 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we are joined by Mr. Mohsin Alam Bhatt who teaches at Jindal Law University and he is going to discuss with us about the hate watch which tracks hate crimes across India. Thank you for joining us. So Mr. Bhatt, how would you really determine what constitutes a hate crime? So the category of hate crime is different from a range of other categories we often hear about particularly over the last few years. So it's different from lynching or mob violence or even historically things like atrocities. The nature of hate crimes is actually quite well sort of entrenched in transnational legal literature because there are lots of countries which have legislations against hate crimes and also lots of different institutions, organizations and countries have proper documentation systems in place which also use the category of hate crimes, hate incidents, hate violence these all sort of categories which have family resemblances. The distinction between the category of hate crime and other categories is the idea of motivation and that is what hate crime the category really refers to. So the ordinary definition of a hate crime is any crime which has been committed by the alleged perpetrator motivated either partly or wholly by the hostility towards the identity of the victim. So the focus in deciding whether a particular incident falls in the category of hate crime or not is really looking at what really motivated a certain person who is alleged to have committed a crime. Now this motivation need not be the dominant motivation it could be one among many other motivations but if the motivation of hostility towards the identity of the victim plays any role in the act it will be classified as hate crime. So what we have been doing along with India Spend what we call hate crimes watch is just documenting religion based hate crimes in India over the last we have started over the last 10 years but hopefully we will want to extend it more. So then what we are doing is we are cataloging all the different incidents which appear from whatever evidence we have gathered to reflect that the alleged perpetrator was motivated by a hostility towards the religious identity of the victim that is the extent to which we are documenting under India Spend hate watch. So when we are talking about hate crimes you did mention that the focus is on the motivating factor. So obviously this is a I mean bit of a departure from the traditional understanding of criminal law where you have the intention and the act that's actually committed. So now you're saying that the focus what determines a hate crime is that the focus is now shifts more on to the motivation. So it's not that the focus shifts so for any and this is a bit of a legal conversation now but for any act to constitute a criminal act ordinarily under criminal law the act must be accompanied by a criminal intention. So for example a murder a person killing another person counts as murder if the person who did it intended to kill. Hate crime the category does not change that. Hate crime says that plus if there's a motivation which is a motive which is ordinarily not necessary for an act to be a criminal act under traditional classical criminal law. So apart from the intention to kill there was also motivation that the person who was the victim of this crime was attacked partly or wholly because of her say religious identity or caste identity or race identity then it would also be a hate crime. So for some incident to be considered a hate crime it should one be a crime on the face of it. Secondly for data collection purposes plus it should also have hostility motivation. So it would not only be a crime it will also be a hate crime. Could you tell us a little bit about the methodology that you've adopted for you know collating your data with respect to hate one? Yeah so there are two things apart from the definition as you would have guessed any assessment or motivation is quite tricky it will obviously be tricky even when it comes to adjudication so in countries where there is the category of hate crimes courts to find it quite difficult to assess whether the motivation existed or not and it's really a question of evidence. So what the first thing which we decided quite early is that whenever we are deciding whether a particular incident should be included as religion-based hate crime we would require affirmative evidence there must be existing evidence we won't merely infer something there must be existing evidence that the alleged perpetrator was motivated by religious hostility. Sometimes this evidence comes in the form of direct evidence so for example of the alleged perpetrator himself says that you know the reason I attacked this person was because of this person's religious identity. In many other cases these are circumstantial or contextual factors so the we just look at the facts and we see that the only reason somebody could have been attacked is because of the religious identity there's no other motivational factor the person is completely stranger but say for example has a religious garb and then you can infer that the only possible motivation could have been that so these are you and there obviously are the contextual factors sometimes the alleged perpetrator says we are I'm doing this because of love jihad right so explicitly the person may not say religion etc but obviously we know from the contextual factors that this must be something to do with religious hostility but there are sometimes slightly more complicated things and this is potentially controversial so we have included cow related violence or violence perpetrated for ostensible protection of the cow as also falling in the category of religion-based hate crime. Now the reason for that is in international literature we call it bias indicators so existence of the motivation of cow we are treating that as bias indicator but essentially that means is that when there is a certain contextual factor even though it there's no direct evidence we infer this must be something to do with religion because data shows that so India spent had done a survey which showed that most cases of cow violence actually happened against caste and religious minorities particularly religious minorities so since there's already a strong correlation based on data between religious hostility and cow related violence we presume unless proven wrong if we have any data we do not put that incident in but we just presume that if there is a cow angle and the violence is perpetrated against say a person being a Muslim by a person who's not a Muslim particularly a Hindu then we will presume this may be religious hostility but we are presuming that based on data and the strong correlation so that is the evidentiary side the second is and hopefully we'll talk about that more is the kind of sources we are using ideally we would want to use ground level verification but since we are just starting at the moment of the first phase we are only looking at English media sources so we have surveyed and audited English media sources now we'll move on to non- English and start including human rights reports other organizations and fact findings and hopefully over a period of time our own ground level fact finding volunteers but at this stage primarily we are using English media sources as a source but hopefully we'll expand. As far as India goes what kind of legislations actually exist that you know specifically mentioned or you know that can be placed under the category of hate crime legislation. Yeah that's a good question so at this stage in India we do not have an anti-religion hate crime law we do have caste-related hate crime laws I would and it may be something people can argue about but I do think the anti atrocities act the schedule car schedule tribe atrocities act is a hate crime legislation the his before the atrocities act the anti schedule caste violence was covered under the protection of civil rights act there the category the phraseology of the act was any crime committed on the grounds of untouchability again that is motivation so what that ground what that phrase try to capture was that the perpetrator is motivated partly or wholly because of untouchability or because of caste that is the sort of structure of a hate crime legislation so in India we do obviously have a history of hate crime legislations but that is primarily in the form of protecting particularly schedule caste of the communities and schedule tribe communities many people would argue even many sort of gender related laws also hate crime legislation so anti hate crime legislations but at this stage we do not have anti hate crime legislation when it comes to sexual minorities religious minorities racial ethnic linguistic minorities so that's not covered with respect to the recent discussions in the judiciary with respect to I mean I was reading article at the wire and with respect to the the directions given to the the state governments and the preventive measures that one needs to take do you have any information with respect to how is I know what's what's the development with that and how effective do you think that really is and what we need to do at three or two sides you know being the legislative or from the citizens and as to what do we need to do from our end per se so so I think we'll still have to wait for the implementation of the Supreme Court guidelines so in short what happened was that this case was filed by a variety of different organizations and supported by some really good lawyers in the Supreme Court and the primary frame of this judgment was this notion of lynching as it turns out the Supreme Court judgment itself didn't define what quote-unquote lynching meant so whether lynching is hate crime or lynching is mob violence it's not really clear from the Supreme Court order itself but it's implicit in what the court is trying to say because the court was asked to respond to a wide range of problems often described as car vigilantism etc so many of the cases which do get documented in the hate watch are covered by Supreme Court guidelines the Supreme Court I think most of us welcome Supreme Court guidelines but at this stage even most of the states have not filed compliance reports and Supreme Court had asked the different states to file compliance reports so that has not happened and I think it's a huge responsibility on the legal academy and civil rights groups to make sure that we continue to survey and audit the implementation of the guidelines because as far as we have gathered the information is not completely clear about how many cases have actually received the kind of attention which the guidelines are mandated but I think we still have time and we should get our act together and make sure that these guidelines are implemented speaking of legislative judiciary now let's talk about civil societies and citizens what do you think we should probably do from our end to sort of right so there are a couple of things the first thing is that any respectable hate crime monitoring or documentation system must have fact-finding which is done by volunteers or by people who are part of the documentation network so our big aim from the hate watch's side will be to start expanding as soon as possible and as far as possible the depth and breadth of hate crime documentation and that's definitely one thing which different civil society organizations students journalists and others can help us in because we are in the process of creating modules and questionnaires which fit into our methodologies so we would want people to take up this challenge and whenever they hear about a certain incident or they witness a certain incident to adopt these modules and protocols and conduct fact findings based on our questionnaires so that would obviously contribute to documentation which we are doing and hopefully which other people also doing because this has to be a collective activity and secondly while that is going on hopefully it will also generate some sort of local grounds well and what I would say local level mobilization both for documentation but also to respond to these kind of incidents because these incidents are not don't happen in isolation these are part of a larger problem of civil rights in this country so if people do start contributing to local level fact-finding and documentation then they'll also be able to hopefully get in touch with the families and provide them rehabilitation support and legal aid support so these are also sort of concrete deliverables which civil society organizations and individuals and students can participate in and I do see both of them working in tandem but that will really depend on to what extent we are able to have an outreach reach out to all sorts of different stakeholders and ask them to contribute so what is the purpose you really see as why you're documenting hate crimes or you know hate violence through the hate watch so this is partly connected with what we already talked about which is I think firstly we need to understand what is happening in this country and it can be surprisingly perplexing because the kind of violence which we are witnessing is quite diverse and some some of this violence has political overtones much of the other violence may not have that those sort of obvious political connections and I think it is really important for particularly for journalists and for the academia to understand what is this violence which we are witnessing what is often called vigilantism or targeted violence or mob lynching or mob violence so the one category would be hate crime and perhaps approaching this particular inquiry from that category so both in terms of documenting the scale of the problem but also understanding what is the nature of this problem and secondly hopefully if that job is well done then also really coming together and figuring out what is the best strategy to deal with this problem because the anybody who's been working in this area would know that most of the families which are affected are extremely poor they are not in a position to follow through through the legal means either to ensure that the police takes the right steps or the courts come into this whole issue in a productive way and in many cases the state's response has been quite weak and that's also something which is quite implicit in the Supreme Court's decision as well so what I think we as members of civil society have to do is to come together understand this problem and respond so hopefully genuinely good rigorous documentation will help that process but documentation in and of itself may not do that it has to necessarily involve a range of other people participating both for the purpose of documentation but also for helping the families and victims thank you most and for your time that's all the time we have for today thank you for watching news click and Indian culture for