Bindu Doddahatti is a litigator at the Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore. She is currently working on increasing access to quality legal-aid to under-trial prisoners, and religious, and sexual minorities. She is also associated with various peoples' movements working on the issues of caste, and gender.
Now that the Section 377, IPC has been read down, the conservative communal elements are targeting sexual minorities by resorting to cunning ways to reinforce regressive social morality over constitutional morality. The Navtej judgment might be a positive and much required step forward, however there are laws like the Beggary Acts of different States, Section 36A of Karnataka Police Act, 1963, which still has the potential to victimise trans-women, and Karnataka Dramatic Performances Act, 1964, which gives immense power to State machineries.
Mob lynching in India in many cases has received the sanction of the State, just like how the U.S. Senate kept silent while thousands of African Americans were lynched over many decades. To recognise the deep-seated abhorrence in the society, and calling it what it is, that is “lynching”, sends a very powerful message that criminal acts of hatred are not tolerated in an equitable society.
Social movements in India need to broaden their understanding of the prison politics and how the State is actively criminalising the poor, and locking up a large number of marginalised communities in prisons. The State and dominant groups use law as an instrument to perpetuate discrimination and violence against these marginalised groups, which is a replication and extension of the colonial practice of subjugation.
The death penalty is another method of policing vulnerable communities and is symptomatic of what the current criminal justice system already is. All aspects of the criminal justice system are politically tinted, such as, who is to be arrested and investigated, who is likely to be unrepresented or poorly represented at trial, who the judge thinks is more likely to have committed the crime and deserves punishment, and whether the mercy petition is considered or not.
