The Takshashila Institution and Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy Release a Framework for Countering Mobilised Violence
The Takshashila Institution, along with Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy released a discussion document titled, “A Framework for Countering Mobilised Violence” at Takshashila Institution’s office on December 5, 2018.Uday Holla, Advocate General of Karnataka gave the keynote, explaining the need for a new framework to create sufficient laws to tackle the issue of mobilised violence. “Mob violence is nothing else but a group of people who join hands with each other to organise violence. No statute describes what is mob violence; the answer was a group of people who with a political motive come up with violence. But can there be sporadic violence? Are there laws sufficient enough to tackle this?” he said.“In a scenario where we have an increase in sporadic violence and an absolute lack of clarity and vacuum in the law, this framework to tackle mobilised violence could be a starting point,” he added.Takshashila’s Madhav Chandavarkar then took the audience through the costs that mob violence has on society, the insufficiencies in the laws we have in India at the moment, and the definition of mob violence. He then talked about the proposed framework and ways to tackle hate speech. The presentation with his talking points is below.
R Srikumar, former DGP of Karnataka; senior advocate Aditya Sondhi and Vikas Kumar, professor at Azim Premji University formally launched the report. They then joined the co-author of the report Divij Joshi of Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy for a panel discussion on the possible solutions to counter mobilised violence.We concluded the evening with questions from the audience - some of which included how certain entities can be held responsible for inciting mob violence and how we as a society can promote people trying to seek justice through democratic means.Click here to read the full report.