Lowering of the Lowered: The ‘Spectacular’ Construction of ‘Humiliation’ in the Indian Prevention of Atrocities Act 1989

The Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 is the only law in India that explicitly recognises caste-based insults or hate speech as an offence. In doing so, it captures the distinctive harm of such speech as humiliation. This article focuses on Section 3(1)(r) of the Act and argues that this recognition is significantly qualified by the “public view” requirement. Drawing on socio-political scholarship on humiliation, I show that judicial interpretation of this requirement has produced an extra-legislative condition of spectacularity. Courts tend to read caste-based humiliation through the paradigm of visible, overt, and collective atrocity, thereby obscuring more covert and intimate forms of caste injury. Such an approach, I argue, undermines the lived impact of humiliating speech on its target, whose injury lies not simply in public degradation, but in being made to feel diminished in one’s own eyes.