Violence, Cumulative Discrimination and Gendered Struggles for Justice

The unabated violence against women, sexual minorities, Dalits, minorities and indigenous communities in India, it's resurgence even, resurrects older debates on subjugation, repression and resistance struggles.  There are layers of new meanings and forms and articulations of suffering and harm that grow over these older debates on inequality and discrimination that signal shifts in economic realities and legal (im)possibilities -- spreading the sense of imminent crisis. The (mis)appropriations of ideas of justice, by the state, by non-state actors and "the people", drive new vectors of change at the intersection of law, governance and public debate.   The emergence of a new common sense on the (co)habitations of gender based discrimination and the interrogation of the very construction of crisis itself -- "is this the worst that has happened?" -- are at the centre of the renewed imagination of justice.

This paper will use the events and debates around the Report of the Committee on Amendments in Criminal Law headed by Justice Verma that recommended wide ranging changes in the law on sexual assault to open out the possibilities that a Bill of Rights for Women holds for a different imagination of justice -- looking at the specific situation of women, but also at the ways in which larger questions of modernity, impunity, targeted assault, the existing recognition of "atrocity" in the law and state practice inform and are shaped by these debates.

What are the multiple locations and articulations of the law (or is it justice in the era of modernity?) -- within which the shifts in the debate need to be mapped? What are the aggravations in targeted assault that are consequent on rapid and escalating shifts in economic policy?  And therefrom how does state formation take place around the edifice of patriarchy?