Symbiotic Justice: Hate Crimes, Police Humiliation, and Layered Legal Consciousness in Dalit Human Rights

This article responds to scholarly critiques, which highlight the failures of hate crime legislation in delivering justice to historically oppressed groups. Drawing on ethnographic data on the mobilisation of India's only hate crime law - the Prevention of Atrocities (PoA) Act- among Dalit (untouchable) communities, the article proposes that the potential of hate crime law to create a restitution must be analysed in conversation with other social justice frameworks. In India, Dalit legal aid advocates interweave hate crime cases with a culturally specific discourse of Dalit human rights. By strategically bringing "failed" PoA investigations before India's National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Dalit advocates hold the police accountable for negligent investigations, while also creating collective affects of hope for survivors of casteist crimes. This process, which I call symbiotic justice, engenders a form of legal consciousness, which regards hate crime law as a creative tool that can offer new avenues of agency.