“SC ‘n ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, Or A Political Ploy of the Cynical Minds”, MyIndMakers, 29 Sep 2026.
“Though for a long while, the dalits and the janjatis, aka SCs and STs, were wont to get the rough end of the socially discriminatory stick, yet it was only forty years after independence that Rajiv Gandhi occasioned the SC and ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989, but not for any holistic reasons. It was but a cynical idea to stem the growing political mobilisation of the dalits outside his Congress umbrella that ensued the weakening of their traditional support to it from the early eighties. That was precisely because, by then, their social awakening, political empowerment and educational advancement, coupled with the country’s growing urbanisation, made them assertive as a class and aggressive in their manners.
If anything, the ill-motivated SC and ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act that ironically came into force a year later on January 30, Gandhi’s death anniversary, in a way, gave the unscrupulous among the SC-STs the license to kill, not literally, that is, just not in self-defence. It’s thus, the cynical law has squarely put the shoe on the other foot, so to speak, with statistical backing.
The official data pertaining to the complaints under the lopsided law and the convictions thereunder reads as under:
In 2022, while 57,569 cases were preferred by SCs, the ST count was 10,064 (put together 67,633); and the convictions during the year (including the ongoing trials from previous years) were 34.1% and 28.1%, respectively, that is 31.1% in all. So, some 70% of the SC-ST complaints fell by the wayside, being unproven!……..”
Read the full article at MyIndMakers.
