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Abstract

This article critically examines the Supreme Court’s judgment in Hitesh Verma v State of Uttarakhand (2020) and argues for reading it as a “landmark trial” in the judicial undoing of reform—namely, the statutory changes introduced by the 2016 Amendment to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989. Existing socio-legal scholarship on atrocity jurisprudence has shown that the judicial understanding of caste violence and doctrinally instituted evidentiary standards have historically operated to invisibilise caste from crime’s framework. As a result, most instances of caste-based discrimination and violence have not been named as offences of “atrocity” under the Act, and instead, have been tried as “general crimes” under the Indian Penal Code 1860. While the 2016 Amendment sought to address certain institutional and interpretive issues that undermined the Act’s effective implementation, in this article, I argue that the Verma judgment reinscribes earlier standards of atrocity jurisprudence. I identify certain semantic and procedural manoeuvres employed in the judgement through which this is achieved, including repetition, contravention, misquotation, silencing, and synchronic reasoning. Examining the court’s reasoning around questions of intent, “public view,” property disputes, and cross litigation, I show how these manoeuvres not only effect a reversal of reform, but also inaugurate newer grounds for effacing caste power, thereby disarticulating atrocity to a civil dispute between private individuals. Doing so, I further argue that the Verma decision’s precedential power of injustice is realised in subsequent appellate decisions where everyday instances of caste discrimination are not recognised as offences triable under the 1989 Act.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.55496/CJCO9935

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