The Fragile Life of the Atrocities Act
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Seeking Justice against Caste Crimes
- ISBN: 9788194631385
- Size: 6 x 9"
- Binding: Paperback
- Number of Pages: 358
Ragu, a Dalit, meets Karishma, a Brahmin, in college in Jaipur. They fall in love and marry in secret. They have a child. The girl’s parents invite them home, beat Ragu up, and throw him in a sewage canal. He’s rescued and admitted to a hospital. He receives a text from Karishma that says she’s divorcing him. A broken Ragu kills himself, coming under a running train. For his parents, this is murder. They fight for justice using the Atrocities Act.
The Prevention of Atrocities Act of 1989 marks an important turn in tackling hate crimes in India. But availing this law entails fighting an entire legal and state apparatus that is bent on subverting justice. Sandhya Fuchs, a European raised in India, adopted by the Dalit families she works with, spends time with cases filed under the Act in Rajasthan. The term ‘case’ disguises personal stories of loss, trauma, determination, and hope for a future free from inequality, hate, and violence.
The Fragile Life of the Atrocities Act lays bare the minute ways in which survivors, activists, and legal aid NGOs unlace and rearrange the structural allegiance of India’s criminal legal system to Savarna worldviews: a system that holds the Atrocities Act, and thousands like Ragu–Karishma, captive.
Sandhya Fuchs is Assistant Professor of Criminology at the University of Bristol.
‘A deeply moving and nuanced account of the hope offered by one of the world’s most significant hate-crime laws for Dalits’—Alpa Shah, author of The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India
‘Savarnas who ply the narrative that the Prevention of Atrocities Act of 1989 is being abused and misused by Dalits must read this book’—Bhanwar Meghwanshi, rights activist, author, I Could Not Be Hindu
‘The book uncovers the insidious mutation of untouchability designed to let off the perpetrators of atrocities’—Manoj Mitta, author of Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India
‘An intense and empathetic investigation into the harrowing realities of caste-based hate crimes in India’—Harish Wankhede, social scientist, Jawaharlal Nehru University
‘An outstanding book … a thoughtful, imaginative, and occasionally startling work of scholarship’—Tobias Kelly, author, This Side of Silence: Human Rights, Torture, and the Recognition of Cruelty
‘This is a remarkable book on the social life of a law which governs the deepest and most violent contradictions in contemporary Indian society’—David Mosse, author of The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India