LLM Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration Collective Violence and Criminal Justice System 2019 Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: this question offers two notes and, unlike the notes questions on the later papers, it does not say "any two of three", so both must be answered and each is worth twelve and a half marks. Give each note a structure of its own: for (a), the forms, the law and the gap; for (b), the constitutional text, the doctrinal test and the current controversy. Do not write half a page on each and stop.

(a) Violence committed against women

The forms, and the provision for each. Violence against Indian women is not one phenomenon. In the marital home it appears as cruelty and dowry harassment, punished by sections 85 and 86 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, and as dowry death within seven years of marriage under section 80, supported by the presumption in section 118 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023. Sexual violence is covered by sections 63 to 70, with section 65(2) for a victim below twelve and section 70 for gang rape.

The decisive cases. Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan, (1997) 6 SCC 241 arose from the gang rape of Bhanwari Devi, a saathin employed under a Rajasthan Government programme, in reprisal for her attempt to prevent a child marriage, and the collapse of the prosecution that followed. The Supreme Court held that Articles 19(1)(g) and 21 include the right to a safe working environment, used Articles 51(c) and 253 to draw on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and laid down guidelines binding under Article 141 until Parliament legislated, which it did only in 2013.

State of Punjab v. Gurmit Singh, (1996) 2 SCC 384 removed the evidentiary obstacles at trial, holding that the evidence of the prosecutrix stands on the footing of an injured witness, that corroboration is not a rule of law, and that delay in complaint must be assessed against social reality rather than treated as fatal.

(b) Freedom of speech

The text. Article 19(1)(a) guarantees freedom of speech and expression to citizens; Article 19(2) permits reasonable restrictions in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, contempt of court, defamation, and incitement to an offence. Public order and incitement to an offence were not in the original text. They were added by the Constitution (First Amendment) Act, 1951, in response to Romesh Thappar v. State of Madras, AIR 1950 SC 124, where the Supreme Court struck down a ban on the circulation of the journal Cross Roads on the ground that the Article as it then stood allowed restriction only where the security of the State was undermined and that public order was a wider concept the framers had deliberately excluded.

The grounds are exhaustive. A Constitution Bench held in Kaushal Kishor v. State of U.P., (2023) 4 SCC 1 that no restriction may be imposed on speech beyond the grounds enumerated in Article 19(2), even to protect other constitutional values.

The controversy. Sedition occupies an unusual position. Kedar Nath Singh v. State of Bihar, AIR 1962 SC 955 saved section 124A of the Indian Penal Code by confining it to incitement to violence or public disorder; in S.G. Vombatkere v. Union of India, (2022) 7 SCC 433 the Supreme Court directed that the section be kept in abeyance, with no fresh FIRs and pending proceedings stayed; and since 1 July 2024 the provision has been replaced by section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, whose constitutionality is itself under challenge.

What both notes have in common: the enforcement gap

Each note describes a body of law that is comprehensive on paper and thin in practice, and in both the loss occurs at the first step rather than at the last.

The Court supplied a working framework for hate speech, asking who spoke, what was said, and to whom, and treating the reach and authority of the speaker and the vulnerability of the target group as material. The practical lesson is that where the offence is broadly worded, as sections 196, 197 and 299 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita are, the process becomes the sanction and the acquittal comes years too late to matter.

The remedy each note still lacks

Both notes end at the same practical problem, which is that the law provides a right and no reliable way of realising it.

For violence against women the missing piece is protection during the trial rather than after it. Section 398 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 now requires every State Government to prepare and notify a witness protection scheme, which is a genuine advance, but the schemes are new, thinly funded and rarely invoked, and the practical consequence is that a complainant who lives in the same household or the same street as the accused withdraws. That, rather than any defect in sections 63 to 87 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, is why conviction rates in this class of case remain low.

Conclusion. Both notes describe a body of law that is now comprehensive in definition and weak in delivery. On violence against women, sections 63 to 87 and 124 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the civil machinery of the Act of 2005 and the workplace machinery of the Act of 2013 leave very little unnamed, but Vishaka had to legislate for sixteen years because Parliament would not, Gurmit Singh had to remove evidentiary assumptions that the statute had not touched, and the one recommendation the Verma Committee pressed hardest, the removal of the marital rape exception, was refused.

On freedom of speech, the doctrinal line is settled and generous: advocacy however unpopular is protected and only incitement with a proximate nexus to disorder may be punished, on the authority of Ram Manohar Lohia, Rangarajan and Shreya Singhal, and the grounds of restriction are exhaustive after Kaushal Kishor. What remains unsettled is the one provision with the longest history, sedition, which survives in abeyance as section 124A and in a new form as section 152, with its validity still to be decided.

The forms

Political. Collective violence is more often produced than merely permitted. Steven Wilkinson's account is that violence polarises and therefore rewards parties that gain from consolidating a majority, while governments dependent on minority votes suppress it, which explains why demographically identical towns have entirely different histories. Paul Brass's institutionalised riot system names the local apparatus, rumour circulators, specialists who recode an ordinary crime as communal or caste-based, and crowd recruiters, without which an incident does not become a riot. Ashutosh Varshney's converse finding is that dense intercommunal civic associations absorb shocks that would otherwise ignite.

Proximate. Processions past places of worship, rumours of desecration or cattle slaughter, an inter-community relationship, an unpunished earlier incident, and since about 2013 the fabricated video and the forwarded message, which have compressed the interval between trigger and crowd from days to hours.

Consequences, at three horizons

Immediate: death, injury, destruction of homes and livelihoods, and displacement, as at Muzaffarnagar in 2013 where tens of thousands moved into relief camps.

Preventive powers. Sections 168 to 172 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 on the duty to prevent, the passing up of intelligence, preventive arrest, protection of public property and compliance with lawful police directions; section 148 on dispersal; section 163 on prohibitory orders; and sections 126 to 129 on security for keeping the peace.

Judicial remedies, and these are the ones with authority. Tehseen S. Poonawalla v. Union of India, (2018) 9 SCC 501 laid down preventive, remedial and punitive measures against mob lynching: a nodal officer of at least Superintendent rank in every district with a special task force, identification of areas where such incidents have occurred, patrolling, prompt FIRs, fast track trials, a compensation scheme, and departmental action against officers who fail to act, treated as deliberate negligence.

What is still missing

No general statute on collective violence. The Communal Violence (Prevention, Control and Rehabilitation of Victims) Bill, 2005 was never taken up after the Standing Committee reported in December 2006, and 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. An official who does nothing during a riot commits no offence.

Commissions cannot punish. Under the Commissions of Inquiry Act, 1952 a report binds nobody, as Ram Krishna Dalmia v. Justice S.R. Tendolkar, AIR 1958 SC 538 holds, statements before a commission are inadmissible against the maker under section 6, and the government need only lay the report with a memorandum of action taken under section 3(4).

Police reform ordered in Prakash Singh v. Union of India, (2006) 8 SCC 1 on a State Security Commission, fixed tenure, a Police Establishment Board and Police Complaints Authorities remains largely unimplemented, and it is precisely political control of postings that the commissions of inquiry have identified as the mechanism of partisan policing.

The offence has a political constituency. Unlike theft or homicide, collective violence is committed by people who believe, often correctly, that a section of political opinion approves. That belief changes the behaviour of every actor in the system, from the officer deciding whether to register to the prosecutor deciding what to press.

Prevention is discretionary and unreviewable. The powers in sections 148, 163 and 168 to 172 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita are permissive in form, and a decision not to exercise them leaves no record and attracts no sanction. That is precisely the gap that a statutory offence of dereliction of duty would close, and it is why Tehseen Poonawalla had to direct that inaction be treated as deliberate negligence for departmental purposes.

For full marks, cover: three tasks are set. The quotation must be engaged with rather than merely agreed to, so explain in what sense terrorism is antihuman, which is that it deliberately targets the innocent in order to communicate with a third party. Then causes and remedies from the Indian perspective, which means the four theatres India actually faces rather than a general account. Then the instruction to cite recent activities, which is an instruction to be specific with dates and places, and a candidate who ignores it forfeits marks even if the rest is excellent.

Why terrorism is described as antihuman

The description is accurate for a precise reason. In ordinary violence the victim and the target are the same person. In terrorism they are deliberately different: the person killed is not the person to be influenced, and is chosen because his death will communicate with a government or a population. The victim is therefore treated purely as an instrument, which is the exact structure of the wrong Kant identified in using a person merely as a means.

Left wing extremism, whose causes are agrarian and tenurial rather than ideological in origin: alienation of tribal land, denial of forest rights, displacement by mining and irrigation projects, and the absence of the ordinary state in the affected districts. Parliament's own diagnosis is the preamble to the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, which records that forest rights were not adequately recognised, resulting in a historical injustice.

Insurgency in the north east, driven by ethnic identity, contested boundaries and demographic anxiety about migration.

Ideological and communal terrorism, in which organised violence follows a period of communal polarisation, and which is the theatre in which impunity for earlier collective violence operates most directly as a recruiting argument.

Cutting across all four are three enabling causes: external sponsorship, financing through hawala, counterfeit currency and now digital channels, and impunity, since a community that has seen no prosecution after a massacre is the most reliable recruiting ground any organisation can have.

Remedies: the legal framework and its problems

The statutes. The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, amended in 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2019; the National Investigation Agency Act, 2008, amended in 2019 to extend the agency's reach to offences committed outside India and to add human trafficking, counterfeit currency, cyber terrorism and offences under the Explosive Substances Act, 1908; State legislation such as the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, 1999; and section 113 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023.

The constitutional foundation. Kartar Singh v. State of Punjab, (1994) 3 SCC 569 upheld the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, 1985 against challenges to legislative competence and to vagueness, holding that Parliament was competent under the Union List read with the residuary power and that the gravity of the threat justified a departure from ordinary procedure, while laying down guidelines to control the admissibility of confessions to senior police officers.

The width of the offence. 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.

The remedies that would actually work

Speed of trial, with statutory outer limits and default bail, so that Najeeb relief is not needed after five years. Investigative and forensic capacity, including notification of the requirement in section 176(3) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 that a forensic expert visit the scene of every offence punishable with seven years or more. Witness protection, now required of every State by section 398 of the same Sanhita, since intimidation is the commonest cause of collapse in these trials.

The definitional problem. India proposed a Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism at the United Nations in 1996, and it has still not been adopted, because states have been unable to agree on a definition that distinguishes terrorism from the activity of national liberation movements and from the acts of state armed forces. The consequence is that the international regime consists of a series of sectoral conventions, on hijacking, hostage-taking, bombings and the financing of terrorism, rather than a single instrument.

The operative obligations. Security Council Resolution 1373 of 2001, adopted under Chapter VII and therefore binding on all members, requires states to criminalise the financing of terrorism, freeze the assets of those involved, deny safe haven and cooperate in criminal investigations. The Financial Action Task Force standards give those obligations practical teeth through mutual evaluation, and they are the instrument India has used most effectively against external sponsorship.

The remedies India has chosen have been legislative and severe, and Kartar Singh and PUCL have consistently upheld them, yet TADA and POTA were both abandoned once the ratio of detentions to convictions became indefensible, and the same defect is now visible in the bail regime that Watali enforces and Najeeb relieves only after years. The measures that would reduce terrorism are therefore procedural and institutional, speed of trial, forensic capacity, witness protection, financial tracing and the recognition of genuine grievance, and not a further widening of an offence that is already as wide as any in Indian law.

The police: prevention, registration and investigation

Prevention is the stage at which the system can do most and does least. Section 168 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 obliges every police officer to interpose to prevent a cognizable offence, section 169 requires intelligence of a design to commit one to be passed up, section 170 permits preventive arrest, section 163 permits prohibitory orders in urgent cases of apprehended danger, and sections 126 to 129 permit security to be taken for keeping the peace and for good behaviour. Section 148 permits an unlawful assembly, or any assembly of five or more likely to disturb the peace, to be commanded to disperse and dispersed by force; section 149 permits dispersal by the armed forces on the order of the District Magistrate.

The prosecution and the courts

Zahira Habibullah Sheikh v. State of Gujarat, (2004) 4 SCC 158 is the leading authority on the role of the court itself. Fourteen people were burnt alive in the Best Bakery at Vadodara in March 2002; at trial the witnesses turned hostile and all the accused were acquitted within weeks.

Setting aside the acquittal, the Supreme Court held that a criminal trial is a search for truth, that the court is not a mute spectator and must use its powers to summon and examine witnesses where the prosecution fails to do so, that the public prosecutor had failed in his duty, and it transferred the retrial from Gujarat to Maharashtra. Its propositions are that a fair trial is the right of the victim and of society as well as of the accused, and that where the local system is compromised the venue is part of the fairness of the trial.

The substantive law the courts apply

The system reaches the crowd through the doctrine of common object. Section 189 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 defines an unlawful assembly as five or more persons with a specified common object; section 190 makes every member liable for an offence committed by any member in prosecution of that common object or such as the members knew was likely to be committed; section 191 punishes rioting; and section 192 punishes wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause rioting. Sections 196, 197, 299 and 302 punish the speech that precedes the violence.

Since 1 July 2024 there is also section 103(2), which punishes murder by a group of five or more acting in concert on the ground of race, caste or community, sex, place of birth, language or personal belief with death or imprisonment for life and fine. Its significance is that the discriminatory motive is now an element of a distinct offence rather than a matter of sentencing.

The limit is evidentiary and it is real: membership of the unlawful assembly must still be proved against each accused, and mere presence in the vicinity is not enough, which is why mass charge sheets produce mass acquittals.

The findings of inquiry cannot be used. 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 when upholding the Act against the argument that it usurped judicial power; statements made before a commission are inadmissible against the maker under section 6; and section 3(4) requires only that the report be laid before the legislature with a memorandum of the action taken. That is why the Srikrishna Commission's naming of 31 officers in 1998 produced so little.

The two reports that would have changed the system, and what happened to them

The failures described above have been examined officially more than once, and the fate of those examinations is part of the answer.

The Second Administrative Reforms Commission's report on Public Order, in 2007, recommended a statutory framework for the prevention of communal violence, district level accountability, and compensation as an entitlement rather than a discretionary payment. Its recommendations overlap almost exactly with the lapsed Bills of 2005 and 2011, which is the point: the diagnosis has been settled and agreed for two decades, and only the legislation is missing.

Conclusion. The criminal justice system's role in communal violence is to prevent, to register, to investigate, to prosecute, to try and to compensate, and it possesses adequate powers at every one of those stages: sections 148, 163 and 168 to 172 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita for prevention, the common object provisions of sections 189 to 192 and now section 103(2) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita for attribution, and sections 396 to 398 for compensation and witness protection. Its performance is nonetheless poor, and for reasons that are structural rather than accidental.

For full marks, cover: the instruction to cite examples and cases is not decoration; it is where the marks are, and an answer that describes atrocities in general terms without naming an incident and a judgment will not pass at postgraduate level. Give the statutory notion first, because "atrocity" is a term of art, then the sociological content, then named examples with dates, then the cases in a line that shows how the law developed, and finish with the enforcement record.

The statutory notion

Section 2(1)(a) of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 provides that "atrocity" means an offence punishable under section 3. The definition is circular by design: Parliament chose enumeration over an abstract formula, because an abstract test would have left it to the judge to decide whether a particular humiliation was grave enough. The Statement of Objects and Reasons to the 1989 Bill records that the term had not been defined until then.

None of this is random assault. Each is a ritual that restates a hierarchy, and almost every one is triggered by an act of equality: drawing water where others draw it, contesting an election, riding a horse in one's own wedding procession, refusing to remove a carcass. Ambedkar's account of caste as graded inequality maintained by sanction explains the pattern better than any theory of individual criminality, and Article 17, which abolishes untouchability and makes its practice in any form an offence, is the constitutional provision the Act implements.

Examples, with dates

Khairlanji, Bhandara district, Maharashtra, 29 September 2006. Four members of the Bhotmange family, the mother Surekha, the daughter Priyanka and two sons, were killed by a mob after the family had resisted encroachment on its land and given evidence against villagers. The Bhandara sessions court convicted eight persons in September 2008 and sentenced six to death, and the Nagpur Bench of the Bombay High Court commuted those sentences to twenty five years' imprisonment in 2010. The feature that matters for this question is that the courts declined to convict under the 1989 Act, on the view that a caste motive had not been established.

The cases, in the order they developed the law

State of Karnataka v. Appa Balu Ingale, 1995 Supp (4) SCC 469. The accused prevented Dalits at gunpoint from drawing water from a newly dug borewell. The trial court convicted under the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955, the appellate courts acquitted on the evidence, and the Supreme Court restored the conviction. The concurring judgment of Ramaswamy J is the most sustained judicial statement in Indian law that untouchability is a system rather than an incident and that Article 17 imposes a positive duty on the State.

State of M.P. v. Ram Kishna Balothia, (1995) 3 SCC 221. The High Court had struck down section 18, which excludes anticipatory bail, as violating Articles 14 and 21. Reversing, the Supreme Court held that offences under the Act form a class apart because they arise from the practice of untouchability which Article 17 itself singles out, and that Parliament was entitled to conclude that anticipatory bail would be used to intimidate complainants in village society.

Patan Jamal Vali v. State of Andhra Pradesh, (2021) 16 SCC 225. A blind Scheduled Caste woman was raped. The Court upheld the conviction for rape but set aside the conviction under section 3(2)(v) because the prosecution had not proved that the offence was committed on the ground of caste, and used the occasion to bring intersectionality into Indian sentencing, directing courts to recognise that caste, gender and disability compound one another.

Sukanya Shantha v. Union of India, 2024 INSC 753. State prison manuals assigned sweeping and scavenging by caste, segregated barracks and classified denotified tribes by supposed hereditary traits. 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. Its importance is that the violence there was not an individual excess but the rule the officer was following.

The National Commission for Scheduled Castes and the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes, established by Articles 338 and 338A, have the power to investigate and monitor all matters relating to the safeguards provided for these communities, to inquire into specific complaints, and to have all the powers of a civil court for that purpose, and their reports must be laid before Parliament with a memorandum explaining the action taken on the recommendations. The constitutional design therefore anticipated non-compliance and required it to be explained. In practice the annual reports are laid years late, and the memorandum requirement has become a formality.

The State and district level Vigilance and Monitoring Committees required by rule 17 of the 1995 Rules are the machinery closest to the ground. The State committee is to be chaired by the Chief Minister and to meet twice a year, and the district committee by the District Magistrate and to meet quarterly, in each case to review the registration of cases, the progress of investigation and prosecution, and the payment of relief. Where they meet, relief improves measurably; in most States they meet far less often than the Rules require.

The case law has been consistently protective of the machinery, Balothia upholding the exclusion of anticipatory bail, Prathvi Raj Chauhan upholding section 18A after Parliament enacted it to reverse Mahajan, and Sukanya Shantha reaching caste inside the prison itself, but Hitesh Verma and Patan Jamal Vali show how easily the special charge is lost on the requirements of public view and of caste motive. With pendency above ninety three per cent and section 4 unused, the honest assessment is that the Act declares the norm well, protects the complainant well and deters very little.

What ahimsa actually is, since the question turns on it

Gandhi's ahimsa is not abstention. He called it the largest love and the greatest charity, and treated it as a positive force, soul force, which acts upon the opponent. The person who does not retaliate from fear is not practising it; Gandhi said that where the choice lay only between cowardice and violence he would counsel violence.

It rests on two propositions. Ahimsa is inseparable from satya: truth is the end and non-violence the means, and because no human being possesses absolute truth, none is entitled to inflict irreversible harm in its name. And means and ends are convertible: the means are the end in the making, so a free India obtained by terror would be governed by terror. It is operationalised as satyagraha, which has rules, exhaust negotiation, act publicly, never exploit the opponent's difficulty, accept the legal penalty rather than evade it, and suspend the campaign if your own side turns violent, which Gandhi did after Chauri Chaura in February 1922 at the cost of the movement.

Where it is relevant today, domain by domain

Political change. The argument above, and the fact that where non-violent movements have failed recently they have generally failed against adversaries indifferent to opinion, which supports rather than undermines the analysis.

Security policy. The contemporary doctrine that an act of terror will be answered as an act of war is the antithesis of the Gandhian position, and a candidate should say so rather than pretend otherwise. Gandhi's argument is not that retaliation never works but that a polity which normalises retaliation acquires the habits of its adversary. That is a claim about the long run and it is not refuted by a successful operation.

Environment and economy. The maxim that the earth provides enough for every person's need but not for every person's greed is a founding text of sustainable development, and Indian environmental jurisprudence reached the same place through the doctrines of sustainable development and intergenerational equity accepted in Vellore Citizens' Welfare Forum v. Union of India, (1996) 5 SCC 647.

Amit Sahni v. Commissioner of Police, (2020) 10 SCC 439 set the limit from the other side, holding that although peaceful protest is protected, the indefinite occupation of a public thoroughfare is not, because the rights of other users are equally protected.

Read together they define the room a constitutional democracy must leave for the method, and they support the practical form of the argument: a legal order that leaves no lawful space for announced, disciplined non-violent protest does not end protest, it converts it into the unannounced and undisciplined kind.

The conditions the method requires, and where it fails

It requires an opponent capable of shame. Non-violence works by imposing a moral and political cost on a ruler who has 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.

It requires discipline in the movement. Chauri Chaura is Gandhi's own demonstration that an undisciplined mass movement produces the violence it disavows, and it is why the ashram vows are part of the doctrine and not decoration.

Nuclear deterrence. Deterrence works by a credible threat to kill non-combatants on a very large scale, so it is a standing threat of the very act ahimsa forbids, and yet it has coincided with the absence of major power war for eight decades. The Gandhian answer is not that deterrence has failed empirically but that a security founded on a permanent conditional intention to commit mass killing corrupts the polity that maintains it. That is a claim about the long run, and it is neither proved nor refuted by the record.

Climate and infrastructure protest. The contemporary movements that block roads, occupy sites and disrupt public services raise exactly the question Gandhi answered with the rule that the satyagrahi accepts the legal penalty. A movement that disrupts and then resists prosecution has abandoned the moral asymmetry that gives the method its force, and Indian law has drawn the same line in Amit Sahni v. Commissioner of Police, (2020) 10 SCC 439, holding that peaceful protest is protected but the indefinite occupation of a public thoroughfare is not.

The point of collision was concrete. The Communal Award of 1932 granted separate electorates to the Depressed Classes; Gandhi fasted against it; and the Poona Pact of 24 September 1932 substituted reserved seats within a joint electorate. Ambedkar accepted the Pact under the pressure of the fast and maintained afterwards that a fast directed against a subordinated group's own political safeguard was itself a form of coercion, which is a criticism drawn from Gandhi's own rule that the fast may be used only against someone bound to the faster by ties of affection or common purpose.

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.

For full marks, cover: the question distinguishes "objective" from "causative" factors, and that distinction is the answer's skeleton. Objective factors are the standing conditions that make an agrarian society liable to violence; causative factors are the mechanisms and triggers that convert those conditions into a rising. Set them out separately, illustrate each with a named rising and a date, and then prove the analysis by showing that the state's own remedial statutes attacked the objective factors one by one.

The objective factors: the standing conditions

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 condition in Bengal and Bihar by vesting a heritable and saleable proprietary right in the zamindar while leaving the resident cultivator with a customary claim only, and Regulation VII of 1799 and Regulation V of 1812 armed the proprietor with summary powers of distraint and sale for arrears without recourse to a court.

Absence of any institutional channel. There was no franchise, no tenancy tribunal and no representative body through which the grievance could be pressed, so the choice was between submission and violence.

The causative factors: the triggers and mechanisms

A price collapse or a failed harvest. The Deccan riots of 1875 in Poona and Ahmednagar followed the fall in cotton prices after the American Civil War boom, when credit contracted and creditors moved to execute.

The arrival of an outsider class. Traders, moneylenders and settled cultivators moving into tribal tracts, the dikus, precipitated the Kol insurrection of 1831-32, the Santhal hool of 1855-56 and Birsa Munda's ulgulan of 1899-1900.

A new legal instrument experienced as an innovation. The civil court decree is the clearest example, and the Deccan Riots Commission appointed in 1875 identified it as the immediate agent of dispossession. That is why the crowds seized and burnt bonds, ledgers and decrees before anything else, and why the number of deaths in that disturbance was very small in proportion to its scale.

Every one of these statutes attacked an objective factor. None of them attacked a trigger, because a price collapse cannot be legislated away. That is the practical significance of the distinction the question draws.

The character of the violence that results

Three features follow from the factors above and are worth stating because they distinguish agrarian violence from the other forms in this syllabus.

Banwasi Seva Ashram v. State of U.P., (1986) 4 SCC 753 answered the forest factor. Adivasis who had cultivated and lived in the Mirzapur forests for generations were treated as encroachers on notification under forest law descended from the Acts of 1865 and 1878, and the Court refused to permit dispossession until each claim had been individually inquired into by judicial officers it appointed.

Orissa Mining Corporation v. Ministry of Environment and Forests, (2013) 6 SCC 476 transferred the decision to the community. Where bauxite mining was proposed on hills sacred to the Dongria Kondh, the Court held that community and religious rights under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 must be settled first and that the gram sabhas were to decide whether the project affected them; all twelve refused. The preamble to the 2006 Act itself records that forest rights were not adequately recognised, resulting in a historical injustice.

The same factors after independence, which is the test of the analysis

An analysis of objective and causative factors is only useful if it predicts, and the Indian record after 1947 is the test.

The legislative answer, when it came, was again an answer to an objective factor. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 recites in its preamble that forest rights were not adequately recognised, resulting in a historical injustice, and the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 replaced a colonial acquisition statute of 1894 with consent and rehabilitation requirements. Both are recognisably the same kind of measure as the Bengal Tenancy Act, 1885 and the Deccan Agriculturists' Relief Act, 1879: a legislature conceding, after violence, a security of entitlement that its own earlier law had removed.

Testing the claim of increase. Reported incidence is high and broadly stable rather than clearly rising. The National Human Rights Commission registered an average of more than 1,700 custodial death cases a year between 2010-11 and 2021-22. What has unmistakably increased is the distance between complaint and consequence: government data placed before Parliament records that of 2,373 cases registered against police personnel for human rights violations between 1999 and 2023, only three ended in conviction, all of them in 2017, with no convictions at all in the six years from 2018 to 2023. The accurate formulation is therefore that impunity has increased even if incidence has not.

Why it persists. Investigation remains confession-centred, so custody is where the case is made, which is why sections 22 and 23 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 exclude confessions caused by inducement, confessions to a police officer, and confessions in police custody unless made in the immediate presence of a Magistrate. Prosecution of a public servant requires sanction, and section 151 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 specifically requires government sanction before prosecuting anyone for acts done under sections 148 to 150 in dispersing an assembly.

The other form the same violence takes is the encounter killing, and it has its own code. People's Union for Civil Liberties v. State of Maharashtra, (2014) 10 SCC 635 laid down sixteen requirements to be followed in every case of death in a police encounter: any intelligence received must be recorded; an FIR must be registered immediately; the investigation must be conducted independently, by the criminal investigation department or by a team from another police station under a senior officer; a magisterial inquiry must be held and the report sent to the Judicial Magistrate; the National or State Human Rights Commission must be informed; and no out of turn promotion or gallantry award may be conferred until the genuineness of the encounter is established.

Extra Judicial Execution Victim Families Association v. Union of India, (2016) 14 SCC 536 removed the remaining shelter, holding on more than 1,500 alleged extra judicial killings in Manipur that there is no blanket immunity for members of the armed forces operating under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, that the use of excessive or retaliatory force is not protected, and that a democracy governed by the rule of law cannot permit excessive force even against an enemy.

The important observation is the convergence. Commissions separated by thirty years, sitting in different States and appointed by different governments of different political complexions, found the same three things: that the police were absent in the early hours, that they acted with bias when present, and that the political executive did not wish them to act.

Why so little followed. The reasons are legal as well as political. A finding cannot convict; the evidence gathered cannot be used at trial because of section 6; the government may reject every recommendation; and a commission has no power to enforce compliance with its own report. That is why the Srikrishna Commission could name 31 police officers in 1998 and produce almost no prosecutions, and why the Liberhan report of 2009 had no legal consequence at all. The reform that would change this is not a better commission but a statutory offence of dereliction of duty, which is exactly what the Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence Bill, 2011 would have created and which lapsed.

What would make a commission of inquiry matter

Since the findings are consistent and the consequences are negligible, the useful question is what change would connect the two, and three answers are available.

Compare the statutory human rights machinery. The National Human Rights Commission under the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993 may inquire suo motu or on petition under section 12, including into negligence by a public servant in preventing a violation; may use its own investigating staff under section 14; and may recommend compensation and prosecution under section 18, with the authority required to report back on the action taken within a month. That is a stronger design than the 1952 Act, and its use in the Gujarat proceedings that led to National Human Rights Commission v. State of Gujarat, (2009) 6 SCC 342, where the Supreme Court constituted a Special Investigation Team and supervised it, shows what a body with standing to litigate can achieve where a commission of inquiry cannot.

Conclusion. Both notes describe the same failure from two directions. Institutionalised violence has not obviously risen in incidence, running at more than 1,700 custodial death complaints a year, but accountability for it has collapsed to three convictions in twenty four years, and the reasons are a confession-centred investigative culture, a sanction requirement that shields the officer, political control of postings and the absence of any offence of torture despite India's signature in 1997 and the Law Commission's recommendation in 2017.

For full marks, cover: the second limb is the distinctive one and it carries most of the marks, because any candidate can describe communal violence and very few can explain the mechanism by which political competition produces it. Give the phenomenon briefly, then devote the body of the answer to the political limb: the theoretical account, the documentary evidence from the commissions, and, crucially, the law that exists to police the use of religion in politics, which is where a law student can outscore a sociologist.

Communal violence in outline

Communal violence is collective violence in which the line of attack follows religious identity and the victim is chosen for his membership of a community. The Indian record runs from Ranchi and Sholapur in 1967, Ahmedabad in 1969, Bhiwandi in 1970 and Tellicherry in 1971, through Jamshedpur in 1979, Moradabad in 1980, Nellie in 1983, the anti-Sikh violence of November 1984 and Bhagalpur in 1989, to Bombay in December 1992 and January 1993, Gujarat in 2002, Muzaffarnagar in 2013 and north east Delhi in February 2020.

Paul Brass's institutionalised riot system. Riots are produced, not merely permitted. In riot-prone towns there exists a standing network of specialists: those who circulate rumour, those who recode an ordinary crime as communal, and those who assemble the crowd. That network is maintained between episodes, and it is maintained by political organisations because it is useful to them.

The mobilisation cycle. A campaign of polarising speech precedes the violence; the violence consolidates the vote; the electoral result rewards those associated with it; and the absence of prosecution confirms that the strategy is safe. Impunity is therefore not a by-product but a component.

The documentary evidence

This is where an Indian answer can be specific rather than theoretical.

Abhiram Singh v. C.D. Commachen, (2017) 2 SCC 629 settled the scope: a seven-judge Bench held by majority that section 123(3) is not confined to an appeal based on the religion of the candidate, and that an appeal on the ground of the religion, race, caste, community or language of the candidate, his agent, the voter, or any other person is a corrupt practice, reading the provision as a purposive command to keep the electoral process secular. The consequence of a corrupt practice is the setting aside of the election and disqualification, which is a real sanction rarely enforced because an election petition is slow and expensive.

The penal law. Sections 196 and 197 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 punish promoting enmity between groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, caste or community and imputations prejudicial to national integration; section 299 punishes deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings; section 152 punishes exciting secession or armed rebellion. These are the provisions under which the speech that precedes a riot is prosecutable, and their weakness is that prosecution requires the sanction of the very government whose associates are the likely accused.

The judicial framework. Tehseen S. Poonawalla v. Union of India, (2018) 9 SCC 501 requires a nodal officer of at least Superintendent rank in every district, identification of vigilance-prone areas, prompt FIRs, fast track trials and a compensation scheme, and treats official inaction as deliberate negligence attracting departmental proceedings. Mohd. Haroon v. Union of India, (2014) 5 SCC 252 held the State Government of the day accountable for failing to maintain law and order at Muzaffarnagar and directed arrests irrespective of political affiliation, which is a judicial acknowledgment that political affiliation is the reason arrests are not made.

The speech that assembles the crowd is now electronic, and the law has followed it. Section 196 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 expressly covers the promotion of enmity by electronic communication, as does section 197 for imputations prejudicial to national integration, and section 353 covers statements conducing to public mischief. Amish Devgan v. Union of India, (2021) 1 SCC 1 supplied the analytical framework, holding that the reach and authority of the speaker, the vulnerability of the target group and the context of the utterance all bear on whether speech crosses into hate speech, and locating the harm in the denial of equal membership of the political community rather than in offence taken.

The intermediary is regulated rather than liable. Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, (2015) 5 SCC 1 upheld section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 on blocking, because it is exercised by a reasoned order under a procedure with safeguards, and read down section 79(3)(b) so that an intermediary loses safe harbour only on a court order or a government notification and not on a private complaint. The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 have since added due diligence, grievance officer and traceability obligations, which are themselves under challenge.

Indian law does address the problem: section 123(3) of the Representation of the People Act as construed by the seven-judge Bench in Abhiram Singh makes an appeal on religious grounds a corrupt practice whoever's religion is invoked, sections 196, 197 and 299 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita punish the speech, and S.R. Bommai makes communal governance a ground for action under Article 356 subject to judicial review. What is missing is the enforcement link, because every one of those provisions requires action by an executive that may be the beneficiary, and until official inaction is itself an offence and the police reforms of Prakash Singh are implemented, the incentive structure that produces communal violence will remain intact.

What makes it a matter of culture rather than only of rank is that its enforcement no longer depends on any legal or formal authority. Endogamy, separate residence, deference in speech and posture, occupational assignment, and the pollution attaching to particular work and particular people are transmitted as ordinary social knowledge and are accepted, in Bourdieu's sense, by those they subordinate. Ambedkar's formulation remains the most exact: caste is not division of labour but division of labourers, arranged in a graded hierarchy in which every stratum has one below it and therefore an interest in the survival of the whole, which is why it cannot be dislodged by appeals to solidarity from below.

The atrocities

The statutory notion. Section 2(1)(a) of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 provides that "atrocity" means an offence punishable under section 3; the content is an enumerated list rather than a threshold of severity; and section 3(1) applies only where the offender is not a member of these communities and the victim is.

At Ramabai Ambedkar Nagar, Mumbai, on 11 July 1997, a State Reserve Police Force party fired on residents protesting the desecration of a statue of Dr Ambedkar, killing ten. At Arwal in Bihar on 19 April 1986, police fired on an enclosed gathering of poor and largely Dalit villagers assembled over homestead land, killing twenty one by the count most often given, and the official inquiry's report was never laid before the State Legislature.

The persistence of assigned degrading work. Safai Karamchari Andolan v. Union of India, (2014) 11 SCC 224 held that manual scavenging violates Articles 14, 17, 21 and 23, directed implementation of the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, and ordered payment of ten lakh rupees to the family of every person who had died in a sewer or septic tank since 1993. A direction of that kind is in substance a finding that the state had permitted a caste-assigned occupation to continue.

Statutory. The Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955 punishes the enforcement of disability arising out of untouchability. The 1989 Act supplies the special machinery: investigation only by an officer of at least Deputy Superintendent rank under rule 7 of the 1995 Rules; punishment of wilful neglect of duty by a public servant under section 4; presumptions under section 8; Special and Exclusive Special Courts under section 14, with trial to be completed within two months of the charge sheet; rights of victims and witnesses under section 15A, including the right to be heard and to appeal against a bail order; exclusion of anticipatory bail under section 18; and relief and rehabilitation under rule 12.

Government has also defended the machinery against judicial dilution, and this is the episode to cite. In Subhash Kashinath Mahajan v. State of Maharashtra, (2018) 6 SCC 454 a two-judge Bench, concerned about misuse, directed a preliminary enquiry before any FIR, written permission before arrest, and the availability of anticipatory bail where no prima facie case appeared.

The dimension the criminal law cannot reach

The government's role is usually assessed by the criminal statute, and that is the wrong measure for the largest part of the problem, because the mechanisms by which caste culture reproduces itself are not offences at all.

Assigned degrading work. Safai Karamchari Andolan v. Union of India, (2014) 11 SCC 224 shows the limit of criminalisation from the other side: the Court held that manual scavenging violates Articles 14, 17, 21 and 23, directed implementation of the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, and ordered compensation of ten lakh rupees to the family of every person who had died in a sewer or septic tank since 1993. Prosecution was not the remedy that mattered there; the compensation order and the rehabilitation obligation were.

Conclusion. Caste culture is properly called a black spot because it denies equal moral standing by birth and does so through habits, endogamy, deference, assigned occupation and the pollution attaching to particular work, that need no legal authority to operate and that survived the abolition of the ranks in 1950. The atrocities are the enforcement of that culture, which is why section 3 of the 1989 Act lists humiliations rather than degrees of injury, and why Khairlanji, Ramabai Nagar and Arwal are the examples that matter, two of them killings by the state itself and the third a case in which the caste charge failed of proof.

For full marks, cover: this question has a wider first limb than the companion question on the other paper of the same year. "Discuss Ahimsa" invites an account of the concept across the Indian traditions and not only in Gandhi's hands, and "today's scenario" is unqualified, so the relevance limb should be worked out for India specifically, in communal harmony, in the policing of protest, in criminal justice policy and in environmental thinking. Give the traditions accurately, including their internal limits, because every one of them contains a doctrine of legitimate force alongside the doctrine of non-injury.

Ahimsa in the Indian traditions

Jain. The most rigorous statement. Ahimsa is the first of the five vows, extended to thought and speech as well as act, and supported epistemically by anekantavada, the doctrine that reality is many-sided and that no single standpoint captures it, which is an argument against the certainty that violence requires. It is absolute for the ascetic and graded for the householder, which is the tradition's own concession to practicality.

Gandhi's synthesis. He took the primacy of ahimsa from Jainism through his mentor Shrimad Rajchandra, the first precept and Ashoka's example from Buddhism, nishkama karma from the Gita, and the western statement of the same ideas from the Sermon on the Mount, Tolstoy, Ruskin and Thoreau. What he added was the conversion of a personal renunciatory ethic into a mass political technique with rules: exhaust negotiation, act publicly, never exploit the opponent's difficulty, accept the legal penalty rather than evade it, and suspend the campaign if your own side turns violent, which he did after Chauri Chaura in February 1922 at the height of non-cooperation.

Relevance in today's Indian scenario

In communal harmony. The Gandhian claim is that violence between communities is sustained by reciprocal fear rather than by conviction, and that the fear can only be broken by a party willing to absorb harm without returning it. His own last months, the fast in Calcutta in September 1947 and the fast in Delhi in January 1948, are the strongest empirical support available for that claim, since both produced measurable falls in violence in the affected cities. The institutional descendant is the peace committee at mohalla level, which is the only part of the state's communal violence machinery that operates on Varshney's variable of intercommunal civic contact.

In criminal justice policy. The doctrine that means and ends are convertible is the principle against which the measures studied in this syllabus should be tested. It is the argument against custodial coercion, which is why sections 22 and 23 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 exclude confessions to the police and in police custody; it is the argument behind the compensation jurisdiction recognised in Nilabati Behera v. State of Orissa, (1993) 2 SCC 746 and the safeguards in D.K. Basu v. State of West Bengal, (1997) 1 SCC 416; and it is the strongest argument against the reintroduction of a TADA or POTA style statute, since both were upheld as constitutional and then abandoned because their use bore out exactly the prediction that the means would shape the end.

In environment and economy. The maxim that the earth provides enough for every person's need but not for every person's greed is a founding text of sustainable development, and Indian environmental jurisprudence arrived at the same place through the doctrines of sustainable development and intergenerational equity accepted in Vellore Citizens' Welfare Forum v. Union of India, (1996) 5 SCC 647. Trusteeship and swadeshi survive constitutionally in the Directive Principles, particularly Article 40 on village panchayats, given effect by the Seventy-third Amendment.

Ambedkar's objection is the most serious Indian criticism. He argued that the method was directed outward at the colonial state while the structural violence of caste was met with appeals to the conscience of the dominant rather than a transfer of power to the subordinated. The collision came over the Communal Award of 1932 and Gandhi's fast against separate electorates for the Depressed Classes, which produced the Poona Pact of 24 September 1932; Ambedkar accepted reserved seats within a joint electorate under the pressure of that fast and always maintained that a fast against a subordinated group's own safeguard was itself coercive.

No state can adopt it wholesale, because a constitutional order rests on the monopoly of legitimate force. The same law that protects satyagraha authorises dispersal of an assembly by armed force under section 149 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita.

Where India's own record tests the doctrine

The relevance of ahimsa is not established by quoting Gandhi approvingly, and the honest way to test it is against the country that produced it.

The honest conclusion from these two examples is that ahimsa in India survives as a constitutional aspiration and as a protected method of protest, and not as a description of how the state or the crowd actually behaves. That does not make it irrelevant; it makes it a standard, and a standard is useful precisely because conduct falls short of it.

Conclusion. Ahimsa is not an Indian synonym for pacifism but a family of positions: absolute and ascetic in Jainism, compassionate and precept-based in Buddhism, divided between renunciation and ksatriya duty in the Hindu tradition, and converted by Gandhi into a mass political technique with rules, of which the acceptance of the legal penalty and the suspension of the campaign on one's own side's violence are the most demanding.

For full marks, cover: build the answer on the four functions any legal response to gender violence has to perform, which are prohibition, prevention, protection and prosecution. Set out the forms of violence briefly, then take the four functions in turn and test the government's measures against each. That structure also supplies the criticism, because Indian law is strong on the first and fourth and weak on the second and third, and an examiner who has read fifty answers listing statutes will notice one that assesses them.

The violence, in brief

In the marital home: cruelty and dowry harassment under sections 85 and 86 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, and dowry death within seven years of marriage under section 80, with the presumption in section 118 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 operating once cruelty in connection with a dowry demand soon before the death is shown.

Function one: prohibition

This is the function the state performs best. Every form listed above is now an offence, and the definitional work of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013, enacted on the report of the Committee under Justice J.S. Verma which was constituted on 23 December 2012 and reported on 23 January 2013, was thorough: rape was redefined beyond peno-vaginal intercourse, consent was defined as unequivocal voluntary agreement, non-resistance was declared not to imply consent, and acid attack, sexual harassment, disrobing, voyeurism and stalking became discrete offences.

The gap in prohibition 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 command responsibility; none was accepted. Independent Thought v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 800 read the exception down for wives between fifteen and eighteen, holding it arbitrary and irreconcilable with the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, and expressly left the position of adult wives open; the challenge is pending, and the Union filed an affidavit in October 2024 opposing removal.

The failure of prevention is concrete: Local Complaints Committees, which are the only route available to the great majority of Indian women who work outside the organised sector, exist on paper in most districts and function in few; and the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994, which is purely preventive in design, produces very few convictions.

Function three: protection

Protection means keeping the woman safe while the process runs, and it is the function that determines whether a case survives to judgment.

The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 is the principal instrument and the most innovative Indian measure in this field, because its remedies do not depend on a prosecution: it defines domestic violence to include physical, sexual, verbal, emotional and economic abuse, secures the right to reside in the shared household, and empowers a Magistrate to make protection, residence, monetary relief, custody and compensation orders. Its weakness is administrative, since enforcement depends on Protection Officers appointed under section 8 and in most States the post is held as an additional charge.

The judicial contribution has been decisive at two points. State of Punjab v. Gurmit Singh, (1996) 2 SCC 384 held that the evidence of the prosecutrix stands on the footing of an injured witness, that corroboration is not a rule of law, that delay must be assessed against social reality, and that such trials should be in camera and, where practicable, before a woman judge. Lalita Kumari v. Government of U.P., (2014) 2 SCC 1 held that registration of an FIR is mandatory where the information discloses a cognizable offence and that no preliminary enquiry is permissible, which addresses the largest single point of attrition.

The persisting failures are delay, the absence of any consequence for breach of the two month deadline, and the conduct of the courts themselves, which Aparna Bhat v. State of Madhya Pradesh, 2021 SCC OnLine SC 230 had to address by prohibiting bail conditions requiring contact between accused and victim, forbidding judicial language about a woman's dress, conduct or past, and directing gender sensitisation in judicial academies and in the Bar examination syllabus.

The assessment in one table

At the point of complaint, the case may never be registered. That is the failure Lalita Kumari v. Government of U.P., (2014) 2 SCC 1 addressed by holding registration mandatory where the information discloses a cognizable offence and by prohibiting a preliminary enquiry in such cases, and the proviso to section 173(1) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita now requires a woman officer to record it, which removes one common reason for refusal.

At the point of investigation, the medical examination may be delayed past the point of usefulness, or the scene may not be examined at all. Section 184 governs the examination and section 176(3) requires a forensic team at the scene of any offence punishable with seven years or more, but that requirement is expressly deferred by up to five years and depends on laboratory capacity most States do not yet have.

At the point of committal and trial, the complainant is exposed. She lives in the same household or the same street as the accused; there is settlement pressure, particularly in cases under sections 85 and 86; and the trial takes years. Sections 396 to 398 supply compensation, treatment and a witness protection scheme, and the last of the three is the one that would matter most if it were funded.

On prevention the record is weak, because prevention needs committees, officers and inspections rather than sections, and the Local Complaints Committees that would serve the unorganised sector barely exist. On protection the design is good and the delivery poor, since the Domestic Violence Act, 2005 depends on part-time Protection Officers and the schemes required by sections 396 to 398 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita are new and thinly funded. And on prosecution the law is adequate after Gurmit Singh and Lalita Kumari while the practice is slow, with the two month investigation deadline carrying no sanction and the courts themselves needing the correction administered in Aparna Bhat.

The constitutional constraints on what the Government can do

The federal constraint. Public order is Entry 1 and police is Entry 2 of the State List, so the Union cannot ordinarily create a police force to operate inside a State on its own motion. What it can do is legislate on terrorism, which falls under Entry 1 of the Union List on defence and the residuary power, a competence confirmed in Kartar Singh v. State of Punjab, (1994) 3 SCC 569, where a five-judge Bench upheld the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, 1985 and rejected the argument that it trespassed on the State field; deploy the armed forces of the Union in aid of the civil power under Entry 2A of the Union List; and act on its duty under Article 355 to protect States against internal disturbance.

This is why the National Counter Terrorism Centre proposed after the Mumbai attacks of November 2008 was never operationalised: the States objected to a central body with independent powers of arrest, and the objection was constitutionally serious.

Measures available: legislative

The substantive law is already complete, and this should be stated rather than assumed. The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 as amended in 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2019 covers unlawful associations, terrorist acts, terrorist organisations, membership, financing and the forfeiture of proceeds. The 2019 amendment allows the Central Government to designate an individual as a terrorist under section 35 and permits the National Investigation Agency to attach property with the approval of its Director General. Since 1 July 2024, section 113 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 creates the offence of a terrorist act in the general penal code, in terms substantially borrowed from section 15 of the 1967 Act, with the choice of statute left to an officer not below the rank of Superintendent of Police.

The measure the Government can take here is not more offences but procedural discipline: statutory outer limits for the completion of trial in scheduled offences with default bail on breach, and a requirement of reasons and a hearing before an individual designation under section 35, which currently proceeds on the executive's own satisfaction with only a post-decisional application to the same government and a review committee headed by a judge.

Complete the intelligence architecture within the federal constraint. The Multi Agency Centre and NATGRID exist; a coordination and analysis body without independent powers of arrest would meet the States' objection while closing the gap that defeated the National Counter Terrorism Centre.

Measures available: financial

Terrorism is cheap to commit and expensive to sustain, so financial measures have the best evidence behind them: Chapter V of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act on forfeiture of proceeds of terrorism, the Prevention of Money-Laundering Act, 2002, and compliance with Financial Action Task Force standards, which is India's most effective international instrument against state sponsorship. The measure the Government can take is capacity, since attachment without prosecution merely displaces the money.

Measures available: preventive and remedial

Witness protection. Section 398 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita requires every State to notify a witness protection scheme, and intimidation of witnesses is the commonest cause of collapse in terrorism trials.

Victim compensation under section 396, and treatment of victims under section 397.

The measure that cannot be taken again

A new TADA or POTA. Both were upheld as constitutional, TADA in Kartar Singh and the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002 in People's Union for Civil Liberties v. Union of India, (2004) 9 SCC 580, on the reasoning that the possibility of abuse is no ground of invalidity. Both were nonetheless abandoned by Parliament: TADA lapsed in 1995 after around 76,000 detentions produced convictions in about one per cent of cases, and POTA was repealed in 2004 after a review found large numbers of cases registered without justification. The record shows that constitutional validity does not prevent legislative failure, and a third attempt would reproduce the result.

Publish the data. There is no regularly published official series showing, for offences under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the number of persons arrested, the number charge sheeted, the number tried, the number convicted and the average duration of custody before trial. Without that series, no assessment of whether the statute works is possible, and the argument for and against it is conducted on anecdote. The National Crime Records Bureau compiles some of it, and the gaps are exactly where the controversy lies.

Use the sanction requirement as a filter rather than a formality. Section 45 of the 1967 Act requires previous sanction of the Government for prosecution, to be given after consideration of the report of an independent authority appointed to review the evidence. That authority exists to prevent weak cases from being launched, and if it functioned as designed it would answer most of the misuse criticism without any amendment at all.

Review designations regularly. Under section 35 as amended in 2019 the Central Government may designate an individual as a terrorist on its own satisfaction; the remedy is an application for denotification to the same Government under section 36 and thereafter a review committee headed by a serving or retired judge. A periodic and automatic review, rather than a review on application, would meet the natural justice objection at negligible cost.

Within those bounds the substantive law is already complete after the amendments of 2019 and the enactment of section 113 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, so the available measures are procedural and institutional: statutory time limits on trial with default bail, a hearing before individual designation under section 35, capacity for the National Investigation Agency to match the jurisdiction given to it in 2019, forensic capability under section 176(3), separation of investigation from law and order as Prakash Singh directed, notified witness protection under section 398, financial tracing under Chapter V of the 1967 Act and the Prevention of Money-Laundering Act, and an intelligence coordination body without powers of arrest so that the federal objection is met.

The measure that cannot be taken again is a new special statute of the TADA or POTA kind, because both were upheld and both were abandoned for the same reason, and the defect that must be addressed first is the bail regime, since Watali and Najeeb together mean that the length of incarceration rather than the strength of the case decides who goes free.

(a) The Telangana struggle

Phase one: the armed peasant insurrection, 1946 to 1951. In the Telangana districts of the princely State of Hyderabad the land was held by deshmukhs and jagirdars, locally called doras, who combined revenue collection with police powers. Two practices supplied the grievance: vetti, unpaid forced labour owed by artisan and labouring castes, and bhagela, hereditary debt bondage in which an advance was never extinguished. Organised through the village sanghams of the Andhra Mahasabha under communist leadership, the movement seized grain, burnt the doras' account books, which destroyed the legal evidence of debt and was its commonest single act, occupied waste and surplus land, killed particularly hated landlords and finally fielded guerrilla units, the dalams.

It was fought first against the Razakars, the irregular militia of the Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen under Kasim Razvi, and then, after the Indian Union's Operation Polo of 13 to 18 September 1948 ended the Nizam's rule in five days, against the Indian Army, which made 1948 to 1951 the bloodiest phase. The struggle was withdrawn on 21 October 1951. Its achievements were the effective destruction of vetti as a social institution and the tenurial legislation that followed, including the abolition of jagirs and the Hyderabad Tenancy and Agricultural Lands Act, 1950.

Phase three: 2009 to 2014. The final phase began with a fast in November 2009 and the Union Government's announcement of 9 December 2009 that the process of forming Telangana would be initiated, followed by its effective withdrawal. Its methods were the burning of State transport buses and attacks on government property, prolonged general strikes of which the sakala janula samme of 2011 lasted over forty days, and a sustained wave of suicides and self-immolations by young men that functioned politically as violence turned inward.

The Union's response was to appoint the Committee for Consultations on the Situation in Andhra Pradesh under Justice B.N. Srikrishna on 3 February 2010, which reported on 30 December 2010 setting out six options and favouring a united State with a statutorily empowered Regional Council. The demand was conceded nonetheless, and Telangana came into existence on 2 June 2014 under the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014.

The law it illustrates. Babulal Parate v. State of Bombay, AIR 1960 SC 51 held that the proviso to Article 3 requires only that a State's views be ascertained and placed before Parliament, which is not bound by them, which is why the Andhra Pradesh Assembly's rejection of the reorganisation Bill had no legal effect.

(b) The Arwal massacre

The incident. On 19 April 1986 at Arwal, then in Jehanabad district of Bihar, several hundred poor and largely Dalit villagers gathered in an enclosed compound for a meeting called by the Mazdoor Kisan Sangram Samiti in connection with a dispute over homestead land. A police force under the Superintendent of Police opened fire on the gathering without effective warning and without the graduated steps the law requires. The dead numbered twenty one on the count most commonly given and twenty three on some accounts, and the fact that the figure remains uncertain forty years later is itself part of the story. Contemporary accounts called it the Jallianwala Bagh of Bihar, because the crowd was penned in and the firing was directed rather than dispersing.

The law that governs the use of force on an assembly. What are now sections 148 to 151 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 set out a graduated scheme. Section 148 permits an Executive Magistrate, an officer in charge of a police station or an officer of at least sub-inspector rank to command an unlawful assembly to disperse and, if it does not, to disperse it by force. Section 149 permits dispersal by the armed forces only where the assembly cannot otherwise be dispersed and only on the order of the District Magistrate or an authorised Executive Magistrate. Section 151 then requires the sanction of the Government before any prosecution for acts done under sections 148 to 150. The last of these is why nothing followed at Arwal.

Why the incident matters in this subject. Three reasons.

It is the clearest Indian instance of institutionalised violence in the strict sense, lethal force applied by the state's own agents against an assembly asserting an economic claim, and it should be assessed against the standard later laid down in Anita Thakur v. State of J&K, (2016) 15 SCC 525, where the Supreme Court held that although the police may use reasonable force to disperse an unlawful assembly, force used after dispersal and against persons already in custody violates Article 21, and awarded compensation.

Conclusion. The two notes are joined by a single theme: the relationship between a violent claim and the legal order that receives it. The Telangana struggle shows a legal order absorbing the same claim twice, through Article 371D in 1973 and through statehood on 2 June 2014, with the form of the violence changing from armed insurrection to property destruction and self-immolation as the constitutional setting changed, and with Babulal Parate explaining why the parent State's objection counted for nothing at the end.

Arwal shows the opposite case, in which the state's own force killed at least twenty one people in an enclosed compound, the graduated scheme now in sections 148 to 151 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita was not followed, the sanction requirement in section 151 blocked prosecution, the official report was never laid before the legislature, and the only public record was made by an unofficial tribunal with no legal power whatever.