What is the issue?
- Supreme Court in early 2018 stressed the need for providing inbuilt safeguards within the SC/ST (prevention of atrocities) Act to plug its misuse.
- While this was for preventing the framing of innocents, the leeway that will be provided, is likely to aid offenders get away.
What are the implications of the verdict?
- What - SC/ST (prevention of atrocities) Act is a standalone legal protection granted to the depressed classes against casteist slurs, abuses and violence.
- The act also provides for stringent provisions like non-bailable warrants and a subsequent fast-track trial to settle the case.
- Nonetheless, despite these strong provisions, casteist crimes continue to dominate the larger narrative in most parts of rural India.
- Considering the context, framing of innocents under the act is likely to be rare and the court verdict asking for safeguards to prevent misuse looks naive.
- Verdict - The court seems to have had a narrow minded focus on few cases of misuse of the act by elitist SC/STs sitting in high government/private offices.
- The call for new guidelines to deal with accused persons is hence likely to dilute the act and provide scope for offenders to escape.
- On the whole, the judgment is likely to make the depressed class more vulnerable to abuse and further their victimisation.
- More significantly, it seems to convey that the act is being misused considerably by the depressed classes to blackmail and frame innocents.
What are the concerns with court’s rationale?
- Conviction rate - The Supreme Court has taken note of the large number of acquittals in SC/ST atrocities cases as an indicator of them being largely false.
- But this is a flawed logic, because in SC/ST abuse cases, the accused tend to processes significant social and economic heft in their localities.
- Contrastingly, the victims tend to be those on the margins of the society who’ll have to face police apathy and institutional suppression.
- Additionally, the conviction rate under other acts isn’t very impressive either.
- Data Trend - There is also no precise data on the scale and extent to which the Act has been misused by the elitist SC/ST government/private employees.
- With little data, the court seems to have concluded that there is considerable misuse of the act by the SC/STs to settle personal scores.
- Misuse prevention - There are already provisions within the “Indian Penal Code”, which prescribe punishments for falsifying evidence.
- The court’s verdict doesn’t specify on why these were found insufficient to deal with the falsified SC/ST atrocity cases too.
What are the other procedural flaws in the verdict?
- Considering the implications, it would’ve been prudent for the bench to have sought larger consultations before pronouncing its verdict.
- Article 338 stipulates that governments should consult the “National Commission for SC” on all major policy matters affecting Scheduled Castes.
- Similarly, article 338 A mandates all major policy decision affecting STs to be taken in consultation with “National Commission for Scheduled Tribes”.
- Considering this, Supreme Court is also bound to hear these commissions before pronouncements that are likely to impact SC/STs on a whole.
- But in its urge to weed out the misuse of SC/ST atrocities act, the court seems to have subdued constitutional prudence and overlooked the commissions.
- Some argue that SC’s verdict doesn’t constitute a major impactful policy decision and that it merely tweaked the existing act.
- But spontaneous protests that erupted in the aftermath indicate otherwise, and the verdict was definitely seen as a major affront on social justice.
Source: The Hindu
