When the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) Report for 2023 was ultimately released, it described a country seemingly at ease with itself. Rioting was up only 1.2% from the previous year. Outbreaks of violence had decreased slightly. Offences against the State had also reduced by 26%! On paper, India appeared calmer, safer, and more orderly. But for communities in Manipur, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Delhi, to name a few, life continued with varied manifestations and fallout of targeted violence. In fact, what the NCRB referred to as “riots” were not some faceless disturbances in which two parties were involved; they incited hate crimes with all the ingredients of a collective punishment.
The dissonance between a lived experience and official data is not new. It showcases how the language of state statistics can redefine brutality in state bureaucracy. By detaching violence from motive and identity, the NCRB articulates a false sense of neutrality, one that ultimately offers protection for both state and non-state actors.
The issue lies not in the numbers themselves, but rather in the methodology through which they are presented. The NCRB statistics are based on registered crimes, not the actual incidence of crime. Changes in reporting or policing can significantly influence the figures. The current structure and functioning of India’s police force render it vulnerable to diktats (ideological and other) from the state executive, ensuring that crimes, especially hate crimes against India’s most marginalized, Minorities and Dalits, sometimes women, remain buried. Conversely, higher crime numbers (for such crimes) in some states may reflect citizen-centric, pro-constitutional, police initiatives rather than an actual spiral or increase in crime.
CJP is dedicated to finding and bringing to light instances of Hate Speech, so that the bigots propagating these venomous ideas can be unmasked and brought to justice. To learn more about our campaign against hate speech, please become a member. To support our initiatives, please donate now!
In 2023, the country experienced the longest span of ethnic violence in its contemporary history when Meitei and Kuki–Zo communities mobilized against one another in Manipur. Life lost and displacement suffered by the Kuki-Zo were marked and significant. Kuki women experienced the brunt of gendered targeted violence at the hands of the other community and law enforcement. Yet, for the NCRB, hundreds of pages of the report yield only a handful of cases of “rioting” and “arson.” And what cannot be articulated in a statistic cannot be held accountable in law.
The Language of Neutrality
Over time, the NCRB has—instead of acquiring an autonomous rigour and credibility– grown into a reflection of a majoritarian state’s unease with terms such as communal, ethnic, or targeted violence. You won’t find such terms of classification in the 2023 report. The words used are “riots,” “group clashes,” and “public disorder.” This is not merely playing with words, but rather moral repositioning. By using terms such as “communal” and “ethnic,” motive is acknowledged, and therefore, responsibility. In contrast, “rioting” makes violence seem spontaneous and even-handed!
This kind of linguistic strategy is being increasingly normalised. In 2017, the NCRB surreptitiously removed its specific sections “communal and social violence,” “mob lynchings,” and “honour killings.” Officials defended their actions by stating that states were providing inconsistent data. The outcome of this was an administrative silence, allowing governments to claim hate crimes were falling when, in fact, they are just not being officially documented. Initially, data classification soon became a political shield. Without naming hate, India’s crime data reads now like a bureaucratic novel: correct, procedural, and utterly dissociated from reality.
In this case, neutrality does not refer to having no opinion. It refers to being complicit through action. Omission of the name the state uses for targeted violence does not depoliticize criminality; it simply conceals the injustice of violence and hate crimes being perpetrated.
A Pattern written in History
The NCRB’s refusal to report hate and communal crimes in 2023 is not a new practice. This is simply a reiteration of a policy first established in 2017, when the Union government acknowledged in Parliament that, due to state governments’ “unreliable inputs,” it would stop collecting data on “lynching” and “hate crimes.” This bureaucratic explanation has since served as the basis for the Republic’s statistical loss of memory.
By the year 2023, while the increase in targeted violence in India was expected, the Bureau’s tables did not reflect much of anything. The Centre for Study of Society and Secularism (CSSS) tracked 21 mob-lynchings in 2023, representing a 23% increase from 2022 The CSSS report can be read here Of these incidents, twelve were related to allegations of cow slaughter, two related to interfaith relationships, and nearly all of the victims were Muslim. For example, in Bharatpur in Rajasthan, 35-year-old Nasir and 25-year-old Junaid were kidnapped and burned alive in February 2022 by people said to be affiliated with the Bajrang Dal. In Bhopal in July, two cattle traders were lynched for being suspected to be transporting beef, an inappropriate standard of evidence. Neither case shows up under any communal category in the NCRB 2023 tables: both fold quietly into “murder” and “rioting.”
The same narrative can be found across the nation. In Kolhapur, for instance, a Dalit youth was beaten to death based on rumours about “religious insult.” In Ramgarh, Jharkhand, a mob killed a tribal man, accused of theft. The CSSS report noted that the violence was accompanied by hate speech and communal harassment. The report adds that this kind of violence is smaller-scale and does not fit within the category of violence documented by the NCRB’s rather narrow definitions. Ultimately, the data architecture favours an emphasis on procedural clarity at the expense of human truth.
In another incident in Maharashtra’s Satara district in August 2023, a single social media post mocking a Hindu god led to two days of violent conflict. Two people were killed, approximately 100 were injured, and businesses owned by Muslims were targeted. But if one looks in the NCRB ledger, a single entry gathers the Satara episode with every other instance of what NCRB has recorded as “rioting.” There is nothing to suggest the motive was religious; no record of what happened next; no note of the fact that the riot occurred on established communal lines.
The NCRB’s avoidance of the caption of motive is not unlike the state’s avoidance of calling out hate. Where communal violence once barely allowed for reckoning about the moral heart of the atrocity, instead it is now public disorder. This linguistic flattening eliminates not only the prejudice underlying the violence, but also the impunity enabling it.
Manipur: A Case Study
In 2023, Manipur became the clearest example of how violence can happen in public view and disappear from the official records. On May 3, 2023, a protest was launched by the All Tribal Students’ Union of Manipur (ATSUM) against a court directive to recommend Scheduled Tribe status for the Meiteis, and it quickly transformed into a spiral of armed ethnic conflict between the Meitei majority of the Imphal Valley and the Kuki–Zo tribal communities of the hills.
The violence swept the villages and towns with historic severity. Mobs burned homes, churches, and community centres. Independent estimates from the Hindu, Scroll, and Sabrangindia indicated that over 200 people were killed, over 60,000 displaced, and approximately 5,000 houses burned down. Entire communities disappeared; satellite images confirmed the damage. Over 350 churches and several temples were daubed and destroyed, highlighting the sectarian edge of the violence.
For months, the state was essentially divided into two: Imphal with its Meitei surplus on one hand and the hill districts on the other. There was a complete internet shutdown for over 200 days, severing survivors from aid networks and reporters from the outside world. Civil society and reporters who attempted to document the torture perpetrated by armed forces faced threats and FIRs for their expressions. Still, the reports of rape, sexual violence, women stripped and paraded through the streets to cheers from the crowds, filming as soldiers carried out any forms of violence, remained concealed. Only when a viral video found its way into social media in July 2019, a good three months after the first outbreak, did India’s national conscience briefly awaken to the abuses, and forced the SC to intervene to provide the state some accountability.
In the NCRB 2023 report, however, all of this collapses into a few rows of data. Manipur shows just a few dozen “rioting” cases and scattered cases of “arson”, nothing that would even suggest that a state had descended into a type of civil war. No mention of mass displacement, custodial abuses, or gendered violence. This silence is not incidental; it is institutional. The NCRB is merely flattening ethnic cleansing cited through “law and order disturbances” and provides a bureaucratic alibi for one of the worst governance failures in recent memory.
The Geography of Denial
If the NCRB’s omissions were haphazard, they might be brushed off as misprints. However, the odious erosion is visible across a vast geographical area. In 2023, the India Hate Lab noted 378 incidents of hate speech and hate crime ( CJP Report based on Hate Lab 2023 – Study reveals 668 hate speech cases in 2023, BJP major player), with Uttar Pradesh (62), Maharashtra (42), Bihar (34), and Madhya Pradesh (28) highest on the list. Each of these states also noted “declines” in the NCRB data for “Offences Promoting Enmity”.
Examine Haryana, where riots erupted in Nuh during a religious procession on 31 July 2023. Six died, 200 were arrested, and bulldozers crushed a number of Muslim homes in “retaliation”. The NCRB, by contrast, categorises the outrage as “rioting” without even insinuating it was communal or that the demolitions were punitive. The numbers create an illusion of symmetry — as if both sides were violent, both guilty, and both punished.
In Delhi, more than twenty public rallies were documented during the months of February and August 2023, with hate slogans. Nevertheless, the NCRB notes a decline in “Offences Promoting Enmity Between Groups” – a decline from 231 in 2022 to 194 in 2023. If the absence of numbers is not demonstrated evidence of peace, it is an established case of selective factual erasure.
Even the desecration of religious sites – like an attack on St. Michael’s cemetery in Mahim, Mumbai, in January 2023, when 18 crosses were defaced – does not even make “religious offences”, which are non-existent in the NCRB figures. These types of harassment, which obviously relate to religious identity, are absorbed into the property crime statistics.
The data from Jammu & Kashmir is close to surreal. NCRB 2023 records zero cases of sedition or communal violence, despite the Union Home Ministry stating in Parliament that over 230 people were detained under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) in the same calendar year. This tranquillity reflects not peace, but policy in action – the imposition of normalcy through erasure.
When Counting Conceals
The exclusions in the 2023 report, when evaluated in conjunction with each other, prioritized overt intent over deficiencies in capacity. By outright removing categories such as “hate crime” and “mob lynching,” the state is able to absorb violent acts based on religion, caste, or ideology into broadly neutral categories. While the crime may still be recorded, its cause is erased. The foundation of hate crime — the identity of the victim — is swept away from the record.
This administrative erasure dramatically exceeds the parameters of the chart. It alters public discourse, limits accountability, and relieves the state of its obligation to protect. When violence is relabelled rioting, the victims are stripped of recognition; when hate speech is recoded as “public mischief,” performers possess plausible deniability.
In the NCRB’s framework for 2023, there are the demolitions in Haryana, the ethnic murders in Manipur, the lynching deaths in Bharatpur, and the “riots” in Satara all clubbed into the same “neutral labelling.” The motive behind the violence is absent; all we are left with is a ledger of something resembling lawlessness, which tells us nothing about the injustices inflicted.
The statistics of the NCRB are not indicators of safety but of silence. Every statistic contains a choice — what to include, how to rename, and what to omit. This much is clear: the Bureau’s neutrality is not objectivity but ideology — a way of regulating how we think, and bringing about tranquillity through the absence of visible conflict.
A Nation without Witnesses
When the NCRB came out with its 2023 report, it was apparent that India’s data regime had transitioned from being an instrument of transparency to an apparatus for denial. The numbers corroborate what human rights organizations, journalists, and survivors have reported: that violence in India is not simply physical but epistemic — a battle over who gets to be viewed, tagged, and remembered.
Not having lynching, hate crime, or communal violence as categories is more than an oversight; it is political. In a democracy founded on data as a bedrock of policy, invisibility serves as a way to maintain control. As crimes are recorded, the government looks safer with fewer recorded instances.
This is the irony of modern India: a country in which the spreadsheet of data silencing has replaced the FIR; the number of riots has decreased as the number of victims increases; and the act of counting is now indicative of support for the machinery of impunity.
Here, the NCRB’s neutrality is not the neutrality of law, but of silence — a silence that indicates the price of counting, and the larger price of erasure.
(The legal research team of CJP consists of lawyers and interns; this resource has been worked on by Preksha Bothara)
Related
Manipur 2023: Violence unaddressed eight months after conflicts erupt
Hate crimes on the rise from 2024-2025
India Hate Lab Report 2024: Unveiling the rise of hate speech and communal rhetoric