NLSIR On Line #4: A Conversation with Sandhya Fuchs

NLSIR's Prabhat Rajagopalan in conversation with Dr. Sandhya Fuchs* on her book, "Fragile Hope – Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India," which examines the social impact of the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act and how Dalit communities in Rajasthan navigate legal systems to seek justice for caste-based violence.

Q. Could you briefly describe the central ideas of your book? What are the primary arguments that you explore?

Fragile Hope as a project was born from the realisation that global debates about the efficacy of hate crime legislation often present socially detached analyses of legal success and failure. Hate crime literature typically equates the success of these laws with high conviction rates in court, while interpreting low conviction rates as the central indicator that this type of legislation is failing protected communities. This discourse has also been a prominent feature of academic and civil society debates about the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act in India (PoA). When I began working for the Indian Institute of Dalits Studies (IIDS) in Delhi in 2012, I noticed that lots of studies highlighted how rarely perpetrators of caste atrocities are convicted in court. However, this work didn’t reflect on legal success or failure as lived realities or as socially contested concepts. Who, I started asking myself, gets to decide what success or justice mean when caste atrocities become subject to legal processes and investigations? I began to wonder: if we look beyond the courts and police stations, how are Dalit survivors of caste atrocities, their families, and their communities trying to find success within a legal landscape that is fundamentally stacked against them?

Fragile Hope is an attempt to answer these questions. Peeking behind the curtain of official crime statistics and conviction rates, it lays bare the social life of the PoA. Drawing on almost two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Rajasthan, during which I traced the legal fate of over forty caste atrocities, the book analyses how the aims, substantive rules, and evidentiary procedures of the PoA are (re-)interpreted, gendered, and contested by Dalit communities in Rajasthan—a North Indian state which has consistently seen one of the highest rates of caste atrocities in India in the past decade. Based on this research, Fragile Hope complicates the story that the PoA has failed outright. It argues instead that the act is gradually and invisibly rewriting systems of caste hierarchy and sociopolitical power in Rajasthan, even as the explicit and implicit caste biases of legal actors often undermine individual atrocity complaints. Therefore, the book proposes that previous analyses, which have highlighted the toothless nature or failure of the act, paint an incomplete picture. The book shows that in Rajasthan, which has never witnessed the large-scale mobilizations that have marked Dalit resistance in other parts of India, the Atrocities Act has emerged as a site for a project of legal meliorism: the gradual improvement of oppressive societal conditions (Dewey 1958), which relies on the construction of new strategic legal communities as well as new epistemologies of justice and habits of hope (umid ki aadatein). As these new practices and modes of sociality have symbiotically grown around the bureaucratic trunk of the PoA, the law has inspired different stakeholders to question the fundamental assumptions and temporal frameworks underlying broader criminal truth regimes in India. In microscopic and sometimes controversial ways, survivors, activists, and legal aid NGOs have begun to unlace and rearrange what they consider the structural allegiance of India’s criminal legal system to upper-caste worldviews: a system that holds the potential of the PoA captive.

However, the book also shows that this agenda of institutional transformation is not uniformly conceptualized, experienced, or enacted. When the Atrocities Act is pulled into the everyday life of families, politics, and activism, it can generate new forms of intra-community hierarchy, as well as gender-and class-based violence. As individuals, and sometimes entire neighbourhoods, file complaints, the PoA gives rise to competing socio-legal imaginaries of justice. These visions can be deeply at odds with one another, even within the boundaries of individual family homes. Therefore, Fragile Hope ultimately argues that the social life of the PoA reveals that crime laws are not the sum of their conviction rates. Instead, they become open battlefields, on which different stakeholders fight for the right to imprint their vision of equality, justice, and truth onto the epistemologies of official law.

Q. What is the ideal demographic of readers that you had in mind when writing the book? What impact or takeaway do you hope for the book to have in respect of these readers?

When writing this book, I had two main, interconnected audiences in mind. One was a specifically Indian audience in the social sciences and legal studies interested in issues of caste and inequality. The other was a global socio-legal audience of scholars and practitioners interested in hate crime law and human rights. In the Indian context I wanted to encourage scholars to look beyond binary understandings of legal failure in PoA cases and move beyond black-and-white interpretations of oppression. When I started my research in 2015 there were two dominant perspectives on caste atrocities in India. One emphasized the absolute structural oppression of Dalit atrocity survivors, which is usually perpetuated by the legal system. Another focused on radical resistance, political organising and legal activism among Dalit communities. But there was little work that excavated how everyday engagements with law – especially among survivors of intersectional caste and patriarchal violence - can produce tactical and microscopic forms of agency and hope even in the face of systemic oppression, which blur the boundary between victimhood and resistance.

By providing this kind of analysis I also wanted to encourage hate crime scholars in other parts of the world to pay more attention to the social dynamics around hate crime law beyond the global North. Hate crime literature, whether it originates in the field of policy studies, law or sociology, is still disproportionately focused on Western contexts (with obvious exceptions like Dr. Mohsin Bhat’s work). Much of this scholarship has also largely ignored caste as a category of bias-motivated crime. Hence, many existing studies of the efficacy of hate crime legislation are quite formulaic, highlighting the same issues around motive, police reliance, and attrition rates in European and North American legal contexts. I felt that ethnographic and legal work from the global South, and especially from India, which has such an active legal culture, could add so much to these debates.

In a lot of research on inequality, oppression and law, we still posit Western experiences of the legal system as the norm, but they denote just one single perspective on the social life of law. During my PhD I was based partially at the LSE Inequalities Institute and apart from the few anthropologists at the centre, all other scholars working on discrimination, oppression and law focused on Europe and the US. There was an expectation among colleagues that the type of work I was doing on the PoA in India would bring a culturally diverse counterpoint to established debates on hate crime. But why, I wondered, are explorations of hate crime laws in the global South always designated an ‘alternative’ perspective to the analyses of Northern hate crime systems that scholarship positions as the norm? Instead, the social life of hate crime laws in countries like India should be seen to represent one of many possible and representative pathways, which this type of legislation can pave. So Fragile Hope was my attempt to get hate crime scholars to realise that what they take for granted in terms of the limits, possibilities and creative spaces hate crime law offers, may not be the story. It is simply one story and in places like India the landscape around hate crime legislation is very different.

Q. Could you take us through your research process and methodology? Were there any challenges or particular obstacles you encountered in your ethnography-heavy research? Were there any disadvantages to an ‘outsider’ or etic perspective within these communities?

To understand what a successful legal journey and outcome looked like in the eyes of the different experiential and legal stakeholders involved in PoA cases, I adopted an ethnographic methodology that I refer to as atrocity tracking. By following incidents of upper caste violence against Dalits on their social and institutional journeys through the legal system over the course of 18 months (most of these involved attacks against the Meghwal community), I was able to trace how moments of targeted aggression and violence, become local narratives of discrimination, which are then translated into legal cases under the PoA. 

To be able to do this in an ethical and careful fashion, which respected the needs and boundaries of atrocity survivors, I had to conduct multi-sited ethnography and work with a variety of community, political and legal actors. I set up three fieldwork bases. I alternately lived with two Meghwal families (one urban, and one village-based) in Rajasthan's North-eastern sub district of Jhunjhunu in the Shekhawati region. I also rented a room in Jaipur to be able to accompany lawyers to the special SC/ST courts and the Rajasthan High Court. (Note: I did not trace atrocity complaints filed by Adivasis as the politics around indigenous rights deserve to be explored on their own terms).

These three bases allowed me to track cases both backwards and forwards in time. On the one hand, I worked with independent anti-caste activists, lawyers and legal aid NGOs to identify forty incidents of caste violence within the wider Shekhawati region, as well as in Jaipur and Udaipur in the South. I watched as these incidents became matters of family concern, were transformed into political issues at village council meetings (panchayats) and became the subject of fact-finding missions by local legal aid NGOs. Working closely with a group of Dalit women’s activists, I then followed survivors and local politicians when they decided to file complaints under the PoA and tracked the progress of these cases until they were either closed by the police, settled out of court in the form of so-called ‘compromises’, or forwarded to special SC/ST courts. Living with two different Meghwal families also meant that I was able to approach PoA complainants through trusted family networks. Together with family members, I identified relatives who had filed PoA complaints, or who knew people who had. I then used these contacts to conduct interviews with complainants accompanied by members of my host families. This allowed survivors to recount their experiences in the presence of trusted people. On the other hand, I worked with lawyers and legal aid NGOs in Jaipur (e.g. the Centre for Dalit Rights). By joining NGOs on fact-finding missions, following lawyers who were working on atrocity cases to the special SC/ST court and the High Court, and interviewing police administrators and judges,  I saw how hearings in these cases went, and what social or legal support was needed to make narratives of casteism credible in the eyes of the court and police.

During this process my positionality as a German woman who partly had grown up in India was often advantageous. This outsider-insider perspective allowed me to explore how caste inequality and discrimination are reproduced at different institutional and social levels. I registered as an outsider to institutional actors who were often very open with me about their own biases. But the fact that I spent my childhood in rural Uttarakhand and spoke Hindi fluently made it possible for me to fit into village and family life in a way that made survivors and their communities comfortable.

Of course, as you rightly assume, there were also some real challenges that my positionality posed. First, I had to be very careful about the ways I made myself visible in community contexts where caste atrocities had taken place. When I started the research, I had hoped to also conduct some interviews with perpetrators. However, I dropped this plan almost immediately when I realised that interviewing atrocity complainants and accused within the same village context could be dangerous for survivors. If upper caste communities got to know that atrocity complainants had spoken to me - a white woman with foreign connections - they might retaliate with more aggression. So, I made sure that only survivors knew that I was researching the PoA. The other challenge was managing the expectations of complainants. Some families thought that I could help resolve their cases by going to Delhi and talking to important persons in the government, the police or the judiciary. I was always very honest that I didn’t have any influence over court or police decisions, but many survivors held deep-seated assumptions about the power of white Westerners. To feel that I was disappointing them was difficult, and sometimes made me question the value of my research.

Q. The book relies heavily on a close connection to the individual stories of each person. What was your purpose behind this magnified view into the lives of Aunty-ji and Pinky?[1]

There are three main reasons the book focuses heavily on Pinky’s and Aunty-ji’s stories. One is theoretical, one ethical, and one ethnographic. On a conceptual level Pinky’s and Aunty-ji’s cases show extreme opposites in the search for legal success and hope through law in the everyday. While Pinky’s case shows how hate crime law can fracture social relations, silence survivors and produce new forms of intra-community violence, Aunty-ji’s shows its potential as a site for hopeful and defiant labour and the construction of legal socialities. For Aunty-ji, the PoA becomes a mode through which she can imagine and enact new modes of resistance and legal community, while for Pinky it comes to represent something that further takes away her agency and rips apart her social networks. By positioning these stories at the start and end of the book, I wanted to show the range of disappointments, hopes and visions of justice hate crime laws like the PoA can engender.

But there are also ethical reasons that I explore these stories in so much detail. There is wonderful scholarly literature on gender and caste, as well as gender and law. But I think there are relatively few accounts that show women ̶  especially Dalit women who have been victimized  ̶  actively navigate the legal system and take interpretive and practical ownership over their legal journeys. Pinky and Aunty-ji are not women whom law happens to. They are women who actively reflect on law, victimhood, justice, and agency, and interrogate the links between caste and patriarchal violence. Their experiences made them both experiential owners and critical analysts of hate crime law who actively construct their relationship to hate crime law.

On an ethnographic level, these two stories were also the ones that I came to know most intimately. Based on my own positionality as a young woman, who worked closely with a Dalit women’s activist, I got to know Aunty-ji and Pinky better than most others. Pinky came and stayed with one of my fieldwork families, and Aunty-ji was the landlady of an activist friend. Their stories are positioned so centrally because I was able to intimately trace the complex emotions these women developed vis à vis the PoA.

Q. How have your own experiences from your childhood, as you have discussed, formed your opinions and perspectives on hate crimes? How (if at all) did this perspective change through the process of your writing the book, and through your various interactions?

I think my childhood experiences allowed me to understand intuitively what perhaps many people struggle to grasp in the context of hate and discrimination-led offences: that most of the time they are not exceptional, out-of-the ordinary, extreme acts carried out by radicalised individuals. Instead, they are deeply rooted in the taken-for-granted structures of inequality that dominate our day to day lives and are often committed by people who have been systematically socialised to view their own identity markers as superior in a given social and political context. I learned early that people can show up as incredibly kind individuals to some people – the ones they have been socially trained to consider equals – while being outright cruel to those they have learned to view as different or less than themselves. This is a really uncomfortable insight, not the least because it also forces us to be mindful of any possible prejudices we ourselves carry and may enact blindly. We all have unconscious biases, and we need to do the hard work of identifying and combating them. But legally speaking, the ordinariness of hate also really complicates the issue of identifying and punishing hate crimes because often perpetrators don’t see the violence they commit as violence at all. They see it as protecting their ‘rights’ or the ‘social order’. There is amazing empirical work by Dr. L. David Lal, which shows this in detail.

However, I think what changed me throughout this fieldwork was seeing first-hand that many perpetrators of hate crimes really take pleasure in hurting people. The stories that victims of atrocities tell, unravel how structural inequalities and caste as a system, allow people to enact and justify deeply sadistic urges. That is a profoundly painful thing to witness even as a researcher. So, living as someone who has experienced the appetite for cruelty that certain hate crime perpetrators have on their own bodies must be crushing.      

Overall, this work has left me wondering about violence as a category of understanding and experience. What assumptions must be given for someone to view something as violent rather than as self-defence or protection? What understandings of humanity must be present for something to be categorized as violence? How do structurally unequal systems like caste or patriarchy perhaps systematically socialize upper castes into a worldview where violence doesn’t even exist as a category of analysis?

Q. What role do you think should be played by the Courts, particularly in terms of public interest litigation and suo motu action to respond to hate-crimes? What role does legal meliorism play to this end?

I must answer this question in two parts. In response to the first part of your question, I think Public Interest Litigation remains a crucial mechanism to help a law like the PoA achieve its goal of strengthening the voice of atrocity complainants and of ensuring a fair legal process for socially marginalised groups. Let me give you an example: One of the most discouraging issues around the PoA, as we all undoubtedly know, is that witnesses regularly turn hostile in court. The reasons for this (blackmail by the accused or police bribery) have been well established. However, when I was working with the Centre for Dalit Rights (CDR) in Jaipur in 2017, they were actively working on submitting a PIL to the Rajasthan High Court that focused on strengthening the protective mechanism, rights and compensation of victims and witnesses in PoA cases. One thing that they proposed was safe houses for witnesses and their families, another was protection for extended families of witnesses. Their recommendations grew directly out of the extensive experience lawyers at the CDR had working on atrocity cases. They knew that the easiest way to silence witnesses was not through threats to their own life but threats to their families, and they took that knowledge forward to the court in the form of a PIL. I think PIL is such a crucial tool because it empowers different experiential actors to mobilize their varied forms of legal knowledge to strengthen the conditions for the just enactment of laws. Now, would the changes that could be made to the PoA through PILs like this alone solve the issues around legal punishments for caste violence? Of course not! We all know that written law and the way law is enacted by officials are two different things. But is it an important step in not only highlighting exactly where the issues are, but also cutting off some of the processes that undermine PoA cases at their root? I think, absolutely! And this process is the very definition of legal meliorism: a small step to make the legal landscape comparatively fairer.

Your second question, around suo motu action, is a profoundly important one, but also one that highlights how judicial interpretations can become a double-edged sword. On the one hand, suo motu action is a powerful tool because it allows judicial actors to take cognizance of cases and direct the police to investigate complaints even, or especially, when local caste and political dynamics may create a situation where they are strategically or accidentally undermined. Especially with caste atrocities where data repeatedly shows how many obstacles Dalit survivors run into during the police investigation, this mechanism is crucial to allow courts to uphold fundamental rights and safeguard justice. On the other hand, we must also remember that when it comes to the implementation of the PoA, one of the main issues has been how discourses of credibility that portray Dalits as unreliable narrators can disrupt fair investigative and judicial practice. Judgements like Subhash Kashinath Mahajan v. The State of Maharashtra, 2018[2], highlight how even constitutional courts have been willing to uncritically accept the popular narrative that portrays Dalits as strategic misusers of legal protections. This story claims that Dalits just use the PoA to enact revenge under the cloak of antidiscrimination. The popularity of this narrative within courts shows that judicial actors are not immune to the casteist biases that undermine PoA cases. Many judges in Rajasthan have begun to see the PoA itself as a problematic and unreliable law. So suo motu action can only emerge as a powerful tool of justice for atrocity survivors if these wider discourses of scepticism around the PoA and around Dalit credibility and exceptionalism are systematically disrupted within the judiciary. There needs to be much more social education for judges, which systematically reveals how, for example, NCRB statistics that claim most Dalits file ‘false’ cases, are produced at the police level.

Judicial actors must be willing to engage with the social epistemology of crime data to comprehend fully how often the process of classifying atrocity cases as false and of closing them with final reports is the result of political strategies and caste loyalties, which police forces become embroiled in. Only then can we disrupt these rumours of the “scheming” Dalit atrocity complainant, as the Supreme Court put it in the Mahajan judgement, and create a fertile landscape for effective suo motu action around caste atrocities. In my opinion, systematically disrupting these narratives of “the false case” is also an act of legal meliorism that we can all partak

Q. What sort of response can we realistically hope for from the social dependencies you discuss in the last part of your book, the ‘umid ki aadatein’ (hope as a habit of resistance) cultivated among communities of victims and survivors? What can be done to bolster these efforts?

When I wrote this book, I was aware that the discussion of umid ki aadatein would potentially be one of the most controversial aspects of my analysis. And so far, the book talks I have given to audiences in Europe, the US, and India have proved me right. There tend to be two central approaches to resistance in the context of systemic oppression: one is the idea that the only real way to resist for marginalised communities is to tear systems and institutions of oppression down and build anew. The other is the idea that the most realistic and sustainable form of resistance is to reform institutions from within by pushing for diversity, sensitising actors and initiating policy change. Both approaches obviously have advantages and disadvantages. The former is more radical but radical movements can be hard to sustain. The latter is more incremental and sustainable but may not go far enough in subverting discriminatory structures.

The cultivation of umid ki aadatein that many of my interlocutors pursued in Rajasthan, which is based on the idea that you can use hate crime laws like the PoA to change discriminatory institutional habits from within, is obviously more aligned with the reformist approach. It has some real potential especially in the sense of cultivating broader legal networks and bolstering legal understanding and knowledge exchange with atrocity survivors and communities, who have historically avoided the legal system. However, there are also many legitimate critiques of this approach within Rajasthan. Some argue that the strategic focus on hate crime law to change conditions for legal justice for Dalits, might take away from more groundbreaking, movement-based resistance efforts. Bhanwar Meghwanshi who is a brilliant writer, thinker and activist from Rajasthan has warned of the fragmentation of the Dalit movement in Rajasthan through project-based activism. He cautions that focusing too much on NGO-led reforms of policies and laws introduces new hierarchies of expertise into efforts of anti-caste mobilisation and might stifle creative, collective defiance. This is a legitimate concern. Habits of hope focused on law can only be one part of the puzzle of resistance, which demands a multi-pronged collective approach that also challenges economic and social structures more radically.

However, I think we can all do much to bolster these hopeful habits. First, we really must introduce more social education into police and legal training. My research showed that high-ranking police officials in Rajasthan - even when they potentially meant well - really had no idea how thanas operate day to day, how constables and inspectors on the ground investigate and classify data. Now we can’t reform the whole police structure immediately but one way to bolster the efforts of the survivors in Fragile Hope would be to push for more career development workshops for police personnel at various levels. Workshops like this might familiarise police with the ways in which social, cultural, religious, legal and gender dynamics interact on the ground to shape investigations and the classification of complaints.

As researchers, we must also be much more willing to pay detailed attention to lived complexities and contradictions within the law, and to respect the difficulties and inconsistencies that marginalised communities encounter when they engage law in practice. Scholars - myself included - tend to write about the potential, the promise, and the beauty of legal texts like the PoA, or of the Constitution, and to theorise the visions that underpin them. We come up with certain ideas of what it means to respect these texts, and we are often sceptical of the makeshift ways that marginalised groups might use them. Many judges, lawyers and intellectuals I met in Rajasthan were very dismissive of the way atrocity survivors were choosing to engage with the PoA, for example by coming up with a compromise that works for them within their village context. There were comments about how Dalit complainants were not fighting “the right way” or “selling out the law”. But I think this is fundamentally out-of-touch, and frankly a rather arrogant way to judge people who are doing the best they can, considering the social and economic limitations they encounter. I think as scholars or legal practitioners who hope to improve the conditions for the possibility of formal justice for marginalised groups, we have to - at least initially - stop being judgemental due to our own normative ideas of how law should be mobilized “correctly”. We must stop condemning all compromises as cop-outs or as “weak” justice and respect that right now the system, in which laws like the PoA are embedded, means that atrocity survivors cannot engage with legislation in ideal ways. We must try and really understand why atrocity victims choose to navigate the legal system in a particular way and use these insights to work not just on improving laws and legal conditions, but also the economic and social dynamics that lead atrocity victims to engage with laws in unintended ways.

Q. It is of course a very hard battle to fight for victims, but giving regard to ‘Peedith Pinky’,[3] is it perhaps better, from an individual’s point of view, to not pursue these cases? Is it better to live with the effects of harrowing crimes, than to relive and suffer everyday in being bogged down by efforts to fight for reparations?

This important question cannot be answered at a general level. In some cases, the legal route can generate hope and in other instances it can create additional suffering. However, I think what Pinky’s story shows most importantly is that we must pay careful attention to the “who” in hate crime cases: who wants to pursue a legal case after a hate crime takes place? Is the victim or survivor being given an active voice and choice in the matter? What became a source of prolonged suffering for Pinky was that she never felt that she herself had consented to filing a complaint. She wasn’t categorically against the idea of fighting a PoA case but felt like no one had given her the agency to decide in the first place. Instead, her case became a site for everyone else’s political, legal or familial agendas.

Rather than saying it might be better to avoid the legal system writ large, I think her story teaches us that it is ethically problematic to make hate crime cases about the greater good of a community, while actively taking away agency from those who have been most affected by them. If Pinky had been asked if she wanted to pursue a case she might have said yes, or she might have said no. But either way, she would not have felt reduced to an agency-less “peedith” status.

Q. As you have mentioned in your previous work as well, the law’s reliance on rigid definitions and evidentiary thresholds make it difficult to justify a case, and to translate lived realities. This particularly comes across in cases like Shajan Skaria v. State of Kerala,[4] that place a higher expectation of evidence. How then should this disconnect between the law and lived realities be joined?

This is perhaps the most difficult question we face, and I am afraid I don’t have all the answers here. But let me try to reflect on a few points. There are a few problematic aspects about the Supreme Court judgement in Shajan Skaria v. State of Kerala. The one that is most often discussed is the claim that anticipatory bail can be granted to the accused if no prima facie case is made out. In a way, I understand where this approach comes from because we have to balance the rights of complainants with the rights of the accused. However, my fieldwork and other research indicates that in practice this approach really ignores the particular legal situatedness of atrocity complainants. They often lack the social, economic and legal influence to communicate their claims and interpretations in relation to an incident to the police in a convincing manner, especially because of the ever-present myth of the ‘false’ PoA case.  I also saw a lot of instances where complainants were illiterate and later found that the details that the police had noted down in the FIR didn’t truly reflect what they had reported. So, the structural disadvantage that Dalits have within the legal system ultimately makes a prima facie case incredibly difficult to establish.

However, for me one of the most problematic statements in Shajan Skaria v. State of Kerala, - which was also previously made in Dr. R. Radhakrishnan vs The Assistant Commissioner Of Police, 2022, - was the decision to grant anticipatory bail because the YouTube video the appellant had posted could not be prosecuted under section 3(a) (u) of the PoA. The court argued that the video “did not promote feelings of enmity, hatred, or ill-will against SC/ST members as his target was just the complainant alone”. Here the implication is that the insults explicitly target Dalits as a group rather than as individuals to meet the requirement for section 3(a)(U). This is deeply concerning at multiple levels.

First, when you look at different national and international definitions of hate crime they all agree that hate crimes are rooted in prejudice and aim to “send a message of rejection to whole communities” even when only individuals are targeted in a particular instance. In essence, attacking an individual belonging to a stigmatized group is enough to make other members of the victim’s community understand that they too are under threat and need to stay in their place. But in Shajan Skaria v. State of Kerala the court effectively ignores these social complexities and steps away from international conventions around the interpretation of hate crime by saying that the humiliation of the accused is to be separated from his caste status because the evidence targets him alone. Second, based on my interviews with administrators and activists who were involved in the formulation of the PoA, the intention of the act was to acknowledge that caste has historically been interwoven with other markers of marginality, such as economic status or a comparative lack of social capital. Therefore, as section 8(c) of the PoA outlines, attacks on a member of the Dalit community should always be at least partially seen as motivated by caste. By granting anticipatory bail and isolating the attack on the complainant from the social discourse around caste, the court goes against the spirit of the PoA.

So what can we do about these problematic interpretations of evidence? Here, I must reiterate my point about social sensitization work for police and judicial actors. If we are optimistic for a moment and assume that most judges and police want to do a fair job of classifying, investigating and categorizing PoA complaints, we still have to acknowledge that many of them might not be fully aware what everyday discrimination actually looks like, and what extent of historical and sociological evidence is required to prove it. The evolution from smaller micro-aggressions to full-blown hate crimes, the cumulative character of discrimination, and the impact of caste atrocities on social dynamics, might not be self-evident to institutional actors. So, we must provide more mandatory education around the particularity of discrimination-based evidence for various legal actors. I think within the framework of such educational initiatives, it would also be important to discuss the PoA in conversation with global attempts to regulate hate crimes. There tends to be a discourse in India around Dalits wanting exceptional legal treatment from the state. This reinforces scepticism towards their complaints, especially when the discrimination that is reported can only be recognised when extensive historical and sociological evidence is considered. By educating police and judiciary about the fact that hate crime complainants in other parts of the world encounter similar evidentiary challenges, they might become more receptive towards Dalit narratives.

Q. Given the establishment of special courts for speedy trials in such cases, or the existence of SC/ST protection cells, how impactful or useful would you say such steps have been towards ameliorating the issue?

This question cannot be answered at an all-India level. Research by the Department of Social Justice and Empowerment from 2018-2019 showed that SC/ST Protection Cells perform very differently in different Indian states. While in areas like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, these cells play a significant role in monitoring how Superintendents of Police conduct atrocity investigations, or in informing nodal officers and judicial magistrates about caste-related law and order issues, they have not been as successful in areas like Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh or Bihar. These findings align with my own fieldwork experience in Rajasthan. While legal aid NGOs working on caste atrocity cases were always keen to involve the Special Protection Cells in atrocity-prone areas, these were often not properly staffed. I can only recall one fact-finding mission when staff at a protection cell successfully managed to help the fact-finding team locate a nodal officer. It seemed like the people working in these cells were rarely ever reachable. So we have another instance of a great idea on paper, but one that was implemented half-heartedly.

As far as special courts are concerned, I am of two minds. On the one hand, I think special courts are one of the more efficient and strategically streamlined aspects of PoA implementation today, even if they are nowhere near as speedy as they are intended to be. The idea behind exclusive special courts was that cases would be disposed of within 6 months, but the average time, at least in Rajasthan, is about 10 to 12 years. However, my main scepticism towards the efficacy of special courts goes back to the issue of judicial attitudes. Judges are assigned to special courts, they don’t freely choose to dedicate themselves to PoA cases. Therefore, research has shown that most judges in these courts have no special sympathy with atrocity survivors and often have a very negative view of the PoA from the outset. So, what does it mean to task a person, who is inherently biased against a law, with exclusively implementing that law? What impact does that have on the way the stories of victims are heard? What impact does that have on how evidence is evaluated?

Let me illustrate this point. I remember one case at the Special Court in Jaipur where the judge turned away a Jatav complainant, who said that his land had been illegally occupied by a Gujar family, because he didn’t have a caste certificate proving he was SC. The complainant was an elderly mazdur who wasn’t educated, and it was hard for him to get his hands on this kind of paperwork. Nonetheless, he enlisted the help of the Centre for Dalit Rights and eventually obtained this certificate. It took him almost a year because there were several bureaucratic obstacles to overcome. However, when he finally got another hearing and returned to court with the certificate in hand, the same judge who had asked for it said that he found it suspicious that it had taken him so long to procure the caste certificate. He speculated that the certificate may be a fraud. So, he was suspicious when the Jatav man didn’t have the paperwork he wanted but also remained suspicious when he finally was able to present it. I realised that day that the judge was going to be sceptical of this Dalit man’s story no matter what evidence he was shown. Thus, I must wonder if the theoretical speed and focus for which special courts should allow, outweigh the potential damage they can do by putting reluctant, sceptical judges, exclusively in charge of PoA complaints.

Q. Within the larger framework of hate crimes and caste-based discrimination, what role does intersectionality play? For instance, what (if at all) makes it worse to look at this from a gendered perspective, over and above the pre-existing inequalities and atrocities?

Intersectionality is one of the key issues in Fragile Hope. I am not sure that I would classify atrocity cases that involve explicit intersectional concerns as better or worse than others. However, I would say that gender and class dynamics certainly add layers of complexity to PoA proceedings that we have not always sufficiently reflected. If we look at the intersection of gender and caste, the book really shows that Dalit women must fight so much harder – and often in vain – to even be given an opportunity to make up their own mind about a case or a legal process. When Meghwal women I met in Rajasthan became victims of caste violence they would immediately be turned into overdetermined spaces of legal interpretation for the men in their lives. Their bodies and experiences become the canvas, on which their husbands, fathers, or local community activists and Dalit politicians, painted their visions of resistance and legal success. The women became legal cases that men strategize about. So, female survivors didn’t just have to fight the perpetrator and come to terms with their experiences; they had to fight the men in their lives to be allowed to develop a legal voice in the first place. In that way, intersectionality is a crucial lens if we want to understand how differently hate crimes and hate crime laws are experienced by victims in different social situations.

Also, if we remind ourselves of Bhanwar Meghwanshi’s concern about the fragmentation of the Dalit movement based on NGO politics, as discussed above, many of the stories explored in Fragile Hope really highlight how intersectional dynamics around class and caste can intensify this issue. The book highlights a clear division of power and legal ownership between Dalit lawyers or experts, who were educated and often based in cities, and atrocity survivors, who were embedded in complex socio-economic, inter-caste dependencies in rural areas and had no formal schooling. Educated, urban, legal experts from Dalit backgrounds usually felt that economically and educationally “weaker (kamzoor)” atrocity victims needed to be told how to “do law”. And in the process, they were often quite dismissive of the difficulties survivors would face if they tried to pursue an atrocity case in court. Illiterate survivors were sometimes treated with a lot of paternalistic condescension when they were honest about their legal challenges. So again lower-class status not only makes you a more likely target of caste atrocities but can expose you to dismissive attitudes and microaggressions within your own community, when you turn to the law for help.

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*Sandhya Fuchs is an Assistant Professor of Criminology at the University of Bristol and a legal anthropologist of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Her work explores the relationship between legal institutions, experiences of violence, and social imaginaries of hope, justice and history in the context of polarized political landscapes. Her first book entitled "Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India" explores the social life of India's only hate crime law: the 1989 Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA). Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with survivors of caste atrocities, human rights NGOs, police, and judiciary, the book unveils how Dalit communities in the state of Rajasthan interpret and mobilize the PoA.

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[1] Characters from the book who are hate crime survivors. [2] In 2016 a Dalit employee for the Government of Maharashtra filed a PoA complaint against the Director of Technical Education, Dr S.K. Mahajan, accusing him of casteist bias. After being denied bail by the Maharashtra High Court, Mahajan appealed at the Supreme Court, which suspended proceedings against Mahajan and made amendments to the PoA warning that it had become a vehicle for fraud. [3] Reference to “Pinky” from the book, the young Meghwal girl who was sexually assaulted by upper caste men, which led her family to pursue her case, leaving her in a state of limbo. [4] The Supreme Court, in this case, granted anticipatory bail to journalist Shajan Skaria, accused under the SC/ST Act for allegedly making derogatory remarks against an MLA. The Court observed that not all insults to SC/ST members constitute an offence under the Act unless the insult is made specifically due to the individual's caste.