For India’s Dalits and Adivasis, May 1 this year was a ‘May Day’ in more ways than one. It was May Day, the day to commemorate the labour movement (the vast majority of them do belong to the working classes), and also ‘mayday’ in the maritime sense, an occasion to broadcast their distress over a life-threatening emergency.
Dalit and Adivasi rights organisations observed May 1 as ‘National Resistance Day’. The immediate trigger was the Supreme Court order of March 20 on the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 (hereafter SC/ST Act). Protest meetings held across the country had three demands for the government: neutralise the Supreme Court order through an ordinance that would reinstate both the SC/ST Act and the SC/ST Amendment Act, 2015, in their original form; include both these laws in the Ninth Schedule to protect them from judicial review; and release all the Dalits arrested on April 2 when a ‘Bharat Bandh’ was observed to protest this Supreme Court order.
The Mahajan case
A lot has already been written on why the Supreme Court order is prejudicial to the cause of justice for victims of caste atrocities. But the underlying case that triggered the controversial judgment hasn’t received enough attention. It might be instructive to briefly consider the facts of this case, Subhash Kashinath Mahajan v. the State of Maharashtra.
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