The term ‘Hate Crime’ has recently attracted the attention of popular discourse on crimes in India with alarming upsurge in the incidents of prejudice-motivated violence. ‘Hate Crime’ refers to a criminal act which is motivated by the offender’s prejudice/bias against the victim based on the victim’s social identity or membership in a particular social group. Historically, people world-over have been victims of ‘targeted’ violence due to their association to some particular religion, caste, race, gender, ethnicity etc., but the criminalization of such violence through law taking into account notion of prejudice is a new phenomenon. While hate crimes are universally present, hate crime laws are not. India, a socially diverse country, has long witnessed bias-motivated crimes yet Indian legal system doesn’t recognize any crime as a hate crime and thus there is no separate category of hate crime laws. No legal recognition of hate crimes and absence of ‘special’ hate crime legislation in India provides the background in which the present paper is situated. The failure of the Indian legal system to acknowledge the existence of hate crimes poses two potential dangers- first, it makes a very serious social concern invisible that otherwise must be addressed at the policy level and second, it undermines the problem of discriminatory treatment of some particular groups in society. Therefore, it’s essential to legally address and prosecute hate crimes. Against this background, this paper focuses on addressing one major question – Why does India need special Hate Crime Legislation? There are two prerequisites to this question – (1) Conceptualizing idea of ‘hate crime’ in Indian context. (2) Analysing the existing legal provisions employed to deal with such crimes in India which could otherwise be understood as hate crimes.The paper examines the conditions of hate crime in India and evaluates the legal mechanisms handling it.
