” Collectively, these professions must create cooperative advocacy networks—engaging communities, human rights groups, and policymakers—to lobby for hate crime legislation that benefits dignity, safety, and restorative justice for marginalised communities.”
1. Would you begin by describing a bit about your legal and academic background and why you wanted to do work on hate crime law in your research?
I am a law graduate and a research scholar at the Central University of Kerala. Throughout my years, I have been intensely interested in constitutional rights issues and the real lives of marginalised people. Why I became interested in the topic of hate crime law was the growing tension between constitutional ideals of equality and the ongoing visibility of targeted violence— usually uncontrolled, unmarked, and uncontrolled. I was most interested, though, not in the law as of now, but in how it is going to change to safeguard those most vulnerable.
2. Why is there a focus on marginalised groups in your hate crime research?
My work specifically addresses marginalised groups—religious minorities, Dalits, tribal communities, and LGBTQIA+ individuals—since these groups face institutionalised and systemic discrimination far greater than occasional acts of individual perpetrators. Hate crimes committed against them are not ad hoc or sporadic; rather, they are reflections of underlying social, cultural, and political cleavages. Violence is a public indicator of underlying cleavages in society, validating underlying hierarchies and exclusion processes.
What drew me most to this area of research was a preoccupation of profound interest with the way violence, and especially violence against historically oppressed groups, had been normalised in public debate as well as state institutions. Legal and governance frameworks tend not to refer to these acts as what they really are—structural and identity-based violence—and thus avoid confronting the underlying inequalities that they reflect. This research goes beyond calls for protection. It calls for these communities to be named, respected, and acknowledged in the law. Legal reform, anti- discrimination policy, and culturally sensitive policy interventions are called for now that not only bring justice but also restore dignity to the regularly marginalised and targeted. Through this research, I hope to bring to the fore how hate crimes are connected to larger issues of social power, oppression history, and institutional complicity, and call for reforms that respect and engage these interconnected realities.
3. What is the role of teachers, lawyers, and social workers in promoting hate crime law reforms focusing on the dignity and safety of marginalised people?
Social workers, attorneys, and educators all have specific but similar roles to perform in supporting hate crime law reforms—roles that go beyond their own practice domains to take an active stand against institutionalised bias and to uphold the dignity of the excluded communities.
Social workers are typically the first to act on identity- based violence, engaging intensively with the survivors and the victimised groups. Along with psychosocial intervention, their practice involves legal literacy education, mobilisation of the community, and policy reform advocacy. Social workers can document evidence of patterns of violence, help the survivors navigate the legal system, and bring awareness to the existing gaps in laws. Above all, they frame policy advocacy with a trauma-informed, rights-based, and culturally responsive approach to ensure reforms reflect the everyday realities of the most affected.
Lawyers are at the forefront of interpreting, questioning, and shaping the law. Lawyers have an important role to play in putting at the center-stage the inadequacies of existing hate crime laws and advocating for thorough, intersectional legal definitions incorporating caste, religion, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity-based violence. Lawyers must battle for procedural changes in the form of specialised hate crime units, fast-track courts, and victim protection, and provide gratis legal assistance to survivors. Lawyers’ lobbying in the courtrooms and policy spaces is crucial in pressurising the state apparatus to act and towards progressive legal change. Schools and teachers can influence both public opinion and policy through the creation of socially critical scholarship, curriculum, and the education of future professionals. Educators can create socially progressive professionals who can counteract hate-based violence through social justice education, human rights education, and legal advocacy on an interdisciplinary basis. Academic scholarship can provide empirical evidence on the prevalence, effect, and system facilitators of hate crimes that is essential to informing
legislative reform and public policy. Collectively, these professions must create cooperative advocacy networks—engaging communities, human rights groups, and policymakers—to lobby for hate crime legislation that benefits dignity, safety, and restorative justice for marginalised communities. Collectively, they make sure that legal reforms are not only procedurally sound but also socially just, compassionate, and equitable.
4. How have your research and study in law assisted your understanding of the shortfalls in existing hate crime law in India?
My studies and legal education have provided me with a critical perspective to examine how India’s existing legal framework is incapable of dealing with the complexity of hate crimes. While the Indian Penal Code (IPC) does have provisions for public disorder, violence, and discrimination crimes—Section 153A (incitement of group hatred) and 295A (hurt to religious sentiments)—there is no comprehensive, sole legislation that defines and deals with hate crimes perpetrated on the basis of caste, religion, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation.
From my research, I understood that legal systems have a tendency to isolate such crimes as random, standalone acts of violence, distinguishing them from their larger socio-political contexts. By isolating them, state institutions can avoid the structural dynamic of identity violence and avoid addressing systemic discrimination rooted in legal, policing, and administrative systems. Furthermore, the absence of adequate definitions, data protocols, and victim-led legal remedies also complicates the monitoring of patterns of targeted violence, leaving communities exposed and justice delayed or denied.
Studying law also educated me about the manner in which legal language and proceduralism silence the marginalised. Hate crimes against Dalits, religious minorities, tribal groups, and LGBTQIA+ persons are often underreported, misclassified, or euphemized as personal disputes and not identity-based oppressions. Furthermore, gaps in witness protection, absence of trauma-informed legal processes, and political misuse of communal violence laws also weaken legal responses.
This realisation has solidified my belief that India urgently requires a legally binding, rights-oriented, and victim-centred hate crime law with clearly articulated accountability provisions, expert investigation protocols, and community consultation provisions. My interdisciplinary research—a syncretic fusion of legal scholarship, social work, and human rights research—has therefore allowed me to conceptualise hate crimes not as legal offences only but as essentially social, political, and institutional problems requiring long-term, intersectional legal reform.
5. What, in your view, is the place of empathy in the development of fairer and more equal legal systems, and what significant loopholes have you identified in current hate crime law to safeguard marginalised and minority groups?
From a professional perspective, empathy is not just a ‘soft skill’but a revolutionary force in legal reform and justice delivery,particularly for the vulnerable and marginalised. Legal frameworks constructed in neglect of the lived realities of the very groups they claim to safeguard will be likely to overlook the intricate, structural patterns of violence and oppression. Laws written in ignorance of the trauma, fear, and social isolation that victims of identity-based violence endure will be hollow provisions, insensitive to the urgent needs of those most at risk. Empathy, when applied to law, adjudication, and enforcement, enables institutions to move beyond the narrow, punitive imagination to a responsive, restorative justice—one that pursues healing, dignity, and social reintegration of the victims. It enables legal systems to identify patterns of violence, recognise historical power imbalances, and understand intersectional vulnerabilities of groups targeted due to their caste, religion, gender identity, or ethnicity.
But from my professional and learning experience, I have realised significant structural gaps in India’s current hate crime legislation. First and foremost is the absence of a legal definition of the term “hate crime” itself, leading to inconsistent reporting, weak data collection, and discriminatory prosecution. Hate crimes—caste atrocities, communal violence, or violence against LGBTQIA+ persons—are usually dealt with as ordinary criminal offenses, depriving the crimes of the very context of systemic prejudice and social relations of power.
In addition, there are no official support systems for victims, legal or psychological, established, which leaves the survivors isolated, re-traumatised, and in most cases, reluctant to report to the police or the justice system. Lack of trauma- informed legal processes and protection for witnesses further disenfranchises the victims from an already inaccessible justice system.
To be truly just and equitable, let alone for the most excluded, empathy must be the driving force of legal systems and institutional practice. It must be the same motivating force behind hate crime law, which is unequivocally and categorically defining and categorising identity violence, demanding specialist investigation procedures, and ensuring full victim care provision. Only by infusing empathy into the very fabric of legal reform do we stand a chance of closing the gap between law and life—of having legal systems that are also substantively equitable.
6. Is there an example or case study that illustrates how current law has not delivered justice or recognition to victims of hate crime?
One such commonality is underreporting and misidentification of caste attacks as personal enmity cases instead of caste violence. The police, in most lynching cases against religious minorities, prefer registering FIRs under ordinary assault law, disregarding sections assuming communal hatred. Omitting
the assignment of motive erases the structural nature of the crime and weakens the call for system accountability.
7. How do legal definitions of hate crimes affect reporting, prosecution, or even public perception of hate crimes?
Unbridled courts and police will automatically have to define motive for themselves—something they most likely will do subjectively or conservatively. Charges become diluted, sentences are lowered, or there is an acquittal. Such crimes are perceived by the society, however, as isolated events and not as manifestations of group bias. Invisibility is the product of a lack of definition, and hate crimes become politicised or neglected.
8. In what ways are the challenges faced by marginalised groups to access justice in Australia and India unique, specifically in terms of institutional response,systemic constraints, and legal culture?
Although both India and Australia are faced with the challenge of equal access to justice, their nature and intensity differ because they have divergent socio-legal contexts.
In India, problems are structurally deep and cut across caste, religion, gender, and socio-economic class. Marginalised groups are socially excluded by the police and are subjected to delayed investigations and procedural hurdles that appear impassable. Legal literacy is low, especially in rural India, and even if the victims go to the authorities, they are beaten back, socially boycotted, or economically penalised. The judicial process, as constitutionally advanced as it is, is slow, underfunded, and largely inaccessible in the absence of legal aid or NGO intervention. For too many, justice is a wished-for dream and not a reality.
In Australia, although overall gaps are comparable— i.e., for Indigenous Australians, migrants, and the mentally vulnerable—there have been greater efforts to identify and bridge them. Trauma-informed practice, legal aid offices, interpreter services, and cultural liaison officers are more mainstreamed. Gaps persist, though, in over-policing, deaths in custody, and silencing of voices in policy reform. The strength is greater institutional accountability and more efficient mechanisms of system review.
In fact, India has issues of access at the grassroots, and Australia has issues of responsiveness and equity in an otherwise functioning system. Both countries can learn from each other—India can learn from more participatory procedural protections, and Australia can learn from India’s new grassroots legal empowerment initiatives to extend justice to the periphery.
9. Do you envision a place for restorative practice or community-based programs to complement legal reform for hate crime, and what legal reforms would you find necessary to make hate crime law more responsive, inclusive, and protective of all communities?
Yes—I strongly believe that there is a constitutive role for restorative models of justice and community programs as well as formal legal reform in the response to hate crimes. Legal remedy is required to ensure accountability and deterrence, but restorative models are able to offer collective healing, social validation, and affirmation by community when state institutions are sclerotic or culturally insensitive. Models such as truth-telling circles, community tribunals, or public storytelling sessions are able to offer safe, supportive environments for victims and affected communities to tell, reclaim dignity, and build solidarity. These processes need to be viewed as complementary, and not instead of, legal remedy—so victims are offered both justice and healing.
Concurrently, India needs to have immediate, sweeping legal reforms in order to deal with the endemic shortcomings of its existing response to hate crimes. The first is to have a precise, sweeping legal definition of hate crimes, one that mandatorily recognises caste, religion, ethnicity, gender identity, sexuality, and disability-based bias-motivated violence. The law also needs to recognise intersectionality—a recognition of how these identity markers intersect and render people vulnerable to discrimination and violence.
Moreover, there should be mandatory specialist training for police, judicial officers, and public prosecutors in the identification of hate crimes, investigation, and victim support. Special victim support units, fast-track courts, and open data collection systems for hate crimes are significant for increasing access to justice. The reforms must be rights-based and trauma- informed and position at the centre the voices and agency of the marginalised groups.
Along with legal reform and restorative, community- based approaches, co-existence can be achieved to deal with both the legal and social aspects of hate crime and to promote accountability, collective healing, and long-term social cohesion.
10. Can you speak to how Australia and India differ in adopting empathy in their legal system and policing practices?
India and Australia also vary in where they place empathy in institutional and legal practice. India has been more officially trending towards the implementation of trauma-informed and person-centred practice, particularly in systems responding to Indigenous peoples, mental health, and family violence. Victim advocacy, restorative justice practice, and professional training in cultural competence and psychological well-being increasingly inform the machinery of the law. Institutional space exists for dignity, trauma, and healing consideration, but it is difficult. Justice in India is procedural, not personal. While the constitution and judiciary are based on certain principles of social justice, the administration of justice in everyday life is mostly oppressive, especially for marginalised sections. Empathy is at the individual level—by a sympathetic judge, lawyer, or social worker—and not in a systemic way in the police or judiciary. Victims are often subjected to repeated secondary trauma through coercive interrogation, unavailability of procedure, and absence of psychosocial services. It is true that there are challenges enumerated above, and both countries are still improving. India can learn from the point of Australia’s turning towards trauma-informed justice, and Australia can learn from India’s legal empowerment and grass-roots activism. Ultimately, it is not model-exporting to make law more compassionate—it is about changing minds in every single legal and cultural setting.