Imagine you were out for wedding shopping and three days later, you die in police custody because they thought you were a thief. Or that you were arrested on suspicion of murder, simply because you were within a 5 KM radius from the crime scene. Far from being one off, bizarre and mistaken identity cases, these are the everyday realities that govern the social lives of people from certain caste, tribal and religious identities [‘born criminal’]. The cracks in our criminal justice system are neither invisible, nor a new discovery. However, what remains under-researched is the way the Brahmanical order seeps into the processes of criminalisation and our policing systems, at every point. From language, to artificial intelligence, what is it that gets used, abused and operationalised to keep marginalised communities in check.
In this interview with The Third Eye, Tasveer Parmar and Nikita Sonavane from the Criminal Justice and Police Accountability (CPA) Project, who have been working with Vimukta communities in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh for years, give us granular insights into the interconnections between caste, carcerality and policing that emerge from their work and practice.
TTE: Why did you start the Criminal Justice and Police Accountability (CPA) Project? What was the need you were trying to meet?
Nikita: In my initial years of studying and practicing law, it became clear to me that the very framework through which certain communities were marginalised and deprived of rights, was that of criminalisation. When I began working, there was an ongoing research project mapping the socio-economic backgrounds of all the prisoners on death row. In fact, even before I started law school, I had already worked on this project for a while, and it had become increasingly clear to me that the prisoners on death row belonged to oppressed communities, and were overwhelmingly Dalit, Adivasi and Nomadic Tribes. Even within Muslim prisoners, the caste and class locations are clearly visible.
After I graduated, my work was largely centred around Forest Rights. The discourse on forest rights is largely focused on the implementation of the Forest Rights Act, while at the ground level it is subsumed within criminalisation [through the criminalisation of various forest rights under various criminal laws]. Day in and day out, the Forest Department keeps charging people with cases for ‘petty forest offences’, many of which, such as fishing, are also recognised forest rights.
But there are two things to note in this criminalisation discourse: How do you enter the criminal legal system and what is your initial interaction with it? It is through the police. In fact, for a lot of people, the police is both the start and end point of their interaction. For many of these interactions, the surveillance and beatings they endure at the police station, is not recorded.
So, the role of the police has never been studied or scrutinised. What is the structure of policing? What is the relationship between people on death row (especially people who come from oppressed communities) and this larger structure of criminalisation and policing?
Are there interlinkages between the structures of Brahmanism and criminalisation?
Sufficient work has not been done on this and continues to remain sparse.
Even though I have grappled with the question of caste in my personal life and engaged with it through my work, in a way, it truly culminated for me in Bhopal. Through my lawyering and practice in the courts, especially with Ghumantu communities (Nomadic Tribes), what became clearly visible was this: the category of ‘criminals by birth’, is born at the intersection of policing, caste and criminalisation.
When we started our work, we were going to courts and police stations, so for us it was not a nuanced observation. It is a very basic observation that only one type of people are entering the system and continue to be kept in it – in many ways, the system has been built around them.
This has been the experience of many communities for generations, but there has never been any documentation of it in terms of legal policing. What you would call empirical evidence or proof was scantily available. So we were very interested in tracing historically how this [discrimination] was playing out in the everyday.
In order to be able to understand where it is emanating from, you have to pay close attention to the source. And for us the sources were the arrest, the FIR; the data points in the roz marra (everyday). This was a way of the police telling its own story — so we let it unravel, made the connections, deconstructed it, and paid close attention to what was rising to the fore. So, this is how the CPA Project began and continues to grow.
TTE: We heard your talk at Jindal Global Law School and were very struck by what you said about who is in the jails, and how those same people have been in jail for centuries. Who is being protected and who you are being protected from hasn’t changed over time. What we also found really interesting was what you said about the wandering body. Among the people from whom we want to protect ourselves are the nomadic people or Ghumantu communities, because they ‘unsettle’ us. As a society too, a person who deviates or wanders threatens everything — they threaten heterosexuality, domesticity and the family structure. They threaten your entire caste, capital and industrial complex. We would like you to talk a little more about who these people are, whom the Brahmanical police structure actually ‘protects’ us from.
Tasveer: If I can give an example, for the Vimukta communities (Denotified Tribes), the police station is everything. Same judge, same collector, same commissioner. Every decision of your life is being taken by the police at the police station. Historically, attempts have been made to confine you [nomadic communities] to a particular structure, but you have been constantly resisting it. If you are not a part of it [settler culture], then why should you be bound to it? And it is not as if the police have access to only one aspect of your lives. They also control and surveil other aspects — resources, lifestyle, education, traditions — they will enter into all of these through the legal structure.
So, the question arises that when we [Vimukta communities] are not a part of them, then why should we be a part of their structures? Historically, there have been repeated attempts to assimilate Vimukta/Ghumantu communities into these Brahmanical structures. When you look at colonial laws — whether it is the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, the Habitual Offenders Act, the Wildlife Protection Act or the Forest Act of 1927 — all of these laws have been made to control the resources of the community.
If you cannot control the community, might as well control the jal, jungal, zameen (water, forest and land) around which their lives are centred.
This is how you enter and control them in their everyday. So now, if I have to collect wood, that is also a crime. If I have to go to the jungle and catch fish, that also becomes a crime. Essentially, my entire lifestyle becomes a crime. Some Vimukta/Ghumantu communities, such as the Kanjar community, make liquor from Mahua flowers. It is their traditional occupation, and it is also traditional for them to keep some for themselves. Mahua is also used in worship and in all rituals concerning birth and death. Now where do you get this Mahua from? In the jungle, from the Mahua tree (Madhuca longifolia), which you are not allowed to climb. You have been restricted from accessing your own resources and if you want to access them, you have to rely on the permissions of Brahmanvaad structures.
So where do communities go from here? They create their own system. Just like judicial precedents, some Ghumantu communities have judicial decisions set in place. They have their own Panchayat, which takes its own decisions and follows its own customs. People are not sent to jail as punishment. If someone does commit a mistake or wrongdoing, then a few people from the community will just sit together with him, drink Mahua or smoke a beedi and everything will be forgiven and forgotten over food.
Nikita: If you read any literature on criminality, one word that you will often come across is ‘deviates;
So, if the assumption is that someone is deviating, what is the norm? What are they deviating from? The norm is that of the system — a system based on occupation assigned by birth.
The very existence of the Ghumantu community is against this system because they do not reside or work in any one place. The family system (which is a Brahmanical idea in the first place) is not your traditional Hindu family. Obviously, we are not romanticising this non-traditional family system and saying there is no patriarchy, it is absolutely there, like it is everywhere.
But there is a difference. The idea of women’s honour, or the way in which they exist or take up roles, is very different. When the British came, they too identified the ‘deviants’ by using the caste system as their evidentiary basis. For example, you will see in the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) of 1871 that even the Hijra community has been criminalised, citing deviant sexuality. The gold standard of sexuality in Manusmriti — the model sexuality — is a Brahmin woman or endogamous sexuality.
Controlling heterosexual endogamous sexuality is how you control the caste system.
So, I think the Ghumantu communities’ existence is against this whole system. They are deviating from the norm and you have categorised this deviance as an offence, a crime. To say it in simple Bambaiya bhaasha (Mumbai colloquial language), it’s saying line pe aao. Fit into the system. Settlement is a physical embodiment of it. But its underlying sentiment and definition is ‘this is the structure, you will have to fit into it; if you don’t, we will make you fit into it’.
TTE: So, when we mark someone as deviant, who benefits from it and what is that benefit? Is it material too?
Nikita: It is definitely material. Whatever the occupation of any of the Ghumantu communities is — hunting, street performances, making herbal medicine or being a madari/ snake charmer — all of this gets classified as part of the informal economy or the unorganised sector, right? The origin story of criminalisation, and by virtue of that, policing, lies in the desire to control resources, livelihoods and movements of controlling those seen as ‘unorganised’ within the ‘organised’ caste order. Dispossession, as we have said before, through criminalisation of jal, jungal, zameen is crucial to this exercise.
But also disciplining through surveillance of movements, habits, is material to the realisation of this Brahminical project.
A slightly less obvious benefit [however not so unobvious from the perspective of Brahmanvaad] or if I may say, a red herring or, a distraction tactic, is that by criminalising Ghumantu communities you are eliminating the very inequality that you have created. If you talk about sexual violence, they will say to you “put them in jail, put them in prison, sentence them to death, strengthen criminal laws.” So, now, you are not thinking why this happened, what is the source of this violence, where did it come from, how has the entire system worked to perpetuate this. You have successfully diverted people’s attention from those structural questions of Brahmanical patriarchy by making it an individualised problem to be solved by getting rid of someone who has caused harm.
Our first research report was on policing, which was published during the pandemic. What was the pandemic? A public health crisis, where the public healthcare system was in ruins, so people did not get healthcare and many lost their lives because of it. But what was made of it? A law-and-order issue. It was left to the police, the lockdown was enforced and overnight, an issue of unequal access to healthcare was turned into an issue of law and order and criminalisation. This is how you distract people’s attention away from structural inequalities, by making them concentrate on some aspect of the ‘system’ “Oh we will fix so-and-so issue…” until it becomes an endless process of fixing the system. We can talk about sensitising the police or bringing about prison reforms, but at the end of it nothing changes structurally and radically.
Now if you look at animal rights and the laws surrounding it — such as the Wildlife Protection Act (WPA) — they are not simply asking for wildlife conservation. What they are actually saying is that eating fish is a sin. Eating meat is wrong, hunting is wrong, drinking alcohol made from Mahua tree is wrong. You can go to a five-star hotel and drink alcohol. But the fact that you are drinking raw alcohol like Mahua is wrong. Culturally, you are setting certain ways of living that have been deemed as ‘proper’ in accordance with the caste system, and hence, they become the norm.
That norm, which you are defending through criminalisation, is a Brahmanical norm. So, I think this is exploitation, appropriation and accumulation of material resources. But it is not simply limited to that.
TTE: You talked about deviance and cooperation, and we feel that two processes are happening here, and both are interconnected. One is that you are defining a deviant, and in the other, one is running a civilisational project in order to define the deviant. How is the category of the ‘habitual offender’ created between these two?
Nikita: In the Constituent Assembly post-Independence, it was broadly agreed that one couldn’t use colonial language like ‘criminals by birth’ or ‘tribals’. But while the language may have changed, the idea behind it remains the same.
It is here that the category of the ‘habitual offenders’ becomes a middle ground to replicate the logic of ‘by birth’, albeit in a neutral fashion.
However, in my understanding, this category of habitual offender is worse than that of ‘criminal tribes’ in some aspects. In the definition of criminal tribes, there was a criterion for identifying and notifying communities as criminal. However, now the category of the ‘habitual offender’ is purely dependent on the judgement of the police. There is no measurement, no criteria; it is purely a discretionary category. And since this is a discretionary category, those who have been acquitted by the court and those who have not, have all been put under the same category.
In addition, there is no assessment for what ‘habit’ is, either. Hence, two totally different police officers in the same scenario, can think in two different ways about whether someone is a ‘habitual offender’ or not.
But whose habit are they looking at? They are looking at whether these people sell Mahua liquor, hence the business of alcohol becomes their ‘habit’. Or what we call fitrat. Hence this is an offence for which you have made an excise law and criminalised them for it. Essentially, they are looking to identify communities within the same ‘criminal tribes’ as ‘habitual offenders.
Tasveer: In some cases, children and people from the Vimukta community have been acquitted but despite that, their criminal records are preserved. Even if the person was acquitted five years ago, their criminal records are maintained and used to surveil them, simply because they belong to the Vimukta community. What is he up to these days? Where is he going, who is he meeting, who are his friends, how many people in his family are involved in such criminal cases — all these details become a part of the record. The police structure is being used to maintain these records. And the reason we keep alluding to the Brahmanvaadi system is because this entire data resource — the logic of preserving criminal records in such a manner — comes from there.
Despite Vimukta communities being declared ex-criminals in 1952, why is it still being taught in police training in India as to who the habitual offender would be? In a city like Bhopal, if there is a theft, a murder, or even a rape in a professors’ colony, they will first find out which community lives within a radius of four-five kilometre: is it the Kanjar community, is it the Pardi community, who will it be? And if these communities happen to be within a radius of 5-10 kilometres of the site of crime, these people are definitely branded as the perpetrators.
Such non-evidentiary and casteist narratives are used as data in police trainings.
Legally, one may have declassified the Vimukta and Ghumantu communities as criminals. But no one wants to give up on their prejudices, do they? There is also immense pressure on the police to close the case as soon as possible and prove who the criminal is. But if they know that I live in Rajiv Nagar, they can simply come and pick up 4-5 kids and women to prove that these are the people who have committed theft in the Professors Colony. Easy isn’t it, because they know that Rajiv Nagar falls within the radius of the crime scene.
It is also interesting how the names of our localities have come to be – Rajiv Nagar is also known as ‘Gandi Basti’, Gautam Nagar is known as ‘Kargil’. No one knows why, but strangely, these have come to be known as localities where the labourers live — the ones who drink, collect garbage and clean your sewers, manholes and gutters.
Let me tell you about this case. There is a tehsil here called Berasiya. A Dalit boy was riding a motorcycle when the traffic police stopped him. Instead of asking for his license, the officer asked him about the silver chain that he was wearing. The boy explained, “Sir, it’s a silver chain, not gold. Silver chains weighing 2-3 tolas are available for 23,000 rupees.” The policeman could only say “Since when did Chamaars start wearing silver and gold?”
So this kind of mentality reveals itself in subtle but pervasive ways — through clothing, stories, food, drink, where people live, and the areas or locations they inhabit — it is all indicative of dominant Brahmanical norms.
TTE: This plays out in public data tracking too, yes?
Tasveer: The Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) has perpetuated these norms and biases. Originally intended for surveillance, it maintains registers of so-called habitual offenders. Now, the same practices are being implemented in Habitual Offenders’ Registers (HO). Terms like ‘goon’, ‘rowdy’, or ‘history-sheeter’ have entered common, everyday usage — even by well-meaning people — to categorise people as good, bad, criminal and non-criminal.
The police often visit people’s homes to gather intrusive information, asking questions like, “What kind of car do you have? Where did you buy it? What kind of phone do you own? Who are your friends?” These questions are not mere curiosity — they often serve as justification for filing cases. If someone from a Vimukta, poor or marginalised background buys a new mobile phone, the police assume it must be stolen. “Where did he get the money for a good car? How can someone like him afford nice clothes, gold, or silver? He must have stolen it.”
This profiling also extends to children, who are also treated as habitual offenders, despite the principle of fresh start/right to be forgotten outlined in the Juvenile Justice Act. The underlying idea is that the family you are born into determines whether you are inherently a criminal. This criminalisation operates not just at the community level but at the family level too.
The contrast is stark when you compare this with upper-caste families. In those families, violence — domestic or sexual — is often suppressed and rendered invisible. Yet in Vimukta or Ghumantu communities, entire families are labelled violent simply by their existence, including children.
This kind of profiling is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Authorities collect biased information, and this information itself becomes the deliberate proof’ used to justify their prejudices: Look, these people do this.
Nikita: They are using your entire body itself as a data point. Your entire body is a data point.
Moving, certain cultural practices, owning assets, basically every aspect of the socio-cultural life of communities including their physical self is turned into a data point of criminality. So, if you collect the data of this person, that is evidence of crime. It’s a vicious cycle that reinforces the thought that ‘everything that I do is considered a crime’. Whatever you collect from methen is a data point used to establish crime.
TTE: What is the role of language in the whole power system, to generate this deviant, criminal body? How do you see language playing out?
Nikita: Language plays a very big role, actually. The term ‘habitual offenders’ was for a long time either vaguely defined or not defined at all in various State legislations. This has been done to maintain the facade of administrative neutrality even though the habitual offenders’ laws were formulated to replace the CTA following its repeal by the Ayyangar Committee. deliberately left up to the discretion of the police to maintain the facade of administrative neutrality. While also giving the police unfettered discretion to continue using casteist logics to police criminalise the same communities criminalised under the CTA and also including many others in recent times like various Muslim (predominantly oppressed caste and class Muslims) under its fold. The moment anyone gets associated with this category, then criminality is presumed, it doesn’t matter what becomes of him — no one will question it, simply because the person has now been categorised as a habitual offender. Even to grant bail, the judge will first check whether you have a criminal record, and whether you are and are a habitual offender. That will become the basis for bail.
We had done a study in the Excise Department in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh. Individual women, specifically in the Vimukta Kuchbandiya community [where they make Mahua], have 25-28 cases each, under the Excise Act. Whenever a court or a judge passes an order, they have to give adequate and proper reasoning behind it. When we studied the women’s bail orders from the MP High Court, it became increasingly clear that most orders mentioned ‘habitual offender’ as the sole reason. In a way, it is a carte blanche, an all-encompassing phenomenon. Everyone seems to know what it means, but nobody can tell what that actually is.
Tasveer: I live in Rajiv Nagar, a locality with a reputation that makes it hard for young people living here to find work. Many young people in this area are denied opportunities simply because of where they live.
Some youth from the community work as waiters, particularly during wedding season, which means they often return home late at night, around 3-4 am. However, the police routinely harass them. It’s common for the police to follow them for kilometers in a PCR or police van.
To prove their innocence, these young people often bring leftover food from the wedding party as evidence. Yet, even this isn’t enough.
The police inspect the food suspiciously, questioning where it came from and whether it’s truly food or something else.
This kind of harassment — being chased by a police vehicle or stopped for baseless questioning — is common in Bhopal and across Madhya Pradesh. Vimukta and Ghumantu communities often face violence, including police torture. In some instances, this violence has also turned fatal.
One such case occurred in Berasia Tehsil, Rajgarh district, near Bhopal. In 2021, a man named Tulsiram Kanjar from the Kanjar community came to Bhopal with his family, for a wedding. While shopping for wedding supplies in the Berasia market, he was arrested by local police. Witnesses, including his family, saw him being beaten up in the market. He was then detained at the police station, where he was tortured for three days. On the fourth day he was presented in court, and by the fifth day, he died in Bhopal jail. His family, community members, and market witnesses protested, stating that he was innocent and had simply visited to buy wedding supplies.
Another tragic incident occurred in Ahmedabad, where a woman from the Madari community was lynched by a mob on false charges of child theft. This was just one of many such cases.
So, for many in these communities, life feels inescapably bleak. They are viewed through the lens of criminality from birth, with the system stacked against them. Justice is an illusion when the entire system declares you a criminal before you even have a chance to defend yourself.
Nikita: In mainstream discourse, you look at criminalisation only as a form of imprisonment, don’t you? There is no denying that imprisonment is an outcome of criminalisation, and the work that happens within prisons is necessary, but seldom do we talk about the ways in which people’s lives are criminalised outside the prison.
If there is a theft somewhere, people from the Vimukta/Ghumantu community will not dare to go out because they know that they will be picked up by the police.
In many Pardi communities, even for a wedding to take place, the local police station has to be informed first, because if so many Pardis gather at one place, it is assumed that it is to commit a crime, even if they are simply present as wedding guests.
So, you see, its effect and implication is very wide-ranging. When we were talking to a policeman in Hyderabad (in a different context) about this category of the habitual offender, he said something quite interesting, “Actually “‘habitual offender’ means those people who, even when they are not in our custody, are still in our custody. It’s like they are living in our custody 24/7,” which tells you that custody simply does not mean police station or jail. Custody means those people’s lives.
TTE: What does it mean to work on the psyche and mental health of these communities, who have lived as criminalised people, generation after generation?
Tasveer: Mental health issues are widespread in these communities because every single day, every moment, people are forced to deal with systemic oppression. The police have become deeply entrenched in their lives, playing the role of judge, lawmaker, and enforcer, leaving no room for people to lead their lives with justice, freedom or autonomy.
In some bastis, the situation is dire. For example, in one basti, there have been around 40-50 suicide attempts in the past one and a half years. These individuals face not only internal conflicts and issues within their communities, but also external ones involving society at large.
Recognising this, we have started addressing the issue through initiatives like counselling. We’ve partnered with individuals and organisations that specialise in mental health support. For instance, Deepa Pawar in Maharashtra has been doing remarkable work in this area. In Bhopal, an organisation called Muskaan has a dedicated team providing counselling for Vimukta communities.
There are some unique dynamics within these communities, particularly among women, which one also has to keep in account. For example, in the Pardi community, women often take on leadership roles or manage household expenses. Their everyday lives are a combination of struggle, survival and resilience. Women frequently go to collect and sell recyclable items early in the morning — sometimes as early as 4 or 5 am. In this work, they face constant abuse and harassment, often from the police or the public.
But it’s not just at the level of the basti. Large urban projects, like city-cleaning initiatives, exacerbate these challenges. Women who collect clothing or recyclables face tension and financial instability, because selling these items is crucial for feeding their families. This constant pressure leads to conflicts within relationships and the community. Many women harm themselves or get caught in dangerous situations, such as accidents involving live electric wires or ponds, often as a result of despair.
People are frequently beaten up for minor infractions, and some even lose their lives in custody or during these violent encounters. All of this coalesce into an overwhelming mental health crisis within these communities.
Nikita: We also need to broaden our understanding of trauma and mental health in the context of the Vimukta communities. They have intergenerational histories of criminalisation. I don’t think many mental health professionals have any understanding of this kind of trauma, and even if they have, it is not a historical understanding. I wonder how one will conceptualise and arrive at this historical understanding of trauma, of a community who has perpetually lived under surveillance from all sorts of authorities. As Deepa Pawar also says, it is not a mental health issue alone; it’s a justice issue.
A simplistic definition of self-care cannot be applied here, right? You can't self-care your way out of generations of oppression.
TTE: What is the role that technology must be playing here, and how do we understand carcerality then, in this digital age? Because as you had said the other day, the surveilled body is the ‘datafied’ body…
Nikita: Whether it is technology or Artificial Intelligence, it is not doing anything new. It is really just technologically encoding what already existed; you created the criminal register, you interlinked all of it. By using AI or facial recognition, you will facially map the same people whom you were already surveilling.
It seems to me that the way AI and technology functions is only going to replicate historical forms of criminalisation,
as CPA has documented in its work on Hyderabad.
What we are seeing in Hyderabad right now — because that is the centre-point of these technologies — is the emergence of ‘criminal hotspots. The police already know where they will go if a crime has taken place. They will now call the bastis where people have been living for ages, they will now call them ‘criminal hotspots. They are lending the nomenclature an element of objectivity by saying that this is not a person but technology [that is leading us to these criminal hotspots].
What has happened now is that the government and the State have used the same narrative and said, “Well, you are saying that individual people are doing these things in the system, so let us remove the human bias. Now that we have removed the human bias and added technology, you are seeing the same result.” But who is designing that technology — in which framework are you placing that design? That framework is a human framework, which in turn is a historical and sociological framework.
So, I think this has been the consequence of looking at technology in a casteless manner. Now everyone is harping on about how AI is going to make things worse, but things were already really bad! In case people haven’t paid enough attention, it has always been terrible, so AI is not doing anything that is radically new. It is just replicating history.
TTE: Is that why the caste lens is so critical in understanding criminality?
Nikita: Any discourse that is casteless is always palatable.
Because a casteless discourse has allowed for Savarnas to speak to systems conveniently without implicating themselves. For example, the Mathura case, which came under the category of custodial rape, or Bhanwari Devi’s case which became about sexual harassment at the workplace: but then ‘work’ is very different, for different people. Work is also determined by caste. Similarly, your experience of [police] custody too, is very different. When the Supreme Court acquitted the accused persons — specifically the policemen — in the Mathura case, it sent out the message that these are women who are devoid of honour, and having sexual access to them is not actually a violation, it is a matter of right. Similar things have been said in Bhanwari Devi’s judgement. So there exists a history of such legal precedents and the experiences of survivors in such cases, but they have been erased.
TTE: Why do you then think is it essential to look at ‘policing’ as a philosophical idea in the everyday, beyond its instrumentalist use as a state apparatus? Could that perhaps, be a starting point for us to look at crime and criminality from a feminist lens?
Tasveer: ‘Policing’ as a word, is not just about the police as a unit; it denotes an entire system. This system includes jails, surveillance methods, various departments, and people working in different roles of authority. Surveillance, in particular, has historically targeted specific communities, and its impact persists to this day. The laws and frameworks, designed long ago to control Vimukta communities, are still in use, perpetuating systemic discrimination.
For instance, when a complaint is filed against someone, the police often investigate their family’s history first. Now, if past cases involve their family members, it is presumed that the individual belongs to a ‘criminal group’, even before any charges are proven. This kind of surveillance effectively labels entire communities as criminal by birth. It is a pre-constructed narrative that denies individuals the opportunity to prove their innocence.
Under laws like the CTA, the assumption is that certain people are ‘born criminals’. But how does one become a criminal by birth?
The entire structure was designed to enforce this idea. The laws were crafted to function within such a framework, which has since expanded into other areas like neighbourhood monitoring and surveillance. For instance, the Nagar Suraksha Samiti (Neighbourhood Security Committee) was ostensibly formed to make your localities safer. However, these committees primarily serve as tools to surveil and interfere in people’s lives.
The people selected for these committees often have questionable backgrounds. I’ve personally attended meetings where individuals with serious criminal records — some with multiple cases under the Arms Act or even charges of rape — were part of these committees. These individuals work in collusion with the police. How can such people genuinely ensure the community’s safety?
In one case, two children were taken into custody and instead of being kept under custody at a police station, were held for several days at the home of a known criminal who has been booked for over 25 cases under the Arms Act. This person beat up and interrogated the children. Local residents, particularly women, later reported that this individual had been involved in violent acts, including attacking someone with a sword.
This highlights the hypocrisy, double standards and selective application of justice. Surveillance disproportionately targets Vimukta communities while overlooking the criminal behaviour of those in privileged positions.
If similar crimes (like a rape case which has a public outcry) had been committed by individuals from Vimukta communities, the punishment would likely have been far harsher, possibly even the death penalty. This systemic bias reveals deep-rooted discrimination in the justice system — not just in delivering justice but also defining it. It creates a justification for differential treatment based on caste and class.
In unorganised sectors, it becomes easier to oppress people because they lack the social and institutional power to defend themselves.
Oppressed communities have long been excluded from decision-making roles in governance, administration, and policing. When individuals from privileged communities dominate these spaces, they bring their biases and maintain the status quo. This perpetuates inequality and reinforces systemic oppression.
Nikita: Policing has to be seen in a wider context. I think all the means of maintaining a status quo have to be seen in relation to that. Whether it is the police system, a Panchayat or the residential welfare association of your housing society, they are basically reinforcing a status quo and want the Brahmanical norms to remain intact; this is policing. The many other things you tell people — how to look, how to speak, what is appropriate or inappropriate — I think these are all policing systems. The police is a major part of it, but there is a great need to look at it in a holistic way. The biggest support, if any, to policing — and where it emerges from, really — is the institution of the family. The family is the fundamental unit where you teach people how things should be/ should not be, by playing different roles. I feel that this is also policing. If there is a central point of the entire caste system, it is in the family and, of course, in marriage.
