A Compromise with Hope
Plato, despair!
We prove by norms
How numbers bear
Empiric forms,
As Navayana turns 21, we look back and ahead. The spectre of atrocities and crimes against Dalits and Adivasis are so benumbing that society is dulled into a state of denial. As per official reports, one crime is committed against a Dalit every eighteen minutes. Thirteen Dalits are murdered every week. Twenty-seven atrocities are committed against Dalits every day. The statistics move no one. In 2008, we published Anand Teltumbde’s book on the Khairlanji massacre of 29 September 2006: Khairlanji. A Strange and Bitter Crop. In 2010, this was reissued as The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders & India’s Hidden Apartheid.
Today, as we publish Sandhya Fuchs’s The Fragile Life of the Atrocities Act: Seeking Justice against Caste Crimes, we reflect on what it means to have this Act even if it is rarely implemented in either letter or spirit.
How random wrong
Will average right
If time be long
And error slight,
The tradition of caste occupies a long-standing and respectable place among the pillars of Indian social life. Against the template of active hate sanctioned by the Hindu religion that sanctifies caste, the 1989 Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act remains the only determined effort to systematically punish bias crimes in India. The Act itself was a result of decades of struggles by the Dalit movement to demand such a law. So lethargic was the state to act on its promise, that the Rules for the Act were framed only in 2005.
In 2018, the Supreme Court passed a controversial judgement which declared the act a vehicle for fraud and a ‘pawn’ in the hands of Dalits and Adivasis (a judgement it later reviewed). This shouldn’t be surprising: such anxieties resonate with critiques in upper-caste dominated legal scholarship. In doing so, they neglect many crucial questions: What constitutes a ‘false’ complaint, and who decides if an atrocity charge is true or false? What would it really mean for the Atrocities Act to be successful?
But in our hearts
Hyperbole
Curves and departs
To infinity.
Sandhya Fuchs spends time with Dalit families, activists, and lawyers to document the struggles and hopes of the Atrocities Act. A European raised in India and adopted by the families she works with, Fuchs attempts to step into the gap between the vision and execution of the Act in rural Rajasthan. In The Fragile Life of the Atrocities Act: Seeking Justice against Caste Crimes, she looks beyond official statistics and conviction rates, and lays bare the social life of India’s Prevention of Atrocities Act. Amidst the parlance of legal aid NGOs and the masculine quest for ‘justice’, Fuchs lends her ear and pen to the whispers of female agency. She shows how survivors of caste atrocities, their families, and their communities try to find justice within a legal landscape stacked against them.
Public discourse often points out the conceived ‘failure’ and disappointments of the Act to achieve its desired output. This is especially visible in ‘cases’ where victims strike a compromise with the perpetrators or authorities and drop the charges. However, such analyses don’t tell the whole story. What is underemphasized is how survivors actively and tactically resist the usurpation of ‘their law’ by upper-castes. Carefully and gradually, victims and their families rewrite the allegiances of legal institutions in line with unique subaltern truths of historical oppression. But the Atrocities Act has its limits. In some cases, the question of a compromise is unthinkable.
After Pinky is gang-raped by four upper-caste men, her father decides to use the act to fight for his honor. Her mother’s notion of honor is in stark contrast, but her voice, like Pinky’s, goes unheard in the paternalistic series of events that follow before she retracts her testimony. The violence in Pinky’s past becomes a cultural and political project for different stakeholders with no investment in her present or future.
India was not destined to be a country that simply discouraged discrimination; the Constitution is proof of active encouraged resistance to the hegemony of caste. Despite its limitations to address the afterlife of violence, the Atrocities Act has provided hope for a semblance of stability to many fragile lives. Freeing it from the state of institutional paralysis, survivors and beleaguered families have used the Act in creative ways to make it deliver on its promise of equality. It has emerged as a site of legal meliorism: the gradual improvement of oppressive societal conditions. In Fragile Life, Sandhya Fuchs shows that the transformative potential of the Atrocities Act in Rajasthan, and in India, do not end at compromises. Instead, they begin there.
Babasaheb Ambedkar in several of his works (such Untouchables or The Children of India’s Ghettoes, BAWS 5) documents the incidence of everyday hate crimes against Dalits. He dreamt of and fought for the annihilation of caste. We can at least hope for the annihilation of caste atrocities. Fragile Life is available for pre-order at Rs 499 exclusively on our website—and orders will ship around 1 December. It will reach bookstores across India by 6 December, Babasaheb’s death anniversary.
Error is boundless.
Nor hope nor doubt,
Though both be groundless,
Will average out.(“Meditation on Statistical Method”, J. V. Cunningham)