Sandhya Fuchs

I am a legal anthropologist with ten years experience working in India and the British South Asian diaspora. My work analyses the social life of hate crimes and explores what success, justice and hope mean for communities and individuals who seek justice through hate crime and hate speech legislation in the South Asian context. In particular, I examine how legal institutions and actors engage competing visions of history and contested landscapes of social memory when evaluating claims of hate, discrimination, identity- based violence.

My first book, which explores the social life of India's only hate crime law - the 1989 Scheduled Castes/ Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act - will be published by Stanford University Press in June 2024 (https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=36293).
The book explores what it means for hate crime laws to be successful and analyzes how hate crime laws can be actively dismantled and even weaponized against minorities by police and courts, while, simultaneously opening up new avenues of hope and restitution in the inetrstices of daily life.