LLM Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration Collective Violence and Criminal Justice System 2024-25 Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: the word the examiner has used in the second limb is "system", not "forces", and it is the key to a high mark. Do not describe the police and the paramilitary as two institutions; describe the chain that has to work for a riot to be prevented, from intelligence through deployment to investigation and prosecution, and show at which link it breaks. Cover causes and consequences first but keep them tight, because the second limb carries at least half the marks.

Causes, in three layers

The enabling structure. Religious identity became a unit of political counting under the colonial state through the decennial census from 1871 and, decisively, through the separate electorates introduced by the Indian Councils Act, 1909. Once seats and representation are allocated by community, community becomes a resource worth mobilising. Partition then supplied a template and a memory that every later episode draws on.

Consequences, in three horizons

Immediate. Death, injury, destruction of homes and businesses and the displacement of populations into camps, as at Muzaffarnagar in 2013.

Institutional. The criminal justice system is damaged by every episode. Investigations are conducted by a force that is itself accused, witnesses are neighbours who must go on living in the town, hundreds of accused are combined in unworkable single trials, and acquittals follow. Each acquittal teaches the victim community that the law is not available to it, which reduces reporting in the next episode.

Long term. Ghettoisation. After the Bombay violence of 1992-93 and after Muzaffarnagar, populations relocated permanently into segregated settlements. Since intercommunal civic contact is the strongest protective factor, segregation makes the next riot easier, and communal violence is therefore self-reproducing in a way that ordinary crime is not.

Tehseen S. Poonawalla v. Union of India, (2018) 9 SCC 501 converted these powers into duties with names attached: a nodal officer of at least Superintendent rank in every district, assisted by an officer of Deputy Superintendent rank, with a special task force to gather intelligence on those likely to commit such offences; identification of districts and villages where such violence has occurred; patrolling of vulnerable areas; and a direction that failure by a police officer or a district official to comply be treated as an act of deliberate negligence attracting departmental action. That last direction is the one that matters, because it converts inaction into a disciplinary offence.

Link three, deployment and the use of force. Section 148 allows an Executive Magistrate, an officer in charge of a police station or an officer of at least sub-inspector rank to command an unlawful assembly, or any assembly of five or more likely to disturb the peace, to disperse, and to disperse it by force. Section 149 allows the District Magistrate or an authorised Executive Magistrate to disperse an assembly by the armed forces where it cannot otherwise be dispersed.

Link five, investigation and prosecution. This is where the system fails most completely. The investigation is entrusted to the force whose conduct is in issue. Zahira Habibullah Sheikh v. State of Gujarat, (2004) 4 SCC 158 is the standing illustration: fourteen people were burnt alive at the Best Bakery in Vadodara, the witnesses turned hostile and all the accused were acquitted, and the Supreme Court set the acquittal aside, held that the criminal court is not a mute spectator and must use its powers to summon and examine witnesses, and transferred the retrial out of the State.

National Human Rights Commission v. State of Gujarat, (2009) 6 SCC 342 went further and appointed a Special Investigation Team to reinvestigate the major cases under the Court's continuing supervision. Both are corrections of a system that had failed, not evidence that it works.

Prakash Singh v. Union of India, (2006) 8 SCC 1 is the remedy the Supreme Court has already ordered and the States have not delivered. After the National Police Commission's eight reports between 1979 and 1981 had been ignored for a quarter of a century, the Court directed seven measures: a State Security Commission to insulate the force from extraneous influence, a minimum tenure of two years for the Director General and for officers in operational charge, separation of investigation from law and order in urban areas, a Police Establishment Board to decide transfers and postings, Police Complaints Authorities at State and district level, and a National Security Commission.

Two decades later compliance is partial in most States, and it is precisely political control over postings, which the second and fourth directions attack, that the Srikrishna Commission identified as the mechanism of partisan policing.

What the law itself has added since 2024

Two changes in the new codes bear directly on this question and are worth a short paragraph each.

Section 172 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 has no counterpart in the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973. It obliges all persons to conform to the lawful directions of a police officer given to prevent a cognizable offence or to preserve public order, and permits the officer to detain or remove a person resisting such a direction, producing him before a Magistrate or releasing him within twenty four hours. Whether this becomes a useful preventive tool or a wide new power of detention will depend entirely on how strictly the courts read the word "lawful", and it is the provision to watch in the next decade of communal-violence litigation.

Conclusion. The causes of communal violence in India are layered: a colonial inheritance that made religion the unit of political representation, an electoral incentive to polarise, a standing local apparatus that manufactures the riot, and a trigger that is almost incidental. Its consequences are immediate, institutional and long term, and the long term consequence of ghettoisation makes each episode a cause of the next. As for the system, the powers under sections 148, 163 and 168 to 172 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita are adequate, the Rapid Action Force is a genuinely impartial instrument, and Tehseen Poonawalla has supplied a preventive framework with named officers and disciplinary consequences.