Emergent Conversation 25
This essay is part of the series
First Responders: Crises, Indeterminacies, and (Joyful) Determination in the Global South
By Sandhya Fuchs
Protests After Death Of Hathras Rape Victim In New Delhi. Demonstrators holding placards shout slogans as they protest against Uttar Pradesh government’s handling of Hathras and Balrampur Rape case incidents at Jantar Mantar, on October 4, 2020 in New Delhi, India. This has sparked nationwide outrage and days of protests across the country. Photo by Mayank Makhija/NurPhoto via Getty Images.
“I often think that law has a strange relationship to hope,” Advocate Khan confided in me as we sat in the backseat of his black SUV and watched the driver elegantly weave his way through the Delhi afternoon traffic in an attempt to punctually deliver us to a hearing at the Indian Supreme Court (Fieldnotes, April 16th, 2023). Hastily checking his watch, Advocate Khan continued his train of thought: “On the one hand people turn to the law because they have hope that justice can be served, and rightful punishments can be delivered. On the other hand, nothing can crush people’s hopes as much as a difficult legal process and an unwelcome legal outcome.” He sighed: “I try to explain to my clients that the very act of using legal tools to fight for our vision of justice, our idea of democracy is in itself an act of defiant hope, but I am not sure they always grasp this reality.”
As Advocate Khan fell silent, it occurred to me that his point was valid beyond the immediate arena of legal practice and reflected many of the interpretive tendencies in the anthropology of law. Reading many ethnographic analyses of legal spaces and institutions one might be forgiven for thinking that hope and law exist on opposite ends of the spectrum of human experience. As anthropologists we have been much more likely to point out how law fails: how its actors hide behind a veil of technical neutrality (Canfield 2023) while actively reproducing negative affects against historically marginalised communities, how even its attempts at generating recognition often backfire (Jeffery 2008). Consequently, anthropological reflections on the nature of the legal have repeatedly unveiled how the process of making and enacting law is typically paved with a loss of faith for communities that have historically been pushed to the social margins. Even when they enter legal processes in a hopeful state, they are soon forced to realize that their politically and economically more resourceful counterparts will continue to act with impunity (Chatterjee 2023). This loss of faith is exacerbated by the ever-looming veil of indeterminacy that hangs over the landscape of legal enactment, since every legal rule contains the seeds of its own transgression (Moore 2001). As the application of legal rules necessarily gives rise to competing interpretations, institutional actors project their own worldviews onto the law (Dubois 2014), which can replicate varied structures of oppression (Peletz 2020).
Hence, hope—when the term is used at all—is usually relegated to the realm of the fleeting and unreachable in anthropological explorations of law. Occasionally we may grant hope an ephemeral appearance as a rare moment of perfect human and institutional alignment, where long-overdue recognition is institutionally awarded, and legal action open up spaces of resistance (Niezen and Sapignoli 2017).
However, researching the social life of hate crimes and hate crime law in India over the past decade, interlocutors like Advocate Khan have inspired me to question whether we as anthropologists have sometimes been blind to the unique ways that hope materializes in the legal realm, especially in times of political and social crisis. As I have traced the social life of Indian hate crime law within marginalized caste communities in the North Indian state of Rajasthan, and followed the work of human rights and civil liberty advocates at the Indian Supreme Court in Delhi, I learned that hope is sometimes not an end result, but an endurant, habitual condition of legal engagement: a socially productive mode of labor, which tries to bring legal systems built on structural inequalities in line with the notions of justice and legal success, as well as the aspirant complexes that govern marginalized lifeworlds.
India is a nation whose history is inextricably linked to a legal project of transformation embedded in its constitution. The chairman of the constitutional drafting committee, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, who belonged to India’s Dalit community—a heterogenous collective of caste groups formerly considered “untouchable” within the Indian caste hierarchy—enshrined the principles of social equality, liberty, and non-discrimination in the foundational legal framework of the postcolonial Indian state (Kannabiran 2020). However, this effort of social transformation through law has not only been confined to constitutional law. Legislation like the 1989 Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of) Atrocities Act, which aims to protect Dalits and Adivasi indigenous groups from violence by higher castes, was intended to unleash the power of criminal law to prevent social oppression. In practice, these legal safeguards have often failed to bring perpetrators of discrimination to justice, leading some to conclude that they are paralysed by the very structures of power they aim to address (Baxi 2014).
And yet, the hope that law can help rewrite patterns of social oppression, is well and alive among some of India’s most marginalized caste and religious groups, as well as among many legal professionals. Hope in this context often materializes as the effort of relentless, collective, creative, and resistant legal labour, which attempts to transform legal institutions from below while the constitutional project itself is under threat. Feminist ethnographers have shown how married Indian women, who have suffered domestic violence, often file legal complaints in the hope that the threat of state punishment will force their violent husbands to morally reform, rather than with the aim of winning a court case (Jaju forthcoming). Meanwhile, my own research demonstrates that lower castes and religious minorities in India often turn to courts to claim spaces that have historically been dominated by upper-caste, upper-class Hindu bodies and voices. In both these cases legal hope emerges as a verb rather than a state. This iteration of hopefulness is rooted not in optimism but in meliorism: the attempt to improve the conditions of possibility for formal legal justice.
Discriminatory Habits and Counter-habits
The term meliorism was coined by pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and refers to “the belief that the specific social conditions, which exist at one moment, . . . may be bettered” through persistent, targeted action (Dewey 1963, 178). Key to this idea was the notion that social conduct is built on habits—patterns of social behavior and thought that are not always consciously reflected. Changing individual and institutional conduct and attitudes means the cultivation of new habits. Thus, meliorism referred to the idea that hope for societal transformation lay in the systematic cultivation of progress-directed work, and the creation of habits that would gradually shift the status quo.
Dewey’s philosophical ideas can be directly linked to the history of India’s anti-caste movement through the movement’s strong influenced on the legal approach and theoretical framework of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. Ambedkar gained his PhD in economics from Columbia University in 1927, but during his studies he also attended classes in sociology and philosophy. There, he was taught by Dewey, who by Ambedkar’s own admission was his favorite teacher (Stroud 2023). Dewey’s pragmatist thought shaped Ambedkar’s theory of caste. In his famous 1936 speech “the Annihilation of Caste,” Ambedkar argued that caste is an un-reflected disposition rooted in Hindu notions of purity that gives rise to routine actions among upper castes, which are casually oppressive and outright violent towards lower castes. For Ambedkar, the word habit thus had a negative connotation, as a mode of routine discrimination. However, Ambedkar also believed there was hope: He thought that Indian society could be reformed through the purposive disruption of casteist habits, and of other forms of historic discrimination, for example biases against religious minorities (Stroud 2023). The key to this was the creation of legal and social counter-habits.
I have witnessed the creation and cultivation of such counter habits in India in two ways. First, among survivors of caste discrimination, who use hate crime law to gradually shift patterns of institutional discrimination on the ground. Second, on the judicial level, among advocates who aimed to protect India’s constitutional values of secularism, equality and pluralism in the face of rising Hindu nationalism.
Everyday Meliorism: Cultivating Habits of Hope
Bhim Sena activists take out a protest rally against the Supreme Court’s August 1 decision on the issue of SC-ST reservation near the Albert Hall Museum during ‘Bharat Bandh’ in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, on August 21, 2024. Photo by Vishal Bhatnagar/NurPhoto via Getty Images.
Between 2016 and 2018 I carried out ethnographic fieldwork on the social life of the 1989 Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA) in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Deeply rooted in the Indian civil liberties movement, the PoA is the only law in India that currently bears acts as hate crime legislation. The PoA represents the first law to explicitly define all “verbal, physical, political, ritual and symbolic violence” against Dalits and Adivasi indigenous groups as criminal offences, and aimed to transform a society violently divided along caste lines into one defined by constitutional principles (Rao 2009,174).
Yet the PoA has always been a deeply polarizing law in India, and even a disappointment to many who have fought for caste equality. Anti-caste scholars have argued that ingrained caste bias within legal institutions has dismantled the act through a systematic denial of casteist motives in attacks on Dalits by the police and the judiciary (Teltumbde 2018). However, my own fieldwork revealed that these potent critiques of the Atrocities Act can sometimes paint an incomplete picture. For eighteen months, I traced the cases of forty caste atrocities committed against Dalits of the Meghwal caste, from their communities of origin through the police and courts. What I learned was that hope in the power of the Atrocities Act to gradually combat casteism has not died despite low conviction rates. Survivors of caste atrocities, their families and legal aid NGOs engage in stubborn legal labor to generate new networks of anti-caste sociality, and habits of caste resistance around the act (Fuchs 2024).
In Rajasthan, a state, which has never witnessed the large-scale mobilizations that have marked Dalit resistance in other parts of India, the Atrocities Act has emerged as a site for a project of legal meliorism aimed at the gradual transformation of discriminatory legal habits from below. Dalit atrocity survivors, activists and lawyers mobilized the Atrocities Act to produce imperceptible shifts in legal culture. They cultivated a mode of agency-focused legal consciousness: the idea that law, and hate crime law specifically is, ultimately, an instrument for the transformation of oppressive legal orders (Chua and Engel 2019).
Atrocity survivors and Dalit lawyers in Rajasthan cultivated what some called “habits of hope” (umid ki aadatein), in dialogue with the Atrocities Act. They systematically filed atrocity cases even when chances for court victory were low in order to move more Dalit bodies into the legal spaces they had been historically excluded from. They publicized incidents of police and judicial neglect in atrocity cases daily, staging protests in front of courts and police quarters. And they used the text of the Atrocities Act as a platform to familiarize survivors, their families and communities with the language of law.
Cultivating habits of hope, was a way to create new forms of shared legal engagement, legal confidence and knowledge among Dalit communities that would gradually create the conditions of possibility for a legal system whose truth regimes could capture the unique realities of structural oppression. Here, hope lay in the meliorist act of disrupting the casteist habits of legal actors and building new legal counter-habits through hate crime law to comparatively improve the legal system.
“As long as you do the work your cause is alive!”
This meliorist spirit is also alive at India’s courts, and beyond the realm of caste resistance, even if it often goes unrecognized. In 2022, I set out to build on my previous research on hate crime law by following cases that involved hate speech perpetrated by Hindus against Muslims through the Delhi court system. Since Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014, India has seen the intensification of a government-led political agenda of Hindu nationalism. Also referred to as Hindutva, the BJP’s mode of Hindu nationalism perceives India’s history to be inextricably linked to Hindu religious tradition and regards Hinduism as a cohesive cultural force that should guide Indian policy agendas. Consequently, verbal and physical assaults against religious minorities, and especially Muslims, have risen steeply across India during this decade (Jaiswal et al. 2018).
By following these cases, I aimed to understand what arguments about harm, citizenship, and history advocates put forward in cases that involved extreme forms of incitement against Muslims, in trial courts all the way up to the Indian Supreme Court. However, I soon realized that advocates who represented Muslim survivors of such cases rarely got the opportunity to present strategic arguments to a bench. Instead, their work consisted of tireless paperwork, which aimed to create the very conditions that would allow their clients to appear as credible narrators in court.
Spending time in lawyers’ chambers I learned that the justice machinery was often resistant to the stories of religious minorities. Police officers regularly refused to even file Muslim complaints of verbal aggression by Hindus. When they did, investigations were systematically delayed. One Supreme Court advocate I worked with, who represented an elderly Muslim man who had been beaten up by a group of young Hindu men, described his work as “a routine, never-ending, relentless paper war to make investigating agencies do the bare minimum to make the pursuit of justice possible and uphold constitutional principles of equality” (Fieldnotes, October 23rd, 2023).
So, what is hopeful about this situation? In fact, a legal system that is often blind to the experiences of minorities seems exceptionally disillusioning. However, what was striking about the advocate’s words, was his emphasis on “relentless, routine” paperwork in the service of “constitutional principles.” While the advocates who performed this work were often tired, disappointed and fearful for the future of India’s judiciary, they also held on to the same mode of gritty, hopeful laboring that I had encountered among Meghwal communities in Rajasthan.
One young advocate who admitted to being shocked by the discrepancy of the law on paper and the law in practice, nonetheless, held on to a sense of grim determination: “As long as you do the legal work, even in a progressively authoritarian state your cause is alive and hope is alive,” she told me (Fieldnotes, November 12th, 2023). She argued that the very act of filing cases to protect minorities showed that dissenting voices still existed, and that people still believed in the rule of law.
Like people resisting casteism in Rajasthan, her hope was rooted in the ability of law to build creative and endurant spaces of agency. In her eyes the very indeterminacy of legal rules, which so often frustrated survivors of hate crimes, also opened up permanent, strategic spaces for resistance. For her, hope lay in the knowledge that as a contested, interpretive arena, law would always allow space for maneuvers that defied authoritarian claims or the cruel denial of rights for marginalized groups. “The very thing that is frustrating about law,” she told me, “these technical rules that can be interpreted so differently, is also what creates hope. Because you can always devise ways to make these rules work for oppressed communities in a way that contradicts dominant claims and authoritarian strategies. You just have to be relentless and keep at it” (Fieldnotes, November 14th, 2023). And so, as Indian advocates file paperwork to protect religious minorities again and again—no matter what the case outcome—they too are creating legal counter-habits that keep hope and dissent alive.
Conclusion
Protests After Death Of Hathras Rape Victim In New Delhi. Demonstrators hold placards as they stand in front of a mural drawn on road protesting against Uttar Pradesh government’s handling of Hathras and Balrampur Rape case incidents at Jantar Mantar, on October 4, 2020 in New Delhi, India. This has sparked nationwide outrage and days of protests across the country. Photo by Mayank Makhija/NurPhoto via Getty Images.
It is not my aim to here to deny the ways in which legal systems around the world repeatedly and cruelly fail the most vulnerable communities. Nor do I wish to say that assigning the labor of creating a fair legal system to the very communities who have historically suffered most at its hands is just. However, I do wish to highlight that despite its many disappointments, law remains meaningful to many who face violence and socio-economic precarity. The act of engaging with a system that promises justice but doesn’t yet do so is painful. However, it can also be a source of new dissent as people who have systematically been denied legal agency work to imprint their own visions of justice and history on legal structures through determined, relentless, and defiant everyday practices of legal action and interpretation.
Law has always been a battlefield of interpretation. The social life of hate crime law and hate crime cases in India reveals that these competing interpretations concern more than legal rules. They target the legal system as a whole, how it can be made comparatively better, who can do this work, in what social and institutional spaces and with what aims. For many the ability to create hope through law is not rooted in optimism. It is the result of gritty, meliorist work, which aims to infuse legal structures with the experiences, truths, and perspectives of those who have had little say over its evolution.
Sandhya Fuchs is Assistant Professor in Criminology at the University of Bristol. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the LSE, a MPhil degree in social anthropology from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Anthropology and Philosophy from Colby College. Sandhya’s first book entitled “Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India,” analyses the social life of India’s only hate crime law: the 1989 Scheduled Castes /Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA). It is the winner of the 2025 James Busuttil Award for Human Rights Scholarship issued annually by the Royal Asiatic Society.
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