CJS Seminar: Sandhya Fuchs

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Edinburgh Law School, University of Edinburgh

Hate crime law as Meliorist Hope: Seeking justice for caste atrocities in Rajasthan

Edinburgh Law School

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.’ About the speakerSandhya Fuchs is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Bristol. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She is a legal anthropologist by training, and her work explores the relationship between legal institutions, histories of marginalization, and culturally embedded concepts of truth, violence and justice in India. Sandhya’s first book entitled “Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India,” which was published by Stanford University Press in 2024, analyses how low caste communities in India experience and creatively mobilise India’s only hate crime law: the 1989 Scheduled Castes /Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act. Meanwhile, Sandhya’s current research explores what historical narratives, and temporal models Indian Supreme Court Justices mobilise when evaluating hate speech accusations levelled against members of the country’s Muslim minority. Sandhya’s research has been published in various journals, such as the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Social and Legal Studies and Contemporary South Asia.

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