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

Sandhya Fuchs

doi:10.1111/1467-9655.14094

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

Sandhya Fuchs

School of Social and Political Science

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

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.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	669-686
Number of pages	18
Journal	Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Volume	30
Issue number	3
Early online date	26 Jan 2024
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14094
Publication status	Published - Sept 2024

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

abstract = "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.",

author = "Sandhya Fuchs",

note = "Funding Information: Research for this article was made possible by the generous support of the Wenner‐Gren Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust. I would like to thank Andrea Pia for inviting me to present an initial version of this article at the research seminar on anthropological theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I am grateful to the department's faculty and students for their insightful feedback and questions. Moreover, I thank the organizers of AllegraLab and EASA LawNet for helping to further shape the arguments in this article. I especially thank Prof. Laura Bear, Prof. Alpa Shah, and Prof. Julia Eckert for their constructive comments. I am also grateful to Marie‐B{\'e}n{\'e}dicte Dembour, Jessica Greenberg, Tobias Kelly, Antje Linkenbach, and Agathe Mora for their thoughtful feedback. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2024 The Authors. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute published by John Wiley \& Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Anthropological Institute.",

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

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