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Collective Violence and Criminal Justice System
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LLM · Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration
2025-26 - Set 2 Examination
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LLM Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration Collective Violence and Criminal Justice System 2025-26 - Set 2 Question Paper with Solutions
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First published on munotes.in on 13 August 2026.
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The question paper reproduced here is the paper as set by the University of Mumbai at the 2025-26 - Set 2 examination.
Contents
The questions below are the paper as the University of Mumbai set it at the 2025-26 - Set 2 examination, in the order it was set.
MarksPage
The Paper as Set
The questions in this volume are the questions asked at the 2025-26 - Set 2 examination, reproduced as the University of Mumbai set them, in the order it set them. Nothing has been reworded, added or left out. Only the answers are ours. See the original question paper.
Duration 3 hours · Total marks 100 · 7 questions answered
How to use this volume
Solve the paper first, under exam conditions and against the clock. Then read the answers here and mark your own. Reading a solution before attempting the question feels productive and teaches very little, because recognising an answer is not the same as being able to write one.
SECTION I
Printer's form 16772, sat 10 July 2026, English page 1 of 2 with its Marathi on page 2 of 2. Attempt any four questions, all questions carry equal marks
any four of seven · 100 Marks
Q.1.Discuss the concepts of force, coercion, and violence. Explain the distinctions between symbolic violence, institutionalized violence, and structural violence.[25]
Answer
For full marks, cover: this is the vocabulary question and it is set in almost every sitting, so it must be answered with precision rather than with general remarks about aggression. There are two halves and they belong to two different disciplines. Force, coercion and violence are legal concepts with statutory definitions in Indian law, so define them from the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 and the Indian Contract Act, 1872 and illustrate them. Symbolic, institutionalised and structural violence are sociological concepts, so name Bourdieu and Galtung and keep the three apart. Finish by showing why the distinction matters legally, which is that only some of them are justiciable.
Force in Indian criminal law
Section 128 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 defines force without any element of wrongfulness at all. A person uses force to another if he causes motion, change of motion or cessation of motion to that other, or if he causes to any substance such motion or change or cessation of motion as brings that substance into contact with any part of that other's body or with anything he is wearing or carrying, or in such a manner as to affect his sense of feeling. The definition is entirely physical and morally neutral: a doctor examining a patient and a nurse lifting a child both use force.
Wrongfulness enters at the next step. Section 129 defines criminal force as the intentional use of force to a person without his consent, in order to commit an offence, or with the intention or knowledge that the force will cause injury, fear or annoyance. Section 130 defines assault as making a gesture or preparation intending or knowing it likely that the other will apprehend the use of criminal force. The architecture is therefore a ladder: force is neutral, criminal force adds absence of consent and a culpable purpose, and assault punishes the apprehension without the contact.
Two points earn marks. First, the definition of force is wide enough to cover indirect application, as the Sanhita's own illustration of a person unfastening a moored boat shows. Second, contact with clothing or with anything the person is carrying is force, which is what allows snatching and the pulling of a garment to be prosecuted as criminal force rather than as mere theft.
Coercion, and why it belongs to a different branch of law
Coercion in Indian law is primarily a doctrine of the law of contract, not of crime. Section 15 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872 defines it as the committing or threatening to commit any act forbidden by the Indian Penal Code, now the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, or the unlawful detaining or threatening to detain any property, to the prejudice of any person whatever, with the intention of causing any person to enter into an agreement. Its consequence is not punishment but voidability: by section 19, an agreement caused by coercion is voidable at the option of the party whose consent was so obtained.
Chikham Ammiraju v. Chikham Seshamma, ILR (1918) 41 Mad 33 is the classic illustration and remains a favourite with examiners. A husband threatened to commit suicide unless his wife and son released certain properties in favour of his brother. The Madras High Court, by majority, held that although suicide itself was beyond punishment, an attempt to commit suicide was then an offence under section 309 of the Indian Penal Code, so a threat to commit suicide was a threat to commit an act forbidden by the Code, and the release deed was obtained by coercion and was voidable. The case is a lesson in reading a definition literally, and it shows that coercion looks to the effect on the will rather than to physical contact.
The criminal law equivalent is not called coercion at all. It is extortion, where property is delivered under fear of injury intentionally put, and criminal intimidation under section 351 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, where a threat of injury to person, reputation or property is made with intent to cause alarm or to compel an act. Coercion and criminal intimidation therefore overlap on the same facts but produce different consequences, one civil and one penal.
Violence: the concept the criminal law never defines
Violence is the broadest of the three and, significantly, Indian penal law does not define it. It uses the word in composite expressions, most importantly in section 191, where rioting is defined as the use of force or violence by an unlawful assembly or by any member of it in prosecution of the common object. The drafting is deliberate: force is defined and violence is not, because violence extends beyond force to include violence against property and, in ordinary usage, to intensity and destructiveness that the neutral definition of force does not capture.
For the purposes of this paper violence is best defined, following the World Health Organization, as the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation. The two words in that definition that open the second half of the answer are "power" and "deprivation".
| Concept | Source | Essence | Legal consequence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Force | BNS section 128 | Causing motion or contact; morally neutral | None by itself |
| Criminal force | BNS section 129 | Force without consent, for an offence or to cause injury, fear or annoyance | Punishable, section 131 |
| Coercion | Contract Act section 15 | Threat of a forbidden act to obtain consent | Agreement voidable, section 19 |
| Criminal intimidation | BNS section 351 | Threat of injury to cause alarm or compel an act | Punishable |
| Violence | Not defined | Force or power causing or likely to cause harm; wider than force | Element of rioting, section 191 |
The sociological trio
Structural violence was defined by Johan Galtung in 1969. Violence is present, he wrote, when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realisations are below their potential realisations. Where an actor can be identified the violence is personal or direct; where the harm is built into the structure of society and no actor can be pointed to, it is structural. It shows up as differential life expectancy, differential literacy and differential access to land, and its Indian face is the correlation between caste, landlessness and infant mortality. In 1990 Galtung added cultural violence, meaning those aspects of religion, ideology, language and art that legitimise the other two.
Symbolic violence is Pierre Bourdieu's concept and its distinctive element is misrecognition. The domination is exercised through categories of perception that the dominated share, so it is accepted as the natural order rather than experienced as violence. Untouchability is the paradigm: a hierarchy sustained not principally by beatings but by an internalised sense of pollution, deference and appropriate occupation. It is the mechanism that makes structural violence stable.
Institutionalised violence is narrower and more legal, and it is the one an Indian court can act upon directly. It means violence inflicted by the formal institutions of the state and their agents in the course of their functions: custodial torture and custodial death, encounter killings, prison conditions, the punitive demolition of homes.
Why the distinction is not merely academic
The three concepts have three different legal fates, and saying so is what turns a description into an argument.
Structural violence is not justiciable as such. It is addressed by Part IV of the Constitution, particularly Articles 38, 39 and 46, which are expressly non-enforceable by courts under Article 37. That is why a petition complaining of caste-correlated poverty must be reframed as a claim under Article 21 before a court will hear it.
Symbolic violence becomes justiciable only when it takes a listed form. This is exactly what section 3 of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 does when it punishes garlanding with footwear, forcible tonsuring, parading a person naked, compelling manual scavenging and imposing a social boycott. Every one of these is punished for its symbolic content rather than for the physical hurt, which is often slight.
Institutionalised violence is fully justiciable and compensable. D.K. Basu v. State of West Bengal, (1997) 1 SCC 416 began as a letter to the Chief Justice about deaths in police custody. The Supreme Court held that custodial torture is a violation of Article 21 even where the arrest is lawful, issued eleven mandatory requirements including a memo of arrest attested by a family member or respectable local person, intimation to a relative, the arrestee's right to have a lawyer during interrogation and medical examination every forty eight hours, and confirmed that compensation lies in public law.
The foundation of that remedy is Nilabati Behera v. State of Orissa, (1993) 2 SCC 746, where a young man taken into custody was found dead on railway tracks the next morning and the Court awarded his mother compensation under Article 32, holding that sovereign immunity is no defence to a claim for breach of a fundamental right.
Sukanya Shantha v. Union of India, 2024 INSC 753 shows all three concepts operating at once and is therefore the ideal closing illustration. State prison manuals assigned sweeping and scavenging to prisoners of particular castes, classified denotified tribes by a supposed "natural tendency to escape", and segregated barracks. The segregation was institutionalised violence because officials imposed it; the classification was symbolic violence because it was carried in categories treated as natural; and the resulting distribution of degrading work was structural violence. The Court struck the provisions down as violating Articles 14, 15, 17, 21 and 23 and directed that the caste column be deleted from prison registers.
Conclusion. Force, coercion and violence are three different legal ideas: force is defined neutrally by section 128 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and becomes criminal only when section 129 adds absence of consent and a culpable purpose; coercion is a contractual vitiating factor under section 15 of the Contract Act whose sanction is voidability, as Chikham Ammiraju shows; and violence is deliberately left undefined by the penal law because it must be wide enough to cover the destruction that rioting under section 191 involves. The sociological trio adds what the legal vocabulary omits.
Structural violence names harm with no author, symbolic violence names the misrecognition that makes such harm acceptable to those who suffer it, and institutionalised violence names the harm done by the state's own agents. The practical importance of keeping them apart is that Indian law can reach only the third directly, reaches the second only where Parliament has listed the humiliation as an offence, and confines the first to unenforceable Directive Principles, which is precisely why the study of collective violence cannot be confined to the criminal law.
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