Goals of Law, Goals of Order: Institutional Conversion after Atrocities

The creation of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act (PoA Act), 1989, was a milestone in the development of the legal protection of groups that had experienced frequent humiliation and largescale violence during the postcolonial period. And yet the law does not effectively translate into justice in practice: it is not simply a question of legal design and implementation achieving this. To explain how law can be used, it would be helpful to focus on how law and order are two different things, which may even serve different goals. Foucault argues that the expression of law and order is a ‘hybridized monster’, and that it is better to speak of ‘law or order’ because the two phenomena are incompatible and can be compared to the choice of having either milk or lemon in a cup of tea. Separating the two terms, law and order, offers an opportunity to examine how law may not be part of the ways in which an institutional order operates. Once an atrocity occurs, institutions may respond in ways that differ from the route set out in official law. Thus, although the PoA Act is a piece of legislation that should be obeyed, local state institutions may in practice comply with the interests of locally dominant castes instead. This is more than a question of delayed justice. The attack in Tsundur occurred on 6 August 1991, but it was only on August 2007 that the trial court delivered its judgment and sentenced many of the accused. However, processes that take place after a crime has been committed involve crucial questions concerning practical institutional barriers, which aggravate vulnerabilities and the difficulties of securing evidence and the truth about atrocities. This chapter brings the institutional barriers related to law and order more into focus by examining how caste-related attacks are addressed by institutions of law, that is, the local state and courts. Focusing on the attacks on Dalits in Tsundur village in Andhra Pradesh in 1991 and in Khairlanji in Maharashtra in 2006, I point out how institutions such as police stations and courts are vulnerable to making mistakes and being subjected to direct exploitation.