability to protect their land rights and the environment. It's some of the most progressive legislation on climate and the environment in the world. It includes the Customary Land Rights Act. That land grab would not be possible under a law like this. The new law empowers land use committees requires they be one-third woman (addressing the patriarchal imbalances). It bans industrial development in ecologically sensitive areas. This was the culmination of a decade of struggles across the country of people fighting land grabs and pollution. When you put those struggles together it becomes a portrait that can help advocate for a fundamentally different system. These laws were envisioned by communities facing the gaps in the system and they then led a movement across the country to fight for, and win against private sector and other interests. From grassroots efforts to systemic change - that's been a real learning journey for us.

On the other hand the rise of authoritarianism, nativism and democracy under threat underscores the importance of what we’re doing. We have to not give up and respond like the capoeiristas-- with joy, perseverance and grace in the face of grave danger.

On Courage, Anger and Grief
We are in a dangerous world and moment. Mentioned Myanmar have been working there for over a decade, I can’t go there because my presence could bring attention to people who are at risk. People in Myanmar including this network - we have 40 paralegals across five states and hundreds of paralegals that we have helped bring into being they have showed so much of courage — so much of what they have been fighting for has been at stake. The coup in Myanmar reversed so much of what they worked for. The danger of that work has increased and I take massive inspiration from people in that situation who are persevering. You have to be open to heartbreak if you want to pursue justice in the time we are living in. But what’s the alternative? The alternative is to not see what’s happening around us and I’d rather open up my heart and risk the breaking than close it off. We work in another country I won’t name — places like those — if they are continuing its a call on the rest of us to do everything we can to be part of a movement of solidarity across borders.

I get so angry. [laughs] It’s so infuriating. The only way you sign a lease agreement for 75,000 acres for 50 years at $2/acre without even asking the people who live there is that you’ve concluded those people are useless. And that idea that some people are worthless is infuriating, it’s wrong. And there are so many powerful forces in charge in many countries that are running on a narrative that is hateful exclusionary and counterproductive. Meanwhile we have so much to do together so it is angering. We’ve been talking about King and Gandhi and Malcolm X. Dr King had some very powerful reflections on righteous anger and how you must be able to feel that but at the same time continue to re-anchor yourself so that you're ultimately channeling that anger and coming from place of love.

On How to Drop Preconceived Notions and Get On With Grassroots Service

Trying to solve concrete problems in your neighborhood in your community with neighbors is just a real great way for preconceived notions to fall away. The stuff you’re reading on Facebook starts to feel less relevant if you go outside and join hands. Injustices are not hard to find. Is the river being poisoned where you live? Are people working without basic medical protection are there forests being threatened? Team up with the people who are most effective and who are trying to solve that problem. 

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As Vivek shared, the word Namati is Sanskrit for bending something into a curve. "We had in mind that phrase from Martin Luther King, The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. We wanted to be part of bending that curve."
Listening to him, one can't help but want to join the effort too.

With gratitude to Vivek and his team for their phenomenal efforts, for the profound implications of their work and their stirring invitation to concerned citizens anywhere and everywhere. And thank you as well to all our listeners, and the volunteers who made this call possible.