Mention vote-bank capitulation to the BJP today, and its first answer will almost certainly be Shah Bano. They will lecture you on how a Supreme Court verdict upholding a Muslim woman’s right to maintenance was overturned by the Rajiv Gandhi government under pressure from fundamentalist clerics, and how Parliament overturned the judgment to protect the Congress party’s electoral interests. For forty years, the BJP has used the Shah Bano case to portray the Congress as a party willing to sacrifice individual rights to appease a vote bank. But the BJP rarely speaks of August 2018 amendment law with the same outrage.

On April 2, 2018, curfew was clamped across Gwalior, Morena and Bhind. Additional police units were called in on standby. Madhya Pradesh hadn't seen a domestic law and order situation of this scale in years. By nightfall the state alone had lost half a dozen people to police and crowd gunfire, and the national toll stood at least nine dead, hundreds injured.  Trains were halted, highways were set ablaze, and the law-and-order situation was in dire straits. All of this was over a single Supreme Court order that sought to introduce a few checks and balances against the misuse of a law. This is what happens when a court touches one of the Indian state’s most politically radioactive statutes even lightly. The statute in question is the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. What triggered the unrest was not an attempt to gut the law, but an effort by two judges to build safeguards against its misuse.