shocking news all accused in the PUK Khan lynching case have been acquitted three men Chan Miau Khan and sesi were lynched in RAR Khan was beaten to death in lvi Village while transporting cows at night a migrant worker from Bengal was allegedly beaten to death by members of a car vigilante group why are we going backwards in the terms of violence and lynchings so the does include uh a crime of mob lynching but I have a problem with that phrase I always wonder what if it's not a mob but two people who are engaged in this kind of violence and it would still be equally wrong and therefore it seems to me what is really at stake here is not the fact that there's a mob that is involved the problem is that this is a case of hate [Music] crime hi my name is moson alamut I'm an assistant professor of law in Queen Mary University of London I have worked on hate crime issues and minority rights for several years now uh from uh 2017 onwards I was working with many other colleagues on tracking and documenting hate crime crime violence especially lynching violence against minorities and Muslims in India and since then I have written on theoretical issues and legal issues uh primarily from a constitutional law and international law point of view so historically the language which is used in India to describe Mass violence or anti-minority violence was the word riots and this word Riot or communal Riot as is popularly known is in the law books it is also used in the media and by the public at large but there's a problem with the with this word because it seems to suggest as if this is violence among large groups of people who are just clashing and and therefore this is not just a sometimes a unidirectional violence against vulnerable communities say for example minorities either cast minorities or religious minorities otherwise what we have seen particularly since 2014 or 2015 is the targeting of individuals especially Muslims on several contexts and pretexts the most common being cattle trading or so-called cows slaughter and what has happened over several years is that this kind of violence has been called what we know as lynching hate crime is a different way to describe some of these similar kinds of violence and it's an internationally recognized definition so for instance in the United States United Kingdom in European jurisdictions the phrase hate crime is used to describe any act of violence in which the perpetrator is motivated by hostility towards the religious or racial or ethnic identity of the victim whether that identity is real or perceived identity and therefore what the category of hate crime does is it focuses on the motivation of the perpetrator in terms of its hostility or hatred towards another religious or ethnic group or other racial group and therefore the category of hate crime is also able to help us understand the nature of violence itself so in my view what we have seen say for instance since 2014 or what we often describe as cases of lynching are really cases of hate crime because these are not just cases in which mobs come together and disrupt Law and Order these are cases in which these groups are organized around a certain hostility towards religious minorities towards Muslims and therefore at least we are able to honestly assess and identify the very character of violence that these people are facing so there are different kinds of laws in India that may share what I call a family resemblance with the notion of hate crime so a very good example would be the uh scheduled cast scheduled tribe atrocities act 1989 and if anybody reads that law they can see that these laws or these atrocities are meant to be those actual of violence or even words sometimes that are meant to express or are motivated by hostility towards the dalit or the adasi communities so atrocities act might be the only strictly speaking hate crime law in India besides that one could argue laws protecting women uh against violence may also be a form of hate crime law because many people argue around the world that those actions which are motivated by misogyny or anti-women uh attitudes would also amount to a form of hate crime but besides that there are no other hate crime laws so to say in India and in most cases violence against vulnerable communities religious and cast minorities are covered by other provisions of law so for example in the previous Indian Penal Code we had sections 153a and B that covered this kind of violence which was really between it was described as uh violence between groups or words or action that create enmity among different groups but these are again categories that Define anti-minority violence in Law and Order terms rather than identifying the hostility behind or the Animas behind the violence that is being perpetrated but globally of course there are laws in the United States in United Kingdom in the European uh region which do recognize that these kind of crimes do need special or distinct kind of legal and social appreciation I think any kind of data or documentation mechanism is needed not just in the case of hate crime but in all areas of governance to make sure that you hold the government accountable um and if the government is not maintaining data then it becomes even more important for civil society to do that I think it's also important that this kind of documentation is done so that Civil Society can provide support to the victims again especially if the state is not providing that kind of support so what several initiatives uh some of which I was involved with were trying to do with hate crime tracking or hate crime documentation was to use for example newspaper articles or websites in some cases even go into the field and speak to victims and start carefully documenting these kinds of incidents based on evidence collection based on a very clear protocol based on a very clear definition uh and therefore try and create some sort of a sense of numbers I also feel that we'll always under calculate numbers because people do not often report cases to the police or people are scared to even tell other people that they have faced any kind of violence uh on the basis of their gender religion cast uh sexuality a whole range of other uh identities and therefore the focus should not be so much on collecting large numbers it should really be about making sure that we know what is happening in our society so detailed documentation evidence collection is really required so ideally this kind of work should be done by the police but in India the national crimes record Bureau has not been maintaining any records on hate crime and the reason for that is there's no provision at the moment that requires it to record this kind of this kind of violence in the United Kingdom on the other hand they historically they have collected both hate crime data but also if certain people come to the police and report that they feel they may have suffered from hate crimes then they are also recording even if they are not established as hate crime so what that helps us to do is it helps us understand what other minorities feeling what are the vulnerable communities in the society feeling because it's really important for society as a whole to make sure that all segments of the society feel safe and that is another very important reason to constantly collect data to ensure that all segments particularly vulnerable communities feel safe so there different ways in which hate crime data can be collected so there's no scientifically correct way and I would not even Hazard to recommend that there is one ideal mechanism to collect It ultimately the question which we need to ask is why are we collecting this data and who is this data speaking to so if the work in collecting data is to highlight legal violations then obviously the kind of data you'll correct must necessarily track the way the police and the courts are handling these cases of hate crime but if the real task for people who are collecting data is to magnify a certain issue or talk to both National and international academic audiences or talk to the human rights communities that these are the social and political problems that all of us are facing then the character of that collection would be uh quite different but I suppose all these different strategies all these different mechanisms of collecting data share a few things in common the first would be you need to Define what hate crime is and in my previous efforts for instance working with the India spend uh hate crime tracker or what we called hate crime watch we defined hate crime the way the European countries tend to Define hate crime so hate crime would be something which for the purposes of documentation on the face of it or primer Facey is an act or set of actions that appear to be motivated by hostility or hatred towards the religious identity of the victim um so that would be brought the definition we would use but it's not necessary that this is a strict definition that all people who want to collect uh collect hate crime data would necessarily need to do in our definition we included all sorts of religious hate crime so it didn't matter who the victim was so it didn't matter to us that the victim was from the majority Community so-called or a minority Community because we wanted to collect all kinds of uh hate crime motivated by religious identity but maybe there are some other groups that want to identify by certain victims and make sure that those victims are represented in this data more so for example they may want to collect data on violence against dalits or violence against Muslim women or violence against uh people from the northeast of India right so again you can move around or alter this definition accordingly what we did was we used newspapers as the sources uh primarily and the reason for that is we felt that particularly reputed English newspapers would be the most trustworthy resources but another reason to do that is we did not have enough resources to go into the field across the length and breadth of the country so of course if people do have those kind of resources and they can set up vast networks of volunteers of journalists of stringers to collect information on a regular or frequent basis that is a really good mechanism provided obviously there is a proper system of verification and the the definition of hate crime or whatever variant people are using is respected and finally which I think is really significant and often people forget about it is what do we do with that data so it should be very clear right from the beginning what is the kind of analysis that has to happen with this data what is the visualization of the data do we want a website around it do we want Publications around it who is the data speaking to what is the audience of the data so do we want to speak to government officials as policy people so that we want to bring in some sort of law or do we want to work within academics or universities or human rights communities or do we want to work among communities right so for example the communities of victims and do we want to use this data to make sure that they are getting support from government and non-government sources so these three would be the elements I would imagine are Central to building any meaningful mechanism of hate crime documenting and tracking so the violence on the basis of community identity obviously has a very long history in India uh India had the terrible history of partition Mass violence particularly since late 1960s all the way running to the demolution of bab [Music] Masjid of the Gujarat quote unquote riots which were Gujarat sectarian violence of Po Rome I think since 2014 there it's a possible interpretation that the nature of this violence if not complet completely changed but has intensified on certain areas now one has to speak with a fair bit of skepticism or at least with the cave because the government does not collect data on this but whatever data has been collected by non-government sources suggests that there has been a spike in hate violence which is more individualized and targeted so for instance large scale communal riots uh usually did not happen as often as they did since 2014 14 even though I think the last few years particularly the Delhi program and sectarian violence was a slight variation in that Trend but besides that and a few other smaller incidents overall there has been a spike in more individualized targeting of persons now that obviously does not mean that the number of victims of these crimes has somehow reduced obviously in instances of mass communal violence it is obviously tangible and visible that large parts of the community are affected but what is happening with these individualized so-called lynching cases for instance or hate crime cases is that the effect on the community is much more subtle and it's much more Insidious so even in cases where one individual is lynched uh it affects their whole Community it affects States and sometimes the whole country a very good example would be uh meat uh in harana and Rajasthan the whole region which has suffered terribly because of these series of flinching cases now at most maybe around 15 or 20 people since 2014 may have been lynched I don't have the complete data on it but that's the impression I have even though recently there were uh more disturbances and sectarian violence in new but until then most of these cases coming from the mayat region were individualized but only these individual incidents have completely disrupted the socioeconomic life of mayat region people don't have CLE anymore people don't trade in cattle anymore because they are so scared their employment opportunities are completely destroyed they are even scared to now drive cars or drive trucks even when they are not carrying cattle and the social economic impact on the community is so palpable and an already really poor region has become much worse so even though I would say in summary that the mass scale violence has maybe come down to some respect but the impact in the community Remains the Same through other means and the pattern is also clear from whatever uh the data we have collected so for instance it's clear that several of these kind of incidents happen in the pretext of cow protection or cow vigilantism uh or in the case of people like AAR uh that there's an allegation of consuming beef uh more recently instance of violence against Muslim men on the ground of interfaith relationships or marriage is another big big reason so the context of the pretexts keep changing all the time but what is increasingly evident and rather undisputable is that rather well organized hoodlums and networks of right-wing uh Vigilantes are involved in all these cases of violence and there is both social policing and legal abuse and impunity which is at play so the bharti N San does include uh a crime of mob lynching but I have a problem with that phrase the reason is because the problem in my view that has to be addressed is hate crime rather than Violence by mobs uh because the phrase mob lynching seems to interpret the problem of violence as a problem of Law and Order that there is a mob of five or more people that's how the provision defines this particular crime and because there is a mob involved then this has to be prosecuted I always wonder what if it's not a mob but two people who are engaged in this kind of violence and it would still be equally wrong and therefore it seems to me what is really at stake here is not the fact that there's a mob that is involved the problem is that this is a case of hate crime and what the provision does is after defining it as moob lynching it then identifies a series of grounds including cast or race it does not explicitly mention religion but it does mention personal belief so one could argue that the provision does include cases of hate crime or at least those cases of hate crime that are committed by mob but that is definitely one of the problems the second issue is that these kind of deeply entrenched social and political problems cannot be resolved by just having a provision there has to be proper system in place to address this problem of violence so for instance where is sensitization of the police or training of the police where is the system of data collection and documentation where is the system to help the victims or rehabilitate them or support them where is the system in which the larger prosecutory Machinery is informed or trained to address these kind of cases so I'm not very optimistic that in our current climate this provision in and of itself will be able to deal with this problem at all and also let's remember that the provision is framed in a manner that it can be even used against vulnerable communities so it's possible that this provision is actually used against thit or tribal tribals or Muslims or other marginalized communities on the ground that they have committed mobl lining so if the whole point of this provision was to appreciate the problem of hate crime it clearly is not going to succeed so there are different models around the world and I have recently written whether the western or the United Kingdom model can be used in the case of India and I'm not particularly uh wedded to the idea that there's one single model around the world that we must adopt but there are all always models to learn from I think the important elements of the models should definitely be recognized so for instance first we must recognize that this is a problem of religious or identity based hostility because once we recognize it we know that we are trying to help victims and the larger communities rather than isolated incidents of mob violence or violations of uh Law and Order the second element is that you can definitely include hate crime Provisions in the law but they have to be fully integrated in the policing and the justice system so there has to be a wider dialogue around these Provisions just legislating these Provisions without sending them to the select committee without having public hearing about these things will never allow these kind of laws to be absorbed in our institutions and in our society the third element is data collection that is absolutely crucial and ncrb must be asked to start collecting meaningful data in a rigorous manner there are larger problems with NCBS data collection techniques but apart from General reform this has to be one of the grounds that we introduce and I suppose finally if the whole purpose of this law is to support victims and their communities there has to be a system of Rehabilitation and support and courts must be particularly uh focused on that issue so for instance the idea of compensation is really important and there have been some bills in the past that have tried to do it so for example the West Bengal lynching act which was passed by the legislature but not signed uh by the governor or president and therefore is is not law at the at the moment does have those mechanisms of compensation another good resource is the Supreme Court's order in 2018 the t punala uh judgment or guidelines even though the implementation of those guidelines have been at best patchy and incomplete but the guidelines did have uh both preventative and compensatory mechanisms so all those have to be integrated in the law if the problem of hate crime has to be addressed or at least be want to even start addressing the problem of hate crime so as I said cases of morining or hate crime may have directly speaking one or two victims but once we start digging deeper we know that the victims are the whole communities uh and the best way first to address or see it is to use the right phrase use the right categories and start talking about it in those terms so rather than framing anti-minority violence as mere Law and Order problems that have to be managed somehow we need to recognize that these have tangible harms to vulnerable communities second ideally the government should step in and help in Rehabilitation and compensation of people but if that is not happening then the Civil Society has to do it but the civil society today is completely cornered uh particularly that civil society which is interested in addressing adding these these questions so I suppose the medium to long-term ambition of for all of us has to be to strengthen those efforts uh on the basis of solidarity and egalitarianism and secularism I would encourage my friends and colleagues to really explore future directions of work and research and intervention in hate crime I've because I teach in a classroom I always have High Hopes from students both law students but also from other social sciences and I think tracking cases on the ground studying the experiences of victims the trauma that they have faced is really important it's not enough to just see if the law is being violated or the law is being respected uh that is just not enough this story is not about just violation or non-violation of law it is really important to bring out the human story here and I think social scientists particularly will be able to help us because they will be able to document the psychosocial impact on the victims really well and how we as a society can respond um another really important area is doing comparative work uh there are several countries around the world that have hate crime laws I think United States for instance has a long history of anti-minority violence and they have found different mechanisms of addressing it through legal ways and through social ways historians tell us how these instance of anti-black lynchings for instance have happened so I think people who study Media or who study social science or anthropology and history have a lot to tell us about what we are seeing today and really put it in a larger Global conversation and comparison