Nikita Sonavane

Beginning in Madhya Pradesh, India in 2020, Nikita Sonavane has built an intervention to challenge the historical casteist criminalisation through policing of one of the most oppressed by caste groups of the Indian society, the Denotified Tribes. 

Nikita Sonavane is working on challenging the policing and criminalisation of India’s nomadic/semi-nomadic tribes (NTs), and Vimuktas (also known as Denotified Tribes orDNTs) who are deemed to be “criminal by birth” under the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA), 1871 and by building a system of accountability in the law enforcement system. She is doing that by unearthing new data, collating dispersed data, underscoring patterns of criminalization and creating evidence admissible for the judicial system, and activating a large group of legal experts and activists to bring justice for the communities and end state-led institutional and historical criminalisation.  

A lawyer by training, Nikita co-founded the Criminal Justice and Police Accountability Project (CPAP) in 2020 in the state of Madhya Pradesh to use data to document oppression, hold police accountable, change laws and policies, and enable communities to access data and advocate for their rights. Nikita is aggregating existing public data to educate people and the communities about the realities of how arrests are made against targeted communities. The Police records reveal a consistent pattern of criminalization and arrests of Vimuktas for minor offenses often labelled as habitual offenders and the alarming struggle to secure bail highlighting the systemic disparities in the judicial system.  

The CPA Project team then uses this data in multiple ways. First, they convert it into accessible evidence to hold the police accountable. The data is instrumental in documenting and foregrounding to the public the systemic violence inflicted by the police upon DNTs. Her unique ways of taking data generated by public institutions such as the police departments and extrapolating the same through multiple similar sources is helping build a narrative distinct from the mere criminalisation of this community, as her findings are backed by evidence about the caste, ethnicity, and socio-economic context, and lived experiences of Vimuktass. 

Second, they use the data to strategically litigate illegal arrests made by the police. These efforts allow Vimuktas to exercise their fundamental right to secure bail, access a fair trial, and seek an overall life of dignity by resisting criminalisation inflicted by everyday forms of policing. But Nikita chooses cases that specifically have the potential to open up new legal pathways for future cases. Nikita has established a comprehensive process that relies on community-based research drivenstrategic litigation and advocacy conducted by the community itself. The goal is to enable Vimuktas to seek legal assistance in various forums and gain access to . In essence, Nikita's approach ensures that legal support and resources are tailored to the specific needs of Vimukta communities. 

Third, through the data that the CPA team has unearthed backed by research and evidence, Nikita has been challenging existing laws, regulations and practices that inform policing. Nikita has advocated for legal reforms in laws and policies like the Wildlife laws that further criminalises Vimukta communities and other tribes. She is forging strategic collaborations with civil society organisations to work on influencing these changes. She is growing a network of leaders who are lawyers, paralegals, researchers, lawmakers and activists both at the local and national level. Together, they analyse both in topical and in macro-level the long-standing, discriminatory and targeted criminalisation and widespread policing of the DNTs. 

The Wildlife Protection Act criminalises traditional livelihoods of the DNT community and Nikita is building data and a body of evidence to offer policy submissions to the concerned committee through her research work. She is also collaborating with other organisations who are working in this area to get a better grasp of the issue and make a stronger case. 

Finally, the Vimuktas are able to access the data and narratives to advocate for themselves. The historical and pertinent evidence combined with community-based litigation and advocacy also enable the community to undertake daily negotiations with law enforcement. The DNTs can now engage in the process of documenting police misconduct, and they possess negotiating tools to counter it. Nikita is also working on making this process replicable and scalable to reach other marginalised groups in the country, including religious minorities, different tribal communities, and marginalised individuals who are often criminalised by the criminal justice system. 

Nikita and the CPA Project team have implemented an inclusive and participatory research methodology, not only overturning extractive data collection practices, but also developing to build practices of collective knowledge creation. They have also taken further steps for using their findings for public and policy advocacy and discourses. By bringing together DNT community leaders, legal experts, judiciary and lawmakers, she is ensuring that every DNT member is treated equally and with dignity before law without inherent ethnic biases. This is the first time the DNT communities are actively participating in an end-to-end process, from primary research to policy reform submissions and actual litigation. 

During her graduate research project Nikita identified that the extremely discriminatory and oppressive British Raj-era Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 which was repealed in 1952continues to remain in practice as the law enforcement system treats several communities as ‘criminal by birth’. As an effect, these formerly nomadic and presently landless, and historically marginalised groups, particularly the DNT (Denotified Tribe), are incarcerated as undertrials without any legal access while their families struggle for education and dignified livelihoods. 

 India’s jails are overcrowded up to 133% over capacity, of which more than 77% are waiting for a trial and jails largely lack the most essential amenities. Over 70% of the undertrial population is also from marginalised castes, and minority religions. Lack of access to legal and justice system has created a never-ending issue for many DNTs, who await a real end to a draconian law. India is home to nearly 60 million (10% of population) DNTs, several of which live in Madhya Pradesh. Similarly, many other tribes and other oppressed caste communities are constantly surveilled and arrested for traditional livelihood practices and rituals, such as producing small amounts of traditional alcohol such as mahua, procuring minor forest produce or miniscule hunting, many of which are prohibited under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. Often the protection of forest and wildlife are treated in contravention to the communities’ right to lifewhile facilitating large-scale industrial mining and deforestation.  

On one end, the criminalised individuals cannot afford legal support for being poor and lack of well-documented evidence admissible in the court of law, and most of them being the sole bread earners, their families are forced immediately into poverty upon their arrest. These landless and economically marginalised have very low or no access to education, and, hence, political leadership or ability to organise against an oppressive machinery. Pro-bono legal support is often unavailable in small cities and there is no practice for building legal evidence against the state’s discriminatory and targeted policing or incarceration. On the contrary, the law enforcement agencies have maintained a long and detailed record of suspected individuals, all from such marginalised groups, generations after generations, and neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood, that they use for targeted arrests. If made public, this data could illustrate how incarceration is directly linked with the DNT and other indigenous identities. 

Such prejudiced policing and incarceration against Denotified and Nomadic Tribes have permeated both socially and within the judiciary. The communities’ poor legal access has also resulted in less evidence-gathering about their systemic incarceration and the unfair treatment against them. Additionally, there is lack of legal literacy within the community to document evidence against policing and violence from the state and dominant groups. 

Nikita uses a three-prong strategy to stop the systemic criminalisation against India's marginalised nomadic (NT), forest-dwelling and Denotified Tribes (DNT). She does this by building legal data, and activating communities and key stakeholders who hold police accountable judicially and push for legal and policy-level reforms. 

First, through community-based research, Nikita and the CPA Project team collect, analyse and publish police data under various laws of long-term patterns of systemic and targeted criminalisation against DNTs, a heterogenous community deemed “criminal by birth”, and the marginalised nomadic and forest-dwelling tribes. Similarly, their research has brought to the fore historical discrimination and incarceration of forest-dwelling and nomadic tribes. Second, by creating legally admissible evidence, inaccessible in public domain before, such targeted communities and their counsels fight against systemic injustice using strategic litigation. Third, by forging collaboration with, activating and training legal experts, lawmakers and grassroots and socio-political rights groups, and public writing and discourses, CPAP pushes for judicial trials, and legal and policy reforms. 

Nikita and the CPA Project team have developed specialised investigative, empirical and community-based and driven research techniques to build legal data about long-term and targeted caste/ethnicity-based incarceration of NTs-DNTs. They employ several empirical investigative methods to legally uncover historical criminal records, often kept away by state entities from the public. By digitising, collating, and analysing data from India's National Criminal Record Bureau and First Information Reports, arrest records her team has transformed scattered and non-public data into admissible evidence. By engaging and training communities and grassroots organisations, CPAP documents ground reality, strengthening legal evidence. This helps underline how these historically marginalised communities have been facing historical discrimination and incarceration, severing their socio-economic status. 

Nikita's second strategy involves building a strategic litigation pathway about NTs, DNTs and forest-dwelling communities illegal arrest cases by using data that was previously inaccessible and is newly created and curated by CPA Project. Using such data as legal evidence, she mobilizes counsels who previously would not advocate such cases due to lack of data, and community activists. Community members increasingly resist arbitrary and targeted incarcerations. Many grassroots and socio-political rights groups' prior defences were dismissed in the court of law due to the lack of their legal evidence curation knowhow. CPA Project has been collaborating with over 40 such groups across India, providing them with regular training to better collect, process and present data. By building a strong partnership between lawyers, rights groups and communities and helping them create legal evidence, CPA Project ensures that people from these communities receive a fair trial, putting an end to similar future arrests. This approach also exposes systemic violence against these landless communities, restoring their human dignity. 

In addition to the above, Nikita’s third strategy includes a consorted and continuous activation of a broader set of criminal justice system stakeholders, many being unaware of systemic violence. Through public consultations, writing and discourse, she and the CPA Project team are going far and wide to legal experts, provincial and federal lawmakers, judges, grassroots and socio-political rights groups and civil society. 

Like other democracies, India too largely adheres to the separation of powers where the main pillars, the Legislature, the Executive, and the Judiciary, do not interfere but complement each other’s roles. Until Nikita and CPA Project’s documented evidence of the systemic nature of targeted violence against some of the most marginalised groups, even the judiciary treated criminal cases as one-offs. CPA Project has actively engaged several key criminal justice actors to grow a collective resistance against the state’s power abuse, who, in turn, have influenced policy and implementation reforms. 

As new exclusionary policies emerge, often backed by emerging technology, CPA Project and these stakeholders actively invoke vulnerable population protection (SC/ST Act), environmental and privacy laws, which previously took a backseat. Thus, they argue about India’s tribes and the historical endangerment of their social justice, with an urgent demand for stopping the state’s rampant tech-assisted policing and illegal incarceration of marginalised groups. 

In a successful 2022 policy intervention, CPA Project along with a coalition of 20 diverse grassroots organisations in the state of Madhya Pradesh that pushed back against a highly exclusionary policy. Several provisions under the Wildlife Protection Act would have led to criminalisation of DNT communities whose life and traditional livelihoods rely on use of forest resources. Similarly, Nikita also intervened in Madhya Pradesh's excise regulations that introduced the death penalty by organising community consultations and submitting policy recommendations. e. 

To showcase the gross manipulation of COVID-19 public safety protocols to further targeted criminalisation of DNTs, Nikita initiated the Countermapping Pandemic Policing, a project under CPA Project. The project underlined how DNTs were disproportionately targeted by police for mere public presence. The study captured how DNTs were arrested in large numbers mostly for being in public places, primarily for basic life and livelihood needs, while the protocols were levied for the dominant caste group members. Collected data was simplified into comics, translated into various Indian languages and were disseminated among DNTs to build public awareness, as well as resistance against sanctioned violence. The CPA Project used this data to intervene in an ongoing litigation at the Madhya Pradesh High Court on decongestion of prisons during the pandemic to demonstrate the increase of population in the prisons of Madhya Pradesh due to arbitrary arrests by the police in violation of the law. The CPA Project led an in-depth study about tech-based surveillance and criminalisation of the working-class Muslims in the Telangana state who are a highly vulnerable ethnic minority.. Furthermore, drawing to CPA Project’s work, Judges from a Supreme Court bench observed that and remarked that the States and Union Territories to revise the ‘History Sheet’ rules. These rules pertain to the record of crimes committed by a ‘criminal’ used within police surveillance and detection. The directive aims to prevent bias and mechanical targeting of specific communities. 

By providing forest-dwelling, nomadic and denotified tribes with the legal language, narrative, and data, Nikita and her team progressively equip them with daily negotiation skills in the event of police violence. To demonstrate and train communities, advocacy and rights groups, and legal experts about using systemic criminalisation data, CPA Project has also defended a select set of 100 individual cases, securing 50 bails. The organisation has significantly built a public narrative by successfully disseminating its emerging data, findings and counter-violence strategies among leading domestic and international media outlets. 

These growing efforts in the public realm have subsequently triggered conversations about the 60 million forest-dwelling and NTs-Vimuktas and their historical public ostracisation. There has been a significant change owing to Nikita and CPA Project’s interventions, reducing arrests of NTs-Vimuktas. 

Nikita’s goal is to eventually build a large national network of major social justice actors and strengthen internal leadership of NT-DNT communities. 

Nikita grew up in Mumbai in a multicultural, multilingual, and inter-caste family, which exposed her to various facets of Indian society. Her personal experiences of caste-based discrimination as a Dalit woman largely influenced her decision to pursue a legal career centred around zealous advocacy for marginalised communities. Nikita is not only the first in her family to step into the legal field but is also the first to graduate from college. She is multilingual – fluent in Marathi, Konkani, Hindi, and English. Nikita's intersectional identity has informed her ability to critically assess marginalised communities' divergent and complex problems. Additionally, her practical experience and legal training have strengthened her ability to devise sustainable and innovative solutions to address the same.  

As a first-generation Dalit student in the Indian higher education system, Nikita encountered the works of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar – a prolific lawyer, scholar, social reformer, and the chief compiler of the Indian Constitution, belonging to the Dalit Mahar community. Referencing Dr. Ambedkar's dedication and work, Nikita discovered her own motivation and tools to effectively advocate for herself as a Dalit woman in educational spaces that were historically built for dominant-caste men. Nikita's career as an advocate and social entrepreneur took shape while navigating this space as an “outsider.” As she made her way through school, Nikita realised that English is an essential resource that opens many doors in India. Subsequently, she devised innovative ways to persuade her parents to subscribe to an English newspaper at home. Reading, which initially was a tool to acclimatise into dominant-caste educational spaces, eventually evolved into a passion. Nikita continued to read works of Dr. Ambedkar and other anti-caste leaders, which inspired her social entrepreneurship in addition to guiding her through seemingly foreign spaces otherwise lacking Dalit representation. The Indian judiciary is one such example of an exclusionary space primarily comprising of dominant-caste, male-identifying judges. The apex court of the country is roughly made up of 30% Brahmin Justices, with the first OBC and SC Justices (all cis-male identifying) being appointed only 30 years after independence. As of 2022, there has not been a single Justice belonging to the Adivasi community appointed to the apex court.  

Nikita’s determination to use the law as an innovative tool for social change became apparent to her during her undergraduate years During an internship with the Mazdoor Kisaan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) in Rajasthan, headed by Aruna Roy, Nikita witnessed the law's ability to provide various forms of immediate relief to farmers and labourers. She subsequently decided to follow Dr. Ambedkar’s footsteps and enrolled herself in law school. During her time at the Government Law College in Mumbai, Nikita not only familiarised herself with the criminal justice system but also noticed several gaps particularly affecting her own community. For instance, she noticed that prison populations across the country were disproportionately skewed towards Dalits, Muslims, and Adivasis. Putting her legal training, practical skills, and personal experiences to use, Nikita founded the Criminal Justice and Police Accountability Project aiming to fill in these gaps prevalent in the Indian justice system. Through her organisation, Nikita hopes to enable systemically criminalised communities while simultaneously changing the public discourse surrounding these communities.  

Nikita has not only defied arbitrary social norms that marginalise Dalit communities but also has capitalised on her skills to identify gaps and reform systems. She uses her training and personal experiences to add a nuanced lens to the innovative tools that she identifies to initiate social change. In doing so, she envisions a world where every Dalit, Bahujan, Vimukta and Adivasi child can look up to role models within their community and embrace their personhood.