Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the policy process of the United Progressive Alliance government's attempts to legislate a model anti-communal violence bill by focusing on the draft bills of 2005 and 2011.

Paper long abstract:

In India, special legislative provisions for vulnerable groups, such as the anti-discrimination measures in the Protection of Civil Rights Act (1955) and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act (1989), have provided strong legal protection and security to caste groups in the wake of violence. In contrast, though religious minorities, especially Muslims, have been the target of violence during communal riots, they lack equivalent protection. Hindu-Muslim riots and anti-Muslim pogroms have become the defining feature of post-1947 collective violence in India, and the regular recurrence of such events presents a serious challenge to the principles of secularism and religious tolerance. Recognising this fact, and against a backdrop of 9/11 and Gujarat pogroms, the UPA government promised to 'enact a model comprehensive law to deal with communal violence'. This paper will assess the UPA's efforts to legislate a model anti-communal violence bill. These bills were the core of UPA's post-Gujarat anti-communal violence strategy for better security for minorities by increasing the likelihood of punishments for perpetrators of violence and negligent state officials. How were UPA's efforts to produce 'top-down' legislation frustrated by the institutionalised opposition to such a measure? This paper will argue that the patterns of policy formulation resulting from the institutional arrangement created at the time of critical juncture of constitution-making have fostered a conservative, path-dependent mode of policy-making by preferred key institutions, and faced with political, administrative and judicial opposition to these bills, the UPA eventually opted for symbolic implementation.