LLM Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration Collective Violence and Criminal Justice System 2025-26 Question Paper with Solutions

Two movements, one name

The Telangana question has produced collective violence twice over, in forms that have almost nothing in common. The first was an armed agrarian insurrection between 1946 and 1951 against the landlords of the princely State of Hyderabad and then against the Indian Army. The second was a long agitation for a separate State within the Indian Union, which flared in 1969 and again between 2009 and 2014, and whose violence was overwhelmingly the violence of crowds, police firing, arson and self-immolation rather than of guerrilla warfare.

An answer that treats these as one movement will misdescribe both. The first was directed at a system of land tenure and at a sovereign who was refusing accession. The second was directed at a democratically elected State government and used the ordinary repertoire of Indian mass politics. What connects them is a single grievance repeatedly denied, and a regional memory in which armed struggle is remembered as having worked.

Against them stood the Razakars, the irregular militia of the Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen led by Kasim Razvi, whose raids on villages produced the largest number of civilian deaths and drove the countryside towards the insurgents. When the Indian Union moved on Hyderabad in Operation Polo between 13 and 18 September 1948 the Nizam's forces collapsed in five days, but the violence did not end with accession. The Indian Army then turned on the communist sanghams, and the phase between 1948 and 1951 was in casualty terms the bloodiest of the whole struggle.

The movement was formally withdrawn on 21 October 1951, when the Communist Party of India resolved to contest elections instead. Its concrete achievement was that roughly a million acres had passed, at least temporarily, into the hands of those who worked it, and that vetti had been destroyed as a social institution over a large part of Telangana.

The final phase from 2009 was again dominated by crowd violence, arson of public transport and government buildings, prolonged general strikes such as the sakala janula samme of 2011, and a sustained wave of student suicides and self-immolations which functioned politically as a form of violence turned inward. The Union response was procedural: the Committee for Consultations on the Situation in Andhra Pradesh under Justice B.N. Srikrishna, constituted on 3 February 2010 and reporting on 30 December 2010, which set out six options and favoured a united State with a statutorily empowered Regional Council. The demand was nonetheless conceded, and Telangana came into existence on 2 June 2014 under the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014.

It held that where a protest turns destructive the High Court or the Supreme Court may appoint a Claims Commissioner to assess damages, that the organisers of the event may be made prima facie liable and put to proof of their absence of complicity, and that video and other evidence should be gathered by the police as a matter of course. Read with the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act, 1984, it is the legal answer to the burning of buses that marked 2009 to 2014.

Ramlila Maidan Incident, In re, (2012) 5 SCC 1 supplies the limit on the other side. A sleeping crowd at a permitted assembly was evicted at midnight after a prohibitory order under what was then section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, now section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. The Court held that the power is preventive and not punitive, that it cannot be used to disperse a peaceful assembly which has caused no apprehension of disorder, and it awarded compensation and directed disciplinary action against the police. The Telangana agitations were policed almost entirely through this provision, and the case is the measure against which that policing must be judged.

Socio-political implications

Three implications deserve to be named. First, the land question: the abolition of jagirdari in Hyderabad and the Hyderabad Tenancy and Agricultural Lands Act, 1950 were legislative responses to an insurrection already in progress, which is the clearest Indian example of agrarian violence forcing tenurial reform. Second, the movement supplied the organisational template and much of the personnel for the later Naxalite movement in the same districts, so the state's security problem in Telangana outlived the grievance that produced it. Third, the 2014 settlement established that a linguistic State is not a permanent unit, and that sustained agitation short of insurrection can obtain a new State from Parliament.

The criticism the answer must state

The romantic reading of the armed struggle does not survive scrutiny. Much of the redistributed land reverted to its former holders once the movement was withdrawn; the sanghams themselves practised summary killing, including of poor peasants suspected of informing; and the mass casualties of 1948 to 1951 fell on villagers caught between the dalams and the Army, not on the combatants. Equally, the later agitations imposed their heaviest costs on people with no part in the dispute, and the wave of student suicides is not a form of political participation that any legal order can afford to validate.

That approach was buried by Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, (1978) 1 SCC 248, which read Articles 14, 19 and 21 together and required any procedure depriving a person of liberty to be just, fair and reasonable. A student should say plainly that the Telangana insurgents were policed under the Gopalan constitution and the Telangana agitators of 2009 under the Maneka one, and that the difference shows in the remedies available: the 1969 firing produced no judicial reckoning at all, while the crowd policing of the later phase is answerable in damages under Ramlila Maidan.

The prosecutorial record of the later phase is equally instructive. Tens of thousands of preventive arrests were made under what is now section 170 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, prohibitory orders were kept in force for months at a stretch, and yet convictions for the destruction of public property were negligible. That gap between mass arrest and negligible conviction is the standing criticism of how India polices agitation: the law is used to incapacitate a movement in the short term and abandoned once the political question is settled.

For full marks, cover: the question has two limbs separated by a century, and the marks are in the join. Do not write a chronology of revolutionaries and then a list of modern statutes as though they were unrelated. The revolutionary strand of the freedom struggle produced the first Indian security legislation, and almost every feature of today's counter-terror law, that is, executive proscription of associations, detention without trial, special courts, a reverse burden on bail, and admissibility of material a general criminal court would refuse, was invented to defeat it. Say that explicitly, then assess whether the modern strategy works.

Abroad, India House in London produced Madan Lal Dhingra, who shot Curzon Wyllie in 1909, and the Ghadar Party in North America attempted a general mutiny in 1915, which ended in the Lahore Conspiracy trials. In the 1920s the Hindustan Republican Association staged the Kakori train robbery of 1925, for which Ram Prasad Bismil and Ashfaqullah Khan were hanged in 1927. Its successor, the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, killed the police officer Saunders in December 1928 in reprisal for the lathi charge that killed Lala Lajpat Rai, and on 8 April 1929 Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt threw two low intensity bombs into the Central Legislative Assembly and stayed to be arrested, which is the clearest statement anywhere that the object was propaganda rather than casualties. Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were hanged on 23 March

1. In 1930 Surya Sen's Chittagong armoury raid briefly captured a district town.

The colonial legal order that grew out of it

The state's response is the direct ancestor of Indian security law, and this is the part of the answer examiners reward.

Queen Empress v. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, ILR (1898) 22 Bom 112 is the case that shows how the machinery worked. Tilak was prosecuted under section 124A for articles in Kesari published shortly before the Rand murder. Strachey J directed the jury that "disaffection" meant absence of affection, that is, hatred, enmity, dislike and disloyalty, and that it was immaterial whether any disturbance actually followed. Tilak was convicted and sentenced to eighteen months. The ruling made sedition an offence of tendency rather than of consequence, and it is exactly that proposition which the Federal Court rejected in Niharendu Dutt Majumdar v. King Emperor, AIR 1942 FC 22, only for the Privy Council to restore the Tilak position in King Emperor v. Sadashiv Narayan Bhalerao, AIR 1947 PC 82. The Republic inherited the Privy Council's version.

Kartar Singh v. State of Punjab, (1994) 3 SCC 569 is the constitutional foundation of all of it. A five-judge Bench upheld TADA against the argument that "terrorist act" was vague and that Parliament lacked competence, holding that the legislation fell under Entry 1 of List I read with the residuary power and that the gravity of the threat justified a departure from ordinary procedure.

Crucially, it upheld section 15, which made a confession to a police officer of the rank of Superintendent admissible, while laying down guidelines to prevent abuse. The decision was followed in People's Union for Civil Liberties v. Union of India, (2004) 9 SCC 580, where POTA was upheld on the reasoning that the possibility of abuse is no ground to strike down a statute. Both cases are why the Indian answer to terrorism has been legislative rather than constitutional.

The current strategy, in four parts

Legislative. The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Amendment Act, 2019 made two structural changes: it allowed the Central Government to designate an individual, not merely an organisation, as a terrorist under section 35, and it permitted the National Investigation Agency to attach property involved in terrorism with the approval of the Director General of the NIA rather than the State police chief.

Doctrinal and military. The response to the Pahalgam attack of 22 April 2025, in which 26 civilians were killed, was Operation Sindoor on 6 and 7 May 2025, missile strikes on declared terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan occupied Kashmir. The stated doctrine that an act of terror will be treated as an act of war is a policy position and not a legal one, and a law student should say so: it belongs to the law of the use of force under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, not to criminal justice. Domestically, the parallel policy has been the campaign against left wing extremism, where the number of affected districts fell from 126 in 2014 to a reported 11 by 2025 and the Union Home Ministry set 31 March 2026 as its deadline for eliminating the movement.

Does it work? The limits

The honest assessment is mixed and must be written as such. Three problems recur.

First, bail has become the punishment. Section 43D(5) of the UAPA bars bail where the court is of opinion that the accusation is prima facie true, and in NIA v. Zahoor Ahmad Shah Watali, (2019) 5 SCC 1 the Supreme Court held that at the bail stage the court must take the material in the charge sheet at face value and may not weigh its admissibility or probative worth.

Conclusion. Political violence in the colonial struggle was a minority strand that never threatened British power militarily, but it decisively shaped Indian law, because the state built to defeat it left behind proscription of associations, detention without trial, special courts and evidentiary short cuts that the Republic adopted almost intact. The modern strategy, the UAPA as amended in 2019, the NIA, the financial regime and now section 113 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, is coherent and has coincided with a real fall in organised left wing extremism and in fatalities in Jammu and Kashmir.

Its weakness is the one Kartar Singh thought manageable by guidelines: where the process itself is punitive, and Watali has made bail nearly unavailable while Najeeb offers relief only after years of custody, the criminal justice system stops distinguishing the guilty from the accused. Effective counter-terrorism therefore requires what India has never delivered, which is speed of trial, not further expansion of the offence.

This circularity is deliberate and should be defended, not apologised for. The Statement of Objects and Reasons to the 1989 Bill records that the term "atrocity" had not been defined so far, and Parliament chose to define it by exhaustive enumeration rather than by an abstract formula, because an abstract formula would have invited courts to ask whether a particular humiliation was grave enough. An enumerated list removes that discretion. What Parliament has listed is an atrocity whether or not the judge finds it shocking.

Two structural features control everything else. First, section 3(1) applies to a person "not being a member of a Scheduled Caste or a Scheduled Tribe" who commits a listed act against a person who is. The offence is defined by the social location of both parties. Second, section 3(2)(v) enhances the punishment for an ordinary offence punishable with ten years or more when it is committed against a member of these communities, and the 2016 amendment replaced the requirement that it be done "on the ground that" the victim belonged to such a community with the far easier requirement of "knowing that" the victim did.

None of these is a random assault. Each is a ritual of subordination, and almost every one of them is triggered by an act of equality: drawing water where others draw it, sitting where others sit, contesting an election, riding a horse in one's own wedding procession, refusing to remove a carcass. Ambedkar's account of the caste order as graded inequality maintained by sanction explains the pattern better than any theory of individual criminality. The Act is best read as a criminal statute enforcing Article 17, which abolishes untouchability and makes its practice in any form an offence, supported by Article 15(2) on access to public places, Article 23 on forced labour and Article 46 on the protection of these communities from social injustice.

The machinery Parliament built, and how much of it is procedural

The point worth making is that most of the machinery is procedural rather than substantive. Parliament's assumption was that the ordinary criminal law already prohibited the conduct and that what failed was enforcement, so the Act attacks the enforcement chain: who may investigate, how quickly the trial must run, what the court must presume, and what the accused may not ask for.

Subhash Kashinath Mahajan v. State of Maharashtra, (2018) 6 SCC 454 is the episode every examiner is looking for. A two-judge Bench, moved by the perceived misuse of the Act, directed that no FIR be registered without a preliminary enquiry by a Deputy Superintendent of Police, that a public servant not be arrested without the written permission of the appointing authority and any other person without the written permission of the Senior Superintendent of Police, and that anticipatory bail was available where no prima facie case was made out. The directions produced a nationwide protest on 2 April 2018 in which several people were killed.

Parliament responded within months with the Amendment Act of 2018, inserting section 18A to undo each direction expressly. In Prathvi Raj Chauhan v. Union of India, (2020) 4 SCC 727 the Court upheld section 18A, while holding that anticipatory bail is not wholly excluded where the complaint on its face does not make out an offence under the Act, and in Union of India v. State of Maharashtra, (2020) 4 SCC 761 it recalled the Mahajan directions on review. The sequence is a rare, complete example of a legislature overruling a judicial gloss and the Court accepting the correction.

Critical assessment: what criminal law can and cannot do

The record does not support confidence. National Crime Records Bureau compilations show cases registered under the Act rising from 45,995 in 2020 to 53,372 in 2023, with crimes against Scheduled Castes as a whole crossing 57,000 that year. That is properly read as better reporting, not worsening conduct. But of the cases before the Special Courts in 2023, only about 20,300 trials were completed while more than 93 per cent remained pending at the end of the year. A statute that requires trial within two months of the charge sheet and delivers a pendency of that order is not being administered.

Four structural criticisms follow. First, proof of motive defeats the enhanced offences: after Patan Jamal Vali, section 3(2)(v) fails wherever the prosecution cannot connect the act to caste, which is precisely the connection that is hardest to prove and easiest to deny. Second, the investigating machinery is thin: rule 7 confines investigation to officers of and above the rank of Deputy Superintendent, and in districts where such officers are few this becomes a source of delay rather than of quality. Third, section 4 is nearly a dead letter, because prosecuting a police officer for neglect requires the same police force to sanction and support the case.

What it has not done is deliver outcomes, and the reason is not the text but the machinery: pendency above ninety per cent, an unused section 4, and an enhanced-punishment clause that collapses whenever caste motive must be proved. The realistic assessment is that the Act works as a statement of constitutional norm and as a lever for compensation and relief under the 1995 Rules, and works badly as a deterrent, and that improving it is a question of investigation and trial capacity rather than of further amendment.

The Supreme Court held that the right to practise a profession under Article 19(1)(g) and the right to life with dignity under Article 21 include a safe working environment, that Article 51(c) and Article 253 permitted the Court to draw on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and that in the absence of legislation its guidelines would be binding under Article 141.

The guidelines held the field for sixteen years, were applied to the disciplinary sphere in Apparel Export Promotion Council v. A.K. Chopra, (1999) 1 SCC 759, where the Court restored the dismissal of a superior who had molested a subordinate and held that physical contact is not essential to sexual harassment, and were enforced against defaulting states and universities in Medha Kotwal Lele v. Union of India, (2013) 1 SCC 297. Only then did Parliament enact the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013.

Around it sit Delhi Domestic Working Women's Forum v. Union of India, (1995) 1 SCC 14, which directed legal assistance at the police station and anonymity for the complainant, Lalita Kumari v. Government of U.P., (2014) 2 SCC 1, which made registration of an FIR mandatory on information disclosing a cognizable offence and expressly refused a preliminary enquiry in such cases, and Nipun Saxena v. Union of India, (2019) 2 SCC 703, on the prohibition of disclosing the victim's identity.

Phase three: the Court correcting the courts

The most recent phase turns the judicial gaze inward. Aparna Bhat v. State of Madhya Pradesh, 2021 SCC OnLine SC 230 arose from a bail order of the Madhya Pradesh High Court which required the accused, charged with molesting his neighbour, to present himself at her house so that she could tie a rakhi on his wrist. The Supreme Court set the condition aside and went considerably further: it held that bail conditions must not mandate or permit contact between the accused and the victim, that judgments must not use language about a woman's dress, behaviour or past conduct, that stereotypes such as the notion that a real victim resists or complains at once have no place in reasoning, and it directed gender sensitisation modules in judicial academies and in the Bar examination syllabus.

The legislative response, and what was refused

The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 was enacted after the December 2012 Delhi gang rape on the report of the Committee under Justice J.S. Verma, which was constituted on 23 December 2012 and reported on 23 January 2013, an interval of thirty days that remains the fastest serious law reform exercise in Indian history. It widened the definition of rape beyond peno-vaginal intercourse, created discrete offences of acid attack, sexual harassment, disrobing, voyeurism and stalking, defined consent as an unequivocal voluntary agreement, and provided that a woman's non-resistance shall not by itself imply consent. The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2018 added graded minimum sentences and capital punishment for the rape of a girl under twelve. All of this is now carried in BNS sections 63 to 79 and section 124.

What Parliament refused is the sharper half of the evaluation. The Verma Committee recommended removing the marital rape exception, withdrawing the requirement of sanction for prosecuting members of the armed forces for sexual offences in disturbed areas, and introducing command responsibility for superior officers. None was accepted. The marital rape exception survives as Exception 2 to section 63 of the BNS, which provides that sexual acts by a man with his own wife, she not being under eighteen, are not rape. The Supreme Court has read it down once, in Independent Thought v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 800, to remove wives between fifteen and eighteen from its protection, and the challenge to the exception as it applies to adults remains pending, with the Union having filed an affidavit in October 2024 opposing its removal.

Conclusion. The forms of violence Indian women face run from the marital home through the street and the workplace to the clinic and the custodial institution, and Indian law now names each of them, which it did not do before 2013. The judicial contribution has been decisive at three points: Vishaka legislated where Parliament was silent and forced the Act of 2013; Gurmit Singh removed the evidentiary presumptions that made conviction nearly impossible; and Aparna Bhat turned the inquiry on the courts themselves.

The legislative contribution has been real but selective, because the same Parliament that accepted the Verma Committee's new offences declined its recommendations on marital rape and on armed forces immunity. The honest evaluation is therefore that India's substantive law is now broadly adequate and its enforcement is not, and that the next advance will come from investigation, victim support and speed of trial rather than from another round of enhanced punishment.

Communal violence is not simply a riot

A communal riot is collective violence in which the line of attack follows religious identity and in which the victim is chosen for his membership of a community rather than for anything he has done. That distinguishes it from an ordinary affray, and it explains the legal treatment: the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita punishes the promotion of enmity between groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence or language under section 196, imputations prejudicial to national integration under section 197, deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings under section 299, and murder by a group of five or more on the ground of religion, race, caste, community, sex, place of birth or personal belief under section 103(2).

The underlying causes

The colonial construction of community. The decennial census from 1871 fixed fluid religious identities into countable and comparable blocs, and the Indian Councils Act, 1909, which introduced separate electorates for Muslims following the Morley-Minto reforms, converted religion into the unit of political representation. Once representation is allocated by community, community becomes the thing worth mobilising. Partition then supplied a memory of mass violence that every subsequent riot draws on.

The immediate triggers sit on top of these structures: processions past places of worship, cow slaughter and beef rumours, loudspeakers, inter-religious relationships, desecration, and since about 2013 the forwarded video and the fabricated post. Rumour has always been the accelerant; social media changed only its speed.

Consequences

The direct consequence is death and injury, and it is worth remembering that the reported death toll is only the visible part. The lasting consequences are three. Displacement and ghettoisation: after the Bombay riots of 1992-93 and the Muzaffarnagar violence of 2013 large populations moved permanently into segregated settlements, which then reduces the intercommunal civic contact that Varshney identifies as the protective factor, so each riot makes the next one easier. Economic destruction, borne disproportionately by the smaller community and by the informal sector, with the added feature that insurance rarely covers riot damage for the uninsured poor. Corrosion of the criminal justice system: mass cases with hostile witnesses, investigations conducted by a police force that is itself accused, and acquittals that then confirm to victims that the law is unavailable to them.

The recurring finding of the commissions is not that these powers are missing but that they are not used, or are used against one community. The Srikrishna Commission, which inquired into the Bombay riots of December 1992 and January 1993, examined 502 witnesses and 2,903 exhibits, reported on 16 February 1998, indicted named political leaders for inciting the violence, and named 31 police officers for participation in rioting, looting or communal acts. It found a police force with a built-in bias, and it recommended prosecutions in a large number of cases. Very few followed.

Zahira Habibullah Sheikh v. State of Gujarat, (2004) 4 SCC 158 is the case that shows what a compromised local system does to a trial. Fourteen people were burnt alive in the Best Bakery at Vadodara in March 2002. At trial the witnesses, including the principal eyewitness Zahira, turned hostile and all the accused were acquitted within weeks.

The Supreme Court held that the State Government had failed in its duty to maintain law and order, directed the arrest of the accused irrespective of political affiliation, ordered compensation and the rehabilitation of camp residents, and recorded that once the administration has notice of an imminent breakdown it cannot plead helplessness. Tehseen S. Poonawalla v. Union of India, (2018) 9 SCC 501 completed the framework for the mob variant of the same problem: a nodal officer of at least Superintendent rank in every district, identification of vigilance-prone areas, patrolling, prompt FIRs, fast track trials, a compensation scheme, and, decisively, a direction that failure by a police officer or district official to act shall be treated as an act of deliberate negligence and made the subject of departmental action.

The practical difficulty is the chain: the State requests, the Union sanctions, the force moves, the magistrate must accompany it, and its powers on arrival are those of section 149 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, under which armed forces may disperse an assembly only where the District Magistrate or an authorised Executive Magistrate so directs and the assembly cannot otherwise be dispersed. Section 151 protects officers acting in good faith under sections 148 to 150, and prosecution of members of the armed forces for acts done in this capacity requires the sanction of the Central Government. The result is a force that is professional and communally neutral, which is its great advantage over a local force, but that reaches the scene after the first and worst hours, and that has no local intelligence when it does.

Second, commissions of inquiry produce findings and nothing else: under the Commissions of Inquiry Act, 1952 a commission is a fact-finding body whose report binds nobody, as Ram Krishna Dalmia v. Justice S.R. Tendolkar, AIR 1958 SC 538 held, and the government need only lay it before the legislature with an action taken report, which is why Srikrishna in 1998 and Liberhan in 2009 changed so little. Third, police reform is unimplemented: the directions in Prakash Singh v. Union of India, (2006) 8 SCC 1 for a State Security Commission, a fixed tenure for the Director General and the separation of investigation from law and order remain substantially unenforced two decades on, and it is precisely the political control of postings that the Srikrishna Commission identified as the mechanism of partisan policing.

Conclusion. The underlying causes of communal violence in India are structural rather than incidental: a colonial architecture that made religion the unit of political counting, an electoral logic that rewards polarisation, and a local organisational apparatus that converts an incident into a riot. Its consequences outlast the violence, because displacement and ghettoisation destroy the civic density that would have prevented the next one.

For full marks, cover: two limbs again, and the second is where most answers go thin. On the first, give ahimsa as Gandhi actually held it, which is not passivity and not merely a tactic, but a positive force tied to satya and to the doctrine that means and ends are inseparable. On the second, do not write vague praise: name specific contemporary applications with dates, name the movements that adopted the method, and then, because the question says "evaluate", state honestly where non-violence has failed and why.

What Gandhi meant by ahimsa

Ahimsa in Gandhi's usage is not the Sanskrit negative it appears to be. He insisted that it is not merely the absence of the wish to harm but "the largest love, the greatest charity", and that its practice requires more courage than violence, not less. The person who submits to injury from fear or weakness is not practising ahimsa; Gandhi said explicitly that where the choice lay between cowardice and violence he would advise violence.

Three propositions organise the philosophy.

The record of the method is concrete: Champaran in 1917, which produced the Champaran Agrarian Act, 1918 abolishing the tinkathia system; Kheda in 1918; the Salt Satyagraha of 1930, which chose a tax on a universal necessity precisely so that anyone could break the law; and the individual satyagraha of 1940-41.

The traces ahimsa left in Indian law

This is where a law student can distinguish an answer. The Constitution does not use the word, but the influence is visible. Article 51 directs the State to promote international peace and security and to encourage settlement of international disputes by arbitration. Article 51A(b) requires citizens to cherish the noble ideals which inspired the national struggle. The Directive Principles on prohibition in Article 47 and on cattle in Article 48 are Gandhian in origin, and Article 40 on village panchayats is his gram swaraj in constitutional form.

The Court held that the power now contained in section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 is preventive, not punitive; that it cannot be invoked against an assembly that has not threatened public order; and it awarded compensation and directed action against the officers. Amit Sahni v. Commissioner of Police, (2020) 10 SCC 439, the Shaheen Bagh case, sets the limit from the other direction: the Court held that the right to peaceful protest is protected but that occupation of a public thoroughfare indefinitely is not, because the rights of others to use the road are equally protected. Read together the two cases mark out the constitutional space in which satyagraha may still be practised in India.

As environmental and economic ethics. The sentence attributed to him, that the earth provides enough for every man's need but not for every man's greed, has become a founding text of sustainability. It appears in Indian environmental jurisprudence through the doctrines of intergenerational equity and sustainable development accepted in Vellore Citizens' Welfare Forum v. Union of India, (1996) 5 SCC 647.

As a discipline for civil disobedience within a constitutional order. The requirement that the satyagrahi accept the penalty rather than evade it is what distinguishes principled disobedience from ordinary lawbreaking, and it is the standard against which contemporary movements, from climate blockades to farm law protests, are properly judged.

Where the doctrine came from, and what Gandhi changed

Ahimsa was not Gandhi's invention and he never claimed it was. Three inheritances shaped it. From Jainism, mediated by his Gujarati mentor Shrimad Rajchandra, he took the proposition that ahimsa is the highest duty and the corollary doctrine of anekantavada, the many-sidedness of truth, which supplies the epistemic humility on which his whole case against violence rests. From Buddhism he took the first precept of abstention from taking life and the example of Ashoka, whose Thirteenth Rock Edict records remorse after the Kalinga war and announces conquest by dhamma in place of conquest by arms, the earliest instance anywhere of a sovereign publishing a doctrine of non-violence as state policy. From the Bhagavad Gita, which he read as an allegory, he took nishkama karma, action without attachment to its fruit.

The doctrine as a working constraint on Indian public law

The most concrete contemporary use of Gandhi's ahimsa is as a standard by which the policing of protest is measured, and Indian courts have used it that way. Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan v. Union of India, (2018) 17 SCC 324 concerned a blanket prohibition on demonstrations at Jantar Mantar and the Boat Club area in New Delhi, imposed by orders of the police and the National Green Tribunal on grounds of noise and public inconvenience. The Supreme Court held that a total ban is disproportionate, that the rights under Articles 19(1)(a) and 19(1)(b) and the residents' rights under Article 21 must be harmonised rather than one extinguished for the other, and it directed the Delhi Police to frame guidelines for regulated, permitted protest.

The reasoning is Gandhian in substance even where it does not use the word. A legal order that leaves no lawful space for disciplined, announced, non-violent protest does not thereby end protest; it converts it into the unannounced and undisciplined kind. That is the practical, non-sentimental case for ahimsa in a constitutional democracy, and it is the reason Himat Lal, Ramlila Maidan, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan and Amit Sahni are properly read as a single line of authority about how much room the state must leave for the method Gandhi invented.

Whatever view is taken of the merits, the episode identifies the doctrine's blind spot exactly. Ahimsa disciplines the use of physical force and has no separate method for the symbolic and structural violence examined elsewhere in this paper, and Ambedkar's own remedy for that was constitutional guarantee rather than moral persuasion, which is why Articles 15, 17 and 25(2)(b) and not any Gandhian technique are what abolished the legal sanction for untouchability.

Conclusion. Gandhi's ahimsa is a positive doctrine resting on the inseparability of means and ends, operationalised as satyagraha with a strict technique, and distinguished at every point from passivity and from the resistance of the weak. Its impact is measurable: it produced a constitutional order whose Directive Principles and fundamental duties carry its vocabulary, it supplied the method of the civil rights, anti-apartheid and People Power movements, and the comparative evidence now suggests non-violent campaigns are the more effective as well as the more decent instrument.

For full marks, cover: the paper asks for any two, and all three are answered below so that the choice remains yours in the hall. Each note is worth twelve and a half marks, so each needs a definition, an Indian illustration and a legal consequence. In (a) the marks are in keeping the three concepts apart and naming their authors. In (b) the mark-earning idea is that the relationship runs in both directions. In (c) do not narrate rebellions: show that a particular legal instrument produced a particular rising.

(a) Symbolic, structural and institutionalised violence

These three terms come from different traditions and describe genuinely different things. Treating them as synonyms for "violence that is not physical" throws away the marks.

Symbolic violence is Pierre Bourdieu's term and it is not a soft version of the same idea. Its defining feature is misrecognition: the domination is exercised through categories that the dominated themselves accept as natural, so it is imposed with their unwitting complicity. Caste supplies the clearest example anywhere. When a person accepts that his touch pollutes, that his hamlet properly lies outside the village, that a particular occupation is his by birth, the hierarchy no longer needs force to maintain it, because it has been installed in the perceptions of those it subordinates.

Institutionalised violence is narrower and more legal. It is violence done by or through the formal institutions of the state and its agents, in the course of and under colour of their functions: custodial torture, deaths in police custody, encounters, prison conditions, forced evictions carried out by demolition rather than by decree. It is distinguishable from structural violence because there is an identifiable actor wearing a uniform, and from ordinary crime because the actor is exercising public power.

The legal consequence of the distinction is real. Structural violence is not justiciable as such, which is why it appears in the Directive Principles rather than in Part III. Symbolic violence becomes justiciable only when it takes a listed form, which is precisely what the enumerated humiliations in section 3 of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 do: garlanding with footwear and forcible tonsuring are punished because they are acts of symbolic subordination, not because of the physical hurt.

Institutionalised violence is fully justiciable, and D.K. Basu v. State of West Bengal, (1997) 1 SCC 416 is the leading authority: acting on a letter about custodial deaths, the Supreme Court held that custodial torture violates Article 21 even where the detention is lawful, laid down eleven requirements including a memo of arrest attested by a witness, notification to a relative and medical examination every forty eight hours, and confirmed that the state is liable in public law compensation, the principle established in Nilabati Behera v. State of Orissa, (1993) 2 SCC 746, where a mother was awarded compensation under Article 32 for the custodial death of her son.

The legal order as respondent, and the paradox of the response. The state answers with proscription of associations, preventive detention, special courts and reversed burdens, upheld in Kartar Singh v. State of Punjab, (1994) 3 SCC 569 and People's Union for Civil Liberties v. Union of India, (2004) 9 SCC 580. The paradox is that the response validates the grievance: a movement that says the law is not neutral is answered by suspending the ordinary law for it alone. Where the response is disproportionate, as in the midnight clearance considered in Ramlila Maidan Incident, In re, (2012) 5 SCC 1, the courts have recognised that the state's own violence is a legal wrong and have awarded compensation and directed departmental action.

Property law converted custom into contract. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 created in the zamindar a heritable and saleable proprietary right and left the actual cultivator, whose customary occupancy had been secure, as a tenant at will. Regulation VII of 1799 and Regulation V of 1812 armed the zamindar with summary powers of distraint and sale of a defaulting tenant's property without recourse to a court. The result was a legal machine for eviction, and the Pabna agrarian leagues of 1873 in eastern Bengal formed to resist enhancement of rent through exactly that machinery.

Revenue law made the demand rigid. The ryotwari settlements of the Madras and Bombay Presidencies fixed a cash demand payable on a date irrespective of harvest, which forced the cultivator into the credit market in bad years. The Deccan riots of 1875 followed a collapse in cotton prices after the American Civil War boom, and the rioters' targets were the moneylenders' bonds and decrees.

Forest law criminalised subsistence. The Indian Forest Acts of 1865 and 1878 created reserved and protected forests and converted customary shifting cultivation, grazing and the collection of minor produce into offences. The tribal risings of the nineteenth century, the Kol insurrection of 1831-32, the Santhal hool of 1855-56 and Birsa Munda's ulgulan of 1899-1900, are unintelligible without this. The Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 completed the picture by declaring whole communities criminal by birth, and its repeal in 1952 did not undo the stigma, which is why the prison manuals struck down in Sukanya Shantha v. Union of India, 2024 INSC 753 still classified denotified tribes by "natural tendency to escape".

The settlement pattern proves the point. In every case the state's own answer was a tenancy statute: the Bengal Tenancy Act, 1885 conferring occupancy rights after Pabna; the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act, 1908 after the Munda rising; the Santhal Parganas administered under a special non-regulation regime after the hool; and the Champaran Agrarian Act, 1918 abolishing the tinkathia obligation after Gandhi's satyagraha of 1917. A legal order that repeatedly concedes tenancy rights in the aftermath of violence is admitting that its own tenurial law produced the violence.