LLM Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration Collective Violence and Criminal Justice System 2018 Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: organise the first limb by who the perpetrator is, because that is the variable that determines which law applies, what evidence is available and why cases fail. Violence by an intimate partner, by the wider family, by an acquaintance, by a stranger, by an institution and by the community are six different legal problems, not one. Then take the government measures in order of the year they were made and assess each. Keep case law for testing whether the measure worked.

The violence, by relationship

By the intimate partner. This is the largest category by a wide margin in every survey. The criminal law addresses it through section 85 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, which punishes cruelty by a husband or his relative, with cruelty defined by section 86 to include conduct likely to drive the woman to suicide or to cause grave injury, and harassment with a view to coercing an unlawful demand for property.

By an institution. Section 68 punishes sexual intercourse by a public servant, a jail superintendent, or the management or staff of a hospital or remand home with a woman in custody or under charge, and it does not require proof of force, because consent in such a relationship is not meaningful. Section 75 addresses harassment at work, alongside the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013.

By the market and by medicine. Trafficking, addressed by the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956 and the trafficking provisions of the Sanhita, and sex selection before birth, addressed by the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994.

The government measures, in sequence

1961 and 1986: the first statutes. The Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961 and the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1986 were declaratory and almost unenforced; the Dowry Act's principal legacy is the definition of dowry that later provisions borrow.

2012 and 2013: the two large reforms. The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 created a gender-neutral, age-graded code for child sexual offences. The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013, enacted on the report of the Committee under Justice J.S. Verma constituted on 23 December 2012 and reporting on 23 January 2013, redefined rape, created discrete offences of acid attack, sexual harassment, disrobing, voyeurism and stalking, and defined consent. The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act of the same year gave statutory form to what Vishaka had directed sixteen years earlier.

2018 and after: severity. The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2018 introduced the death penalty for rape of a girl below twelve and graded minimum sentences. The procedural guarantees now sit in the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023: recording of information by a woman police officer under the proviso to section 173(1), medical examination under section 184, completion of investigation within two months under section 193(2), a forensic team at the scene of any offence punishable with seven years or more under section 176(3), the bar on arresting a woman after sunset under section 43(5), and victim compensation, treatment of victims and a witness protection scheme under sections 396 to 398.

State of Punjab v. Gurmit Singh, (1996) 2 SCC 384 is the test of whether the trial works. A schoolgirl was abducted and raped, and the trial court acquitted because it disbelieved her, relying on delay in the complaint and on its own expectations of how a victim behaves. Setting the acquittal aside, the Supreme Court held that the evidence of the prosecutrix stands on the same footing as that of an injured witness, that corroboration is not a rule of law, that delay must be understood against social reality, and that such trials should ordinarily be held in camera and, where practicable, before a woman judge. Much of this became statutory only in 2013.

Lalita Kumari v. Government of U.P., (2014) 2 SCC 1 is the test of whether the case is registered at all. A Constitution Bench held that registration of an FIR is mandatory under what was then section 154 of the Code where the information discloses a cognizable offence, that no preliminary enquiry is permissible in such a case, and that action must be taken against officers who fail to register. Non-registration remains the single largest point of loss in this class of case, which is why this decision matters more to outcomes than the definition of any offence.

The assessment

Two criticisms are decisive. The first is the exception Parliament kept. The Verma Committee recommended removing the marital rape exception, removing the sanction requirement for prosecuting armed forces personnel for sexual offences in disturbed areas, and introducing command responsibility; none was accepted, and Exception 2 to section 63 of the Sanhita still provides that sexual acts by a man with his own wife, she not being under eighteen, are not rape. It was read down for wives between fifteen and eighteen in Independent Thought v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 800, and the challenge in respect of adult wives is pending. The second is money and personnel: the Nirbhaya Fund has been persistently under-utilised, fast track courts are frequently existing courts renamed, and the two month investigation deadline in section 193(2) has no sanction attached to its breach.

Conclusion. Violence against women in India is best analysed by the relationship between victim and perpetrator, because that determines the applicable law and the evidentiary problem: the intimate partner category is the largest and is met by sections 80, 85 and 86 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and by the civil machinery of the Act of 2005; the acquaintance category makes consent the contested issue and is why the 2013 definition matters; and the institutional category is met by section 68, which dispenses with proof of force.

For full marks, cover: the words most candidates read past are "amongst the religious communities". The question is not only about caste among Hindus; it asks about caste as a practice that has spread across religions in India, and that is where the distinctive marks are, because it raises the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950 and the still unresolved question of Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims. Explain the proposition, then the atrocities, then the government's role, and end with the reform that is pending.

Why caste is called a black spot

The description is not rhetoric. India's constitutional order rests on the equal moral standing of every person, and caste is the single institution that denies that standing by birth and does so with religious sanction. It is a black spot because it is the internal contradiction of an otherwise egalitarian settlement, and because it is invisible to criminal law until it produces a discrete incident.

The law's response has been uneven and is the sharpest single point in this answer. Paragraph 3 of the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950 originally provided that no person professing a religion different from Hinduism shall be deemed a member of a Scheduled Caste. It was amended in 1956 to include Sikhs and in 1990 to include Buddhists. Christians and Muslims of Scheduled Caste origin remain excluded, so a Dalit who converts to Christianity or Islam loses the protection of the reservation provisions and, on the prevailing view, of the special criminal statute as well, while retaining the social disability that the protection exists to answer.

Soosai v. Union of India, 1985 Supp SCC 590 is the case on the point. A Christian of Scheduled Caste origin, a cobbler, challenged his exclusion from the benefits available to Hindu Scheduled Castes. The Supreme Court accepted that a convert may continue to suffer the same disabilities, but held that the material placed before it was not sufficient to establish that the disabilities were of the same order and extent, and declined to strike down the classification, effectively leaving the question to be reopened on better evidence.

The atrocities

The statutory notion is precise. "Atrocity" under section 2(1)(a) of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 means an offence punishable under section 3, and section 3(1) applies only where the offender is not a member of these communities and the victim is. Reading the enumerated list shows what the Act is about: forcing a person to eat or drink an inedible or obnoxious substance; dumping excreta or carcasses at the entrance of their premises; garlanding with footwear or parading naked; forcible tonsuring; wrongful occupation of land; compelling the carrying of carcasses or the digging of graves; compelling manual scavenging; dedication as a devadasi; and imposing a social or economic boycott. These are rituals of subordination, and nearly every one of them is a response to an assertion of equality.

At Ramabai Ambedkar Nagar in Mumbai on 11 July 1997, a State Reserve Police Force party fired on a crowd protesting the desecration of a statue of Dr Ambedkar, killing ten residents and injuring many more. The proceedings against the officer who ordered the firing ran for more than a decade. The episode belongs in this answer because it shows the two forms of violence, private atrocity and institutional violence, operating on the same population.

The role of Government

Constitutional. Article 17 abolishes untouchability and makes its practice in any form an offence; it is the only fundamental right that operates against private persons without qualification. Article 15(2) opens shops, wells, tanks, roads and places of public resort. Article 23 prohibits forced labour. Article 25(2)(b) saves temple entry legislation, and Sri Venkataramana Devaru v. State of Mysore, AIR 1958 SC 255 held that where a denomination's right under Article 26(b) collides with the temple entry guarantee, the two must be harmonised and the exclusion of Harijans must give way. Articles 330, 332 and 335 provide representation, and Articles 338 and 338A create the National Commissions.

The directions caused nationwide protests on 2 April 2018 in which lives were lost, and Parliament responded within months by inserting section 18A, providing that no preliminary enquiry is required for registration of an FIR, that no approval is required for arrest, and that section 438 of the Code does not apply. The Supreme Court upheld section 18A in Prathvi Raj Chauhan v. Union of India, (2020) 4 SCC 727, while holding that anticipatory bail is not wholly excluded where the complaint on its face discloses no offence under the Act, and recalled the Mahajan directions on review.

Where the effort falls short

Three failures are documented. Enforcement: 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 in 2023, while only about 20,300 trials were completed in 2023 and more than 93 per cent of cases remained pending at the end of the year, in a statute that requires trial within two months of the charge sheet.

The atrocities themselves are the enforcement of that hierarchy, which is why section 3 of the 1989 Act lists humiliations rather than degrees of injury, and Khairlanji shows how easily the caste element of even the gravest case fails of proof. The Government's role has been substantial in declaring the norm and in defending the special machinery, most clearly by enacting section 18A within months of Mahajan and successfully defending it in Prathvi Raj Chauhan, and it has been weakest exactly where it required administration rather than legislation, in a pendency above ninety three per cent and in a section 4 against negligent officials that is almost never used.

The starting position: what already exists

India's counter-terrorism architecture rests on the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 as amended in 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2019; the National Investigation Agency Act, 2008 as amended in 2019; the Explosive Substances Act, 1908; State legislation such as the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, 1999; and, since 1 July 2024, section 113 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, which brings the terrorist act into the general penal code for the first time, in terms substantially borrowed from the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, with the choice between the two statutes left to an officer not below the rank of Superintendent of Police.

Two statutes have already been tried and withdrawn. The Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, 1985 lapsed in 1995 after around 76,000 persons had been detained under it with convictions in about one per cent of cases, and the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002 was repealed in 2004 after a review committee found large numbers of cases registered without justification.

Measure one: fix the trial, not the offence

The single most effective measure available is to make trials finish. Section 43D(5) of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act bars bail where the court is of opinion that the accusation is prima facie true, and NIA v. Zahoor Ahmad Shah Watali, (2019) 5 SCC 1 held that at the bail stage the court must take the material at face value and may not weigh its admissibility or probative worth. The corrective in Union of India v. K.A. Najeeb, (2021) 3 SCC 713, that a constitutional court may grant bail under Article 21 where trial within a reasonable time is impossible, comes only after years in custody, as it did there after more than five years with 276 witnesses still to be examined.

The recommendations follow directly. Fix statutory outer limits for the completion of trial in scheduled offences, with automatic bail on default, on the model already used for default bail on failure to file a charge sheet. Provide sufficient designated courts and dedicated prosecutors, since a special court that hears other work is not a special court. And require periodic judicial review of continued detention on the basis of actual trial progress rather than the strength of the accusation.

Measure three: institutional consolidation

Complete the intelligence architecture. The Multi Agency Centre and NATGRID exist; the National Counter Terrorism Centre proposed after the Mumbai attacks of November 2008 was never operationalised because States objected to a central body with powers of arrest. The measure to recommend is a coordination and analysis body without independent powers of arrest, which meets the federal objection while closing the intelligence gap, since public order and police are State subjects under Entries 1 and 2 of the State List and any design that ignores this will fail politically.

Give the National Investigation Agency capacity to match its jurisdiction. The 2019 amendment extended its reach to scheduled offences committed outside India and added human trafficking, counterfeit currency, cyber terrorism and offences under the Explosive Substances Act, 1908, without a proportionate increase in officers, courts or prosecutors.

Measure five: prevention, deradicalisation and the political question

Address the grievance where it is real. The clearest Indian evidence is the left wing extremist movement, where the state's own diagnosis produced the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, whose preamble records that forest rights were not adequately recognised, resulting in a historical injustice. The number of affected districts fell from 126 in 2014 to a reported 11 by 2025 through a combination of security operations, road building and rights recognition, and the lesson is that the security measure and the entitlement measure worked together.

Do not create the grievance. Arup Bhuyan v. State of Assam, (2023) 8 SCC 745 held that mere continued membership of an association declared unlawful is an offence under section 10(a)(i), overruling the Court's own decisions of 2011 which had required active incitement. Whatever the correctness of that reading, prosecuting passive membership at scale converts sympathisers into cadres, and it is the practice rather than the provision that should be restrained by the sanction requirement in section 45.

The measure not to take

Restoring a TADA or POTA style statute. Both were upheld and both were abandoned, and the reasons were the same on each occasion: mass detention, negligible conviction and use in States with no terrorist activity. A third attempt would repeat the result, and the constitutional cover that Kartar Singh and PUCL supply makes that more likely rather than less.

Conclusion. The measures the Government of India should take are almost entirely procedural and institutional rather than penal, because the substantive law is already comprehensive after the 2019 amendments and the enactment of section 113 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita.

For full marks, cover: the question asserts a failure, and the right answer accepts the assertion but proves it stage by stage rather than asserting it back. Walk the case through the system, prevention, registration, investigation, prosecution, trial, appeal and compensation, and show what goes wrong at each stage and which authority establishes it. Reserve the last part for the two reasons the failure is structural rather than accidental, which are that the investigating agency is often the accused institution, and that no law makes official inaction an offence.

Why deterrence fails in this class of case in particular

Deterrence requires that a potential offender expect a sanction with reasonable probability and reasonable speed. Communal violence defeats both expectations for reasons peculiar to it. The offender acts in a crowd, so identification is difficult and the ordinary evidentiary link between the individual and the harm is broken. He acts with a belief, frequently correct, that the local administration will not act against him. And he acts in a community that will not testify against him afterwards, because the witnesses must go on living in the same town.

The Madon Commission on Bhiwandi in 1970 described the working of the local Special Investigation Squad as "a study in communal discrimination". The Srikrishna Commission on the Bombay riots of 1992-93, reporting on 16 February 1998 after examining 502 witnesses and 2,903 exhibits, named 31 police officers for participation in rioting, looting or communal acts and found a force with a built-in bias.

Stage two: registration

Non-registration and mis-registration are the first point of loss. Complaints are consolidated into omnibus FIRs naming unknown persons, so that a hundred distinct offences become one case, and individual named accused disappear into the mass. Lalita Kumari v. Government of U.P., (2014) 2 SCC 1 holds that registration is mandatory where the information discloses a cognizable offence and that no preliminary enquiry is permissible in such a case, and it directs action against officers who fail to register; the direction is honoured unevenly in ordinary crime and least of all here.

Setting the acquittal aside, the Supreme Court held that a criminal trial is a search for truth and that the court is not a mute spectator, that it was obliged to use its powers to summon and examine witnesses, that the prosecutor had failed in his duty, and it transferred the retrial from Gujarat to Maharashtra. The propositions it establishes are that a fair trial is a right of the victim and of society as well as of the accused, and that where the local system is compromised the venue itself may be changed.

Three trial-stage failures recur. Hostile witnesses, because there was no statutory witness protection until sections 396 to 398 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 required every State to notify a scheme. Unmanageable joint trials, in which hundreds of accused are tried together on a common charge sheet, so that the evidence against any individual is diluted. Delay, which destroys identification evidence and outlasts the will of witnesses.

Stage six: after the trial

Compensation and rehabilitation have historically depended on executive discretion. Section 396 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita now requires every State to have a victim compensation scheme, and Mohd. Haroon v. Union of India, (2014) 5 SCC 252, arising from the Muzaffarnagar violence of 2013, is the case in which the Supreme Court held the State Government to have failed in its constitutional obligation to maintain law and order, directed arrests irrespective of political affiliation, and ordered compensation and rehabilitation for those displaced into relief camps.

The two structural reasons

First, no law makes official inaction an offence. A district magistrate or superintendent of police who does nothing while a riot proceeds commits no crime under any general statute. The Communal Violence (Prevention, Control and Rehabilitation of Victims) Bill, 2005 was introduced in the Rajya Sabha, referred to the Standing Committee on Home Affairs which reported in December 2006 and was never taken up; the Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence Bill, 2011, which would have created an offence of dereliction of duty and a statutory entitlement to relief, lapsed.

What would change the position

Implementation of Prakash Singh v. Union of India, (2006) 8 SCC 1, whose directions on a State Security Commission, fixed tenure, a Police Establishment Board for postings and Police Complaints Authorities attack the political control that the commissions identified as the mechanism of partisan policing; a statutory offence of dereliction of duty prosecutable without executive sanction; a standing mechanism for independent investigation of communal cases, so that a Special Investigation Team is not something the Supreme Court must create case by case; notified and funded witness protection under section 398; and the splitting of mass charge sheets into individually provable cases.

Trial fails through hostile witnesses and unmanageable joint trials, which is why the retrial had to be moved out of the State in Zahira Habibullah Sheikh. And the failure is structural rather than accidental for two reasons: no statute makes official inaction an offence, the Bills of 2005 and 2011 having lapsed, and a commission of inquiry can find facts but cannot convict anyone, as Ram Krishna Dalmia settled in 1958. Section 103(2) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the directions in Tehseen Poonawalla are real advances, but both operate on the offender and the officer after the event, and deterrence will not follow until the investigating agency is independent of the force accused and the district officer's inaction carries a criminal, and not merely a departmental, consequence.

The violence escalated in a recognisable order. Grain stocks were seized and redistributed. The dora's account books were burnt, which was the commonest single act because it destroyed the legal evidence of debt. Waste and surplus land was occupied. Particularly hated landlords and their agents were killed. Finally, armed guerrilla units, the dalams, operated from forest tracts. Against them stood the Razakars, the irregular militia of the Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen under Kasim Razvi, whose village raids produced the largest number of civilian deaths and drove the countryside towards the insurgents. The Indian Union's Operation Polo between 13 and 18 September 1948 ended the Nizam's rule in five days, but the Indian Army then turned on the sanghams, and the years from 1948 to 1951 were in casualty terms the bloodiest of the whole struggle. The movement was withdrawn on 21 October 1951.

Form four: violence turned inward. The most distinctive feature of the last phase was a sustained wave of suicides and self-immolations, overwhelmingly by young men, publicly commemorated as martyrdom. It is properly classified as political violence because it was public, symbolic and intended to compel a political outcome, and it is the element that most sharply distinguishes Telangana from other statehood movements in India.

The state's instruments, and their legal basis

Against the insurrection the state used proscription of the Communist Party and preventive detention rather than prosecution, and this was the period in which A.K. Gopalan v. State of Madras, AIR 1950 SC 27 held that "procedure established by law" in Article 21 meant no more than a procedure enacted by a competent legislature and that Article 22 was a self-contained code, so that the fairness of a detention law could not be questioned. That reading was abandoned in Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, (1978) 1 SCC 248, which required any procedure depriving a person of liberty to be just, fair and reasonable, and the difference between the two constitutional regimes is visible in the remedies available: the firings of 1969 produced no judicial reckoning at all, while the policing of the later phase is answerable in damages.

Ramlila Maidan Incident, In re, (2012) 5 SCC 1 governs the state's own conduct. A sleeping crowd at a permitted assembly was cleared at midnight after a prohibitory order. The Court held that the power is preventive and not punitive, that it cannot be used against an assembly that has caused no apprehension of disorder, and it awarded compensation and directed disciplinary action. Since the Telangana agitations were policed almost entirely through prohibitory orders, this is the standard by which that policing must be judged.

Babulal Parate v. State of Bombay, AIR 1960 SC 51 explains why the movement ultimately succeeded through Parliament. A challenge to the bifurcation of Bombay argued that the proviso to Article 3 required a fresh reference to the State Legislature when Parliament materially altered the scheme. The Supreme Court rejected this, holding that the proviso requires only that the State's views be ascertained and placed before Parliament, which is not bound by them. The Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly rejected the reorganisation Bill in 2014, and under Babulal Parate that rejection had no legal consequence.

The outcomes

The state's own violence shaped the movement's memory. The firings of 1969 went unpunished, and the sense of impunity that produced is a standard precondition of later escalation.

The costs fell on those with least to gain. The buses, the lost school year and the lost wages were borne by the population the movement claimed to represent, and the self-immolations were of young men who obtained nothing personally from the outcome.

The inquiry the state chose instead of a settlement

One episode deserves separate treatment because it shows how a constitutional democracy handles a violent claim it does not wish to concede.

The pattern is therefore complete and it is worth stating as a general proposition. Where a legal order responds to collective violence with an inquiry rather than with a remedy, the inquiry buys time and produces a record, and the record then becomes the evidence used against the state when the demand is eventually conceded.

Conclusion. Collective violence in the Telangana struggle took four distinct forms across seven decades: armed peasant insurrection between 1946 and 1951, directed at vetti and bhagela and organised through the sanghams of the Andhra Mahasabha, which was withdrawn on 21 October 1951 after the Indian Army had suppressed it; student and employee agitation in 1969 in which the principal violence was police firing that killed several hundred and produced no reckoning; crowd violence and prolonged general strikes between 2009 and 2014; and a sustained wave of self-immolations in the last phase, which is the movement's most distinctive and most disturbing feature.

For full marks, cover: any two are required and all three are answered here. Twelve and a half marks each. Note (a) names causes and remedies expressly, so use those as headings and give the remedies with authority rather than as pious suggestions. Note (b) is framed as a question, so it must be answered yes or no with reasons, not evaded. Note (c) uses the words "objective" and "causative", which invite a distinction between the structural conditions and the immediate triggers, and taking that distinction seriously is what earns the marks.

Confession-centred investigation. Where the case is built on what the accused says rather than on independent evidence, custody becomes the place where the case is made. The law's structural answer is exclusionary: sections 22 and 23 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 make a confession caused by inducement, threat or promise irrelevant, bar proof of any confession made to a police officer, and bar a confession made in police custody unless made in the immediate presence of a Magistrate.

Under-resourcing. Chronic vacancies, weak forensic capacity and impossible caseloads make short cuts rational for the individual officer.

Immunity. Prosecution of a public servant for an act done in the discharge of official duty requires sanction, and section 151 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 requires government sanction before prosecuting anyone for acts done under sections 148 to 150 in dispersing an assembly. Sanction is refused far more often than it is granted.

Political control of postings, which converts professional discretion into compliance, and which is what the National Police Commission identified between 1979 and 1981.

Nilabati Behera v. State of Orissa, (1993) 2 SCC 746 supplies the remedy. 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 answer to a claim for breach of a fundamental right, because the public law remedy is distinct from an action in tort.

Paramvir Singh Saini v. Baljit Singh, (2021) 1 SCC 184 is the most practical modern remedy. The Court directed CCTV cameras with night vision and audio recording in every police station covering entrance, lock-up, corridors, lobby and interrogation rooms, with recordings preserved and oversight committees at State and district level, and extended the requirement to every central agency exercising powers of arrest and interrogation.

To these should be added implementation of Prakash Singh v. Union of India, (2006) 8 SCC 1, ratification of the Convention against Torture with a substantive offence of torture, and the narrowing of sanction requirements, without which the conviction figures above will not change.

The case in law. Ahimsa survives in Indian law as a protected method rather than as a value, and the space it occupies is judicially mapped. Ramlila Maidan Incident, In re, (2012) 5 SCC 1 held that the power to make prohibitory orders, now section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, is preventive and not punitive and cannot be used against an assembly that has caused no apprehension of disorder, and awarded compensation for the midnight clearance of a sleeping crowd.

Amit Sahni v. Commissioner of Police, (2020) 10 SCC 439 set the opposite limit, holding that peaceful protest is protected but the indefinite occupation of a public thoroughfare is not. A legal order that leaves no room for announced, disciplined non-violent protest does not end protest; it converts it into the unannounced kind, which is the practical argument for keeping the method available.

The first qualification. Non-violence requires an opponent with a public opinion and some residual scruple. Gandhi's advice to the Jews of Germany in 1938 to meet Nazism with civil resistance is the least defensible thing he wrote, and its indefensibility identifies the precondition exactly. Against an adversary that is indifferent to opinion and unconstrained by law, the method has no purchase.

Objective factors: the conditions.

Concentration of land and insecurity of tenure. Where the cultivator holds at will and the proprietor may evict, every other grievance becomes existential. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 created exactly this by vesting a heritable and saleable proprietary right in the zamindar and leaving the cultivator with a customary claim only.

Indebtedness with the holding as security. Once land is alienable and the creditor may execute a decree against it, a bad season becomes permanent dispossession.

A rigid revenue demand in cash, fixed in advance and payable irrespective of the harvest, which is the ryotwari system's contribution.

Loss of common resources. The Indian Forest Acts of 1865 and 1878 converted customary shifting cultivation, grazing and the collection of minor produce into offences, which is the standing condition behind every tribal rising.

Social subordination reinforcing economic subordination, so that the landlord is also the dominant caste and the labourer's dependence is total.

Causative factors: the triggers and mechanisms.

The proof that the analysis is right lies in the state's own responses, each of which addressed an objective factor after a rising had exposed it: the Indigo Commission of 1860; the Bengal Tenancy Act, 1885 conferring occupancy rights after Pabna in 1873; the Deccan Agriculturists' Relief Act, 1879 allowing courts to look behind the bond after 1875; the special regime for the Santhal Parganas; and the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act, 1908 after the Munda rising.

Conclusion. The three notes are connected by the question of where responsibility can be fixed. Institutionalised violence has not obviously increased in incidence, but accountability for it has fallen to nearly nothing, roughly 1,700 custodial death complaints a year against three convictions in twenty four years, and the remedies exist already in D.K. Basu, Nilabati Behera and Paramvir Singh Saini and fail for want of a torture offence, of police reform and of prosecutions unblocked by sanction.

For full marks, cover: the paper letters these notes e), f) and g), continuing from Q.6 and skipping d); that is a fault in the print and it is reproduced rather than corrected. Any two are required and all three are answered. Note (f) is the one that separates candidates, because it demands Maharashtra-specific incidents with dates, and a general answer about political violence will score very little on it.

(e) Causes and consequences of collective violence

What makes violence collective. Collective violence is violence by a group, against a group, in which the individual is chosen for his membership rather than for anything he has personally done. That single feature produces both its causes and its consequences, and it is also what defeats the criminal law, because the ordinary evidentiary link between an identified offender and an identified harm is broken by the crowd.

Causes, at three depths.

Institutional. The criminal justice system is damaged by every episode: omnibus FIRs, investigation by an implicated force, hostile witnesses, unmanageable joint trials and acquittals, each of which teaches the victim community that the law is not available to it and reduces reporting next time.

Long term. Segregation. Populations relocate into homogeneous settlements after each large episode, which destroys the intercommunal civic contact that Ashutosh Varshney identifies as the strongest protective factor, so that each round makes the next easier.

The law's response is to reach the crowd through the doctrine of common object, sections 189 to 191 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, and, since 2024, to reach the discriminatory motive directly through section 103(2), which punishes murder by a group of five or more on the ground of race, caste or community, sex, place of birth, language or personal belief. On the civil side, In re Destruction of Public and Private Properties v. State of A.P., (2009) 5 SCC 212 allows a Claims Commissioner to be appointed to assess damages and permits the organisers of an event to be made prima facie liable and put to proof that they were not responsible, which is the most promising instrument the law has, because it operates on the people who assemble the crowd rather than on the individual in it.

The serial bomb blasts of 12 March 1993 in Bombay, which killed over two hundred and fifty people, and the trial under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act that followed, in which the designated court convicted a hundred persons and the convictions were substantially upheld by the Supreme Court in 2013.

The Ramabai Ambedkar Nagar firing of 11 July 1997. A State Reserve Police Force party fired on a crowd protesting the desecration of a statue of Dr Ambedkar in Ghatkopar, killing ten residents and injuring many more, and the proceedings against the officer who ordered the firing ran for more than a decade. It is the local example of institutionalised violence.

The Khairlanji killings of 29 September 2006. Four members of a Dalit family, the Bhotmanges, were killed by a mob in Bhandara district. The sessions court convicted eight persons in September 2008 and sentenced six to death; the Nagpur Bench of the Bombay High Court commuted those sentences to twenty five years in 2010. The courts declined to convict under the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, on the view that a caste motive had not been established, which is the recurring evidentiary failure the Supreme Court later analysed in Patan Jamal Vali v. State of Andhra Pradesh, (2021) 16 SCC 225.

(g) Violence against children in India

The forms. Sexual offences; physical abuse in the home, the school and institutions; child labour and bonded labour; trafficking for labour, begging and sexual exploitation; child marriage; corporal punishment; and neglect, including the differential neglect of the girl child which begins before birth.

The constitutional and statutory frame. Article 21A guarantees free and compulsory education to children between six and fourteen; Article 24 prohibits the employment of a child below fourteen in a factory, mine or hazardous employment; Article 39(e) and (f) direct that children not be abused and be given opportunities to develop in conditions of freedom and dignity; and Article 15(3) permits special provision for children.

The statutes are four. The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 creates a gender-neutral, age-graded code with special courts, presumptions and child-friendly procedure, and was amended in 2019 to increase punishments. The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, amended in 2021, deals both with children in conflict with law and with children in need of care and protection, and its section 75 punishes cruelty to a child by a person having actual charge or control.

Attorney General for India v. Satish, (2022) 5 SCC 545 set aside the Bombay High Court's holding that groping a child over her clothing was not "sexual assault" under section 7 of the 2012 Act for want of skin to skin contact. The Supreme Court held that the essential ingredient is sexual intent and not the nature of the contact, and that a construction defeating the purpose of the statute is impermissible.

Just Rights for Children Alliance v. S. Harish, 2024 INSC 716 held that viewing, storing and failing to delete child sexual exploitative material attracts section 15 of the 2012 Act read with section 67B of the Information Technology Act, 2000, reversing a High Court decision to the contrary, and recommended that the expression "child pornography" be replaced by "child sexual exploitative and abuse material" because the older phrase understates the harm.

And violence against children is now governed by a comprehensive statutory scheme, strengthened judicially in Independent Thought, Attorney General for India v. Satish and Just Rights for Children Alliance, whose weakness is not definition but delivery, in unconstituted committees, borrowed special courts and a family enterprise exception that exempts most of the child labour that actually exists.