Look into plea for special law on hate crimes: SC to Attorney General

The Supreme Court on Wednesday (February 18, 2026) disagreed with the notion of pigeonholing crime on the basis of race and region, saying it would fuel polarisation. Chief Justice of India Surya Kant was hearing a petition seeking comprehensive guidelines to recognise ‘racial slur’ as a separate category of hate crime.

Taking an alternative view, the Chief Justice, heading a three-judge Bench, said crime, whoever was on either end of it, should be dealt with an iron hand.

The top judge said that classifying crime on the basis of the identity of the victim may run the danger of dividing the society when the nation, after 75 years of Independence, had to find strength and unity in treating its diverse subjects equally.

The court asked Attorney General R. Venkataramani to consider the petition and refer it to an appropriate authority.

The petition was filed by advocate Anoop Prakash Awasthi in the aftermath of shock and public grief over the fatal attack on Anjel Chakma, a 24-year-old MBA student from Tripura, by a group of men in Uttarakhand. Chakma was attacked after he resisted heckling while out shopping with his younger brother.

The petition recounted Chakma’s tragic words to his attackers, “We are Indians. What certificate should we show to prove that?” He died under medical treatment on December 27, never regaining consciousness.

Mr. Awasthi urged the court “that we must do something” and said people cannot shrug and walk away when somebody was being beaten up by a mob.

He had argued that the new bouquet of criminal laws, including the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, hardly addressed the issue of hate crime, racial discrimination and violence against Indian citizens, especially from the north-eastern States and other frontier regions.

Mr. Awasthi submitted that despite the unmistakable hate-based racial motivation of the crime, there was no mechanism available within the initial criminal justice response system, which still viewed racial offences as an ordinary crime.

“The killing of Mr. Anjel Chakma is not an isolated incident but forms part of a long-standing pattern of racial violence against citizens from the North-Eastern States, including the death of Nido Taniam in 2014 and numerous assaults on students and workers in metropolitan cities, a phenomenon formally acknowledged by the Union of India in parliamentary replies, yet left unaddressed through any dedicated legislative or institutional framework,” the petition said.