Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India

Sandhya Fuchs examines how Dalit communities in Rajasthan interpret and mobilize the Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA) as a project of legal meliorism, highlighting how legal processes intersect with political and gendered concerns about justice for caste atrocities.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 358 pages
Publication date: 15 May 2024
Publisher: Stanford University Press

The global Black Lives Matter movement has brought attention to the social impact of hate crime legislation, particularly in India, a nation with vast socio-cultural diversity and a complex colonial past. In 2019, the UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice asked how legal systems can counter bias and discrimination, and in India, questions about the relationship between law and histories of oppression have become particularly pressing. Recently, India has seen a rise in violence against Dalits (ex-untouchables) and other minorities, leading to an emerging Dalit Lives Matter movement that has campaigned for the effective implementation of India's only hate crime law, the 1989 Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA). Drawing on long-term fieldwork with Dalit survivors of caste atrocities, human rights NGOs, police, and judiciary, Sandhya Fuchs unveils how Dalit communities in the state of Rajasthan interpret and mobilize the PoA. Fuchs shows that the PoA has emerged as a project of legal meliorism, the idea that persistent and creative legal labor can gradually improve the oppressive conditions that characterize Dalit lives. Moving beyond statistics and judicial arguments, Fuchs uses the intimate lens of personal narratives to lay bare how legal processes converge and conflict with political and gendered concerns about justice for caste atrocities, creating new controversies, inequalities, and hopes.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781503639362