Sandhya Fuchs (Bristol): Hate Crime Law as Meliorist Hope: Seeking justice for caste atrocities in Rajasthan
| Dates: | 7 October 2024 |
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| Times: | 15:00 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Sandhya Fuchs |
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Hate crime laws, which criminalise violent expressions of prejudice, have faced growing criticism. Scholars have argued that hate crime legislation relies on the collaboration of legal institutions that are themselves shaped by histories of prejudice and fail to bring justice to survivors of identity-based violence. But what does it mean for a hate crime law to be successful? And to whose vision of justice are hate crime laws accountable?
In India questions about the relationship between legal institutions and histories of oppression have become pressing as the country has seen a rise in violence against Dalit communities (diverse caste groups formerly labelled “untouchable”). Consequently, an emerging "Dalit Lives Matter" movement has campaigned for the successful implementation of the only law in India that currently bears the contours of hate crime legislation: the 1989 Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA). Drawing on extensive fieldwork with survivors of caste atrocities and legal actors in the Indian state of Rajasthan, this talk proposes that analyses, which have highlighted the systemic failure of hate crime legislation, only tell part of the story. The social life of the PoA unveils that hate crime law can (re-)produce and counter-act systems of prejudice and structural violence within the same socio-temporal terrain by producing formal legal failures, alongside new, stubborn modes of hopeful agency.
Through a project of legal meliorism – the idea that persistent and creative legal labour can gradually improve oppressive social conditions – a community of Dalit activists, politicians, and lawyers in Rajasthan has begun to battle for structural legal re-invention. Arguing that the PoA can only become a tool of resistance when legal truth regimes are rewritten to acknowledge the unique temporal and spatial framework of lived discrimination, this group of local leaders has persistently toiled to reimagine the evidence systems of Indian criminal law. However, while their meliorist project has generated surprising and hopeful legal transformations, it has also engendered new inequalities along gender and class lines. Hence the talk ultimately proposes that the unique justice hate crime legislation can provide, may also innovate unexpected modes of oppression, forcing us to ask whose voices are heard when hate crime laws are rendered ‘successful.’
Speaker
Sandhya Fuchs
Organisation: University of Bristol
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Hanson Room
Humanities Bridgeford Street
Manchester
