Truth clashes:Caste atrocities, false cases, and the limits of hate crime in North India

This article brings together theories of truth in legal anthropology and the anthropology of religion to highlight how legal institutions can co-opt hate crime laws and reproduce patterns of sociopolitical oppression. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research on the social life of India's only hate crime law – the 1989 Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA), which punishes violence against Dalit (ex-untouchable) communities – the article argues that hate crime cases involve a clash between three different truth logics: attributive truth or credibility; formal juridical truth regimes defined by evidentiary technicalities; and a distinct mode of experiential-discriminatory truth, which is defined by its processual character. As Indian police and judiciary conflate these truth logics in practice, they publicly and legally erase realities of caste discrimination and (re)construct marginalized communities like Dalits as greedy and unreliable narrators.</p

Rethinking the atrocities act:Proving prejudice and interpreting evidence in Rajasthan

India’s Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA), which aims to punish and prevent violence against Dalits (ex-untouchables) and Adivasis (tribals), represents one of the most ambitious hate crime laws in the world. However, concerns regarding its effectiveness in addressing historical oppression dominate Indian public debates. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with Dalit atrocity survivors and police and judiciary in Rajasthan, this article proposes that current critiques of the PoA have neglected to address fundamental questions about the ideas of social transformation that underpin this unique law. This paper analyses how legal evidence regimes can obscure realities of hate. It further examines to what extent the institutional barriers facing atrocity complainants reflect deeper challenges, which haunt hate crime laws and legislative attempts to address inequality on a global level. Ultimately, the article reveals that for the PoA to be “effective,” policymakers must first decide to whose definition of justice and success the act is accountable

The myth of the false case: what the new Indian Supreme Court Order on the SC/ST Act gets wrong about caste-based violence and legal manipulation

Following considerable protest and the subsequent Bharat Bandh, Sandhya Fuchs critiques the recent provision passed by the Indian Supreme Court, which issued new guidelines to prevent what they deemed the 'rampant misuse' of the 1989 Scheduled Caste/ Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act

“We Don't Have the Right Words!”:Idiomatic violence, embodied inequalities, and uneven translations in Indian law enforcement

This article interrogates the relationship among legal gatekeepers, embodied expressions of structural violence, and institutional patterns of translation in the mobilization of antidiscrimination legislation by examining a case registered under the 1989 Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act in the Indian state of Rajasthan. The article proposes that law enforcement officials often utilize legal registers and legal aesthetics as defensive shields against the demands of historically marginalized groups, which interfere with their institutionalized moralities and wider loyalties to higher caste groups. Thereby they reinscribe the very structural inequalities antidiscrimination laws are intended to address. This process is often the result of a dual breakdown of translation. On the one hand, police officers often refuse to engage with the local linguistic idioms of marginalized communities in a way that makes their experiences legible to the law. On the other hand, survivors of discriminatory violence are themselves hesitant to make their suffering explicit due to trauma and fear of being publicly humiliated. Ultimately, this process can instill further feelings of inadequacy in victims of discrimination at the very moment they try to claim their rights. This case ultimately questions the ability of antidiscrimination legislation to effectively counteract the effects of structural inequality. [India, anti-discrimination law, translation, caste, embodiment]

Book review: The good girls: an ordinary killing by Sonia Faleiro

In The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing, Sonia Faleiro investigates the shocking deaths of two teenage girls in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, allowing the reader to walk beside her as she gradually uncovers the relationships, institutions and political landscapes that shaped Padma and Lalli’s lives and final days. Offering a window into the cultural, emotional and political life of modern India, Faleiro inspires in her ability to combine meticulous research, sharp and nuanced analysis, a sensitive and empathetic authorial voice and a riveting narrative style, finds Sandhya Fuchs. Please be aware that this review refers to acts of violence, including sexual violence. The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing. Sonia Faleiro. Bloomsbury. 2021

Report from Working Group 3: Beyond the standard model physics at the HL-LHC and HE-LHC

This is the third out of five chapters of the final report [1] of the Workshop on Physics at HL-LHC, and perspectives on HE-LHC [2]. It is devoted to the study of the potential, in the search for Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) physics, of the High Luminosity (HL) phase of the LHC, defined as $3$ ab$^{-1}$ of data taken at a centre-of-mass energy of 14 TeV, and of a possible future upgrade, the High Energy (HE) LHC, defined as $15$ ab$^{-1}$ of data at a centre-of-mass energy of 27 TeV. We consider a large variety of new physics models, both in a simplified model fashion and in a more model-dependent one. A long list of contributions from the theory and experimental (ATLAS, CMS, LHCb) communities have been collected and merged together to give a complete, wide, and consistent view of future prospects for BSM physics at the considered colliders. On top of the usual standard candles, such as supersymmetric simplified models and resonances, considered for the evaluation of future collider potentials, this report contains results on dark matter and dark sectors, long lived particles, leptoquarks, sterile neutrinos, axion-like particles, heavy scalars, vector-like quarks, and more. Particular attention is placed, especially in the study of the HL-LHC prospects, to the detector upgrades, the assessment of the future systematic uncertainties, and new experimental techniques. The general conclusion is that the HL-LHC, on top of allowing to extend the present LHC mass and coupling reach by $20-50\%$ on most new physics scenarios, will also be able to constrain, and potentially discover, new physics that is presently unconstrained. Moreover, compared to the HL-LHC, the reach in most observables will, generally more than double at the HE-LHC, which may represent a good candidate future facility for a final test of TeV-scale new physics

The Gift of a Bicultural Upbringing

A daughter of anthropologists reflects on how a childhood lived in and between two cultures profoundly shapes one's views of belonging and "othering.