On the certainty of legal labour: Meliorist legalism and Habits of Hope in Hindu Nationalist India

This paper draws on the concept of meliorism to analyse the phenomenon of hopeful legal labour in the context of hate crime and hate speech complaints in India. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with Supreme Court advocates and survivors of caste-motivated hate crimes in North India, this paper illustrates that in the context of hate crime legislation the pursuit of a legal case can sometimes emerge as process of hopeful labour even when court verdicts fail to hold perpetrators of hate crime to account. In India, a country faced with a growing tide of Hindu nationalism, lower castes and religious minorities increasingly file and dight hate crime complaints with the aim of reclaiming and transforming legal spaces that are dominated by upper-caste, upper-class Hindu bodies and voices. Therefore, this paper argues that hope in law often materialises through the act of defiant legal engagement. Here hope is a verb rather than a state, rooted not in optimism but in meliorism: the conviction that the conditions of legal justice for marginalised groups could be made comparatively better through targeted action.