ARTICLES

1. The migration and integration of the hate crime approach in India
Joanna Perry
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International norms, standards and practices relating to understanding and addressing hate crime are increasingly comprehensive. Efforts by international organisations to build the capacity of national institutions and agencies with responsibilities to operationalise hate crime law, policies and practice by protecting communities and increasing access to justice and support have intensified in recent years, with some tangible improvements. However, available data shows that the hate crime approach has yet to ‘migrate’ and ‘integrate’ into policing and criminal justice practice. Recent legal developments and ground-breaking work to make the nature and prevalence of hate crime visible in India will be explored with a view to locating India’s place within this international ‘scene’ and to help point to possible ways forward suggested by the ‘hate crime approach’.
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2. The crime vanishes: Mob lynching, hate crime, and police discretion in India
M Mohsin Alam Bhat, Vidisha Bajaj & Sanjana Arvind Kumar
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Amidst high-profile incidents of hate violence against religious and caste minorities, the Indian Supreme Court laid down a series of guidelines to address mob violence and lynching in its July 2018 Tehseen Poonawalla order. The order mandated a police supervisory structure and stronger official accountability, more stringent penal provisions, victim and witness protection, and more expansive compensation and rehabilitation schemes. It also recommended the enactment of an anti-lynching legislation. This article contributes to the conversation about the order’s implementation by drawing from the empirical work conducted by Jindal Global Law School’s (JGLS) legal clinic on hate crimes. It focuses on how the police deploy their official discretion in investigating and prosecuting incidents of mob violence and lynching. First, based on detailed interviews of police officials, the article shows how the ambiguity of the category of lynching continues to plague the implementation of the order. Second, taking a case study of a potential hate crime investigation, it shows how the police structures investigations and charges to undermine the goals of criminal law. This article shows that police officials use their discretion to construct lynching — during various stages of investigation and charging — to obscure and invisibilise the crime. This quotidian exercise of discretion is shaped by broader systemic problems in India’s criminal justice system, especially its lack of independence, inadequate training, and institutional bias. The article advocates that these systemic concerns must be integrated in a meaningful response to mob lynching and hate crimes in India.
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3. A tale of targeted violence in Hashimpura: the Delhi High Court on recognition, relations and responses
Vandita Khanna
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On 31 October 2018, Justice Dr S Muralidhar (then) at the Delhi High Court convicted 16 members of the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) for, inter alia, the murder of 38 Muslim residents of Hashimpura, a neighbourhood in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh in the summer of 1987. In so doing, he described the events that unfolded in Hashimpura as the ‘targeted killing’ of ‘members of a particular minority community.’ The judicial recognition of targeted violence in contemporary Indian society forms the focus of the present article. The article contends that Muralidhar J’s reference to targeted violence paves way for the recognition of an important juridical concept that warrants further academic and legal engagement. By adopting a relational approach, I argue that the conceptual utility of the category of targeted violence lies in its ability to unmask the social relations that it implicates. Targeted violence is not aimed at individual actors, but social relations between perpetrators, individual victims and those who share the victims’ minority identity. Committed to the legal recognition of social experiences, I demonstrate how the category of targeted violence accurately reflects the experiences of and relations between different social actors. I further build a case for why and how legal and judicial responses to targeted violence ought to be informed and shaped by a recognition of its relational harms.
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4. Afrazul’s murder: Law and love jihad
Ajita Sharma
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In December 2017, Shambhu Lal Raigher (a Hindu), brutally killed a Muslim labourer named Afrazul Khan in Rajasthan, without any immediate or individualised cause. The reason for the killing is attributed to Raigher’s perception of Muslims as those who get romantically involved with Hindu women to lure them into Islam—what has been called the phenomenon of love jihad. In light of this case, this article discusses how the mythical campaign of love jihad—used as a justification for hatred and violence towards Muslim communities—motivates hate crimes. I also discuss how the current legal framework in India deals with hate crimes, as the existing law does not make a distinction between hate crimes and ordinary crimes. The article flags some of the complexities involved in incorporating a hate crimes legislation into the socio-political and legal context of contemporary India.
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PHOTO ESSAY

5. Patience
Nikhil Roshan
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Hate-fuelled violence reconfigures the social landscape in figurative and literal senses: both the emotive fabric of friendship, neighbourhood, love, and the material landscape of the city’s streets, alleys, shopfronts, cars, buses, burial grounds. Hate-violence thus reimagines and re-images the world; restructures it normatively and physically. This photo-essay presents the visual aftermath of the February 2020 communal violence in Delhi. The photographs are situated in a narrative of the author’s personal journey to the sites of violence, along with the history of communal tension in the city and its periodic eruption (usually with the sanction of the State) into large-scale pogroms. Word and image combine to give us a visceral sense of the destruction of a lifeworld and of the personal and political negotiations that follow, through which survivors must, somehow, attempt to channel their anger and grief.
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INTERVIEW

6. Proto-fascism and State impunity in Majoritarian India: An Interview with Teesta Setalvad
Oishik Sircar
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This interview with Teesta Setalvad was conducted in the wake of the February 2020 anti-Muslim violence in North East Delhi. Drawing on her vast experience as a human rights activist, journalist, and peace educator, Setalvad’s responses map the continuum — across years, anti-minority pogroms and ruling parties with divergent ideologies — of the cultures of hate, and the practices of state repression and impunity in a proto-fascist India. Setalvad offers an interrogation of the ideology of the Hindu right, delves into the historical trajectories of the rise of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). She also charts the repeating patterns of police and media complicity in fomenting anti-minority hate and critically analyses the contradictory role of the criminal law and the Constitution of India in both enabling and resisting communal violence. In conclusion, she offers hopeful strategies for keeping alive the promise of secularism.
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7. Fighting impunity in hate crime — history, ethics, and the law: An interview with Harsh Mander
M Mohsin Alam Bhat
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This interview with writer and activist Harsh Mander was conducted on 21 and 23 April 2020 while numerous instances of hate crime, during the severe COVID-19 lockdown, were coming to light. This came on the heels of the popular protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019, and the February 2020 violence in Delhi. The interview situates the present moment, tying together history, socio-legal assessments of sectarian violence, evaluation of legal reform, and the ethics of anti-hate activism. First, Mander draws from his extensive experience — as a former bureaucrat, anti-hate advocate, and legal activist — to offer the larger historical trajectory of sectarian violence in India. His account highlights the role of the rising majoritarian state ideology in facilitating and celebrating sectarian hostilities. He also develops an account of how we should understand the social and personal harms of mass violence and the phenomenon of lynching. Second, he discusses the contentious question of legal reform for ending impunity in hate crime cases. Specifically, he notes the problem of state complicity in violence and the failed attempts to legislate an anti-communal violence law. Third, he elaborates on the protracted challenges of building viable strategies of litigation in the aftermath of sectarian violence. He evaluates Nyayagraha (literally meaning struggle for justice), his unique experiment after the 2002 Gujarat pogrom based on an ethical practice for legal justice.

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BOOK REVIEW

8. Michael Salter and Kim McGuire: The Lived Experience of Hate Crime: Towards a Phenomenological Approach
R. Krishnaswamy
Article

9. Joanna Jamel: Transphobic Hate Crime
Ankita Gandhi
Article 

10. Revati Laul: The Anatomy of Hate

Bhavinee Singh & Konina Mandal

Article