Nikita Sonavane

Law and Justice Scholar (2023)

Nikita Sonavane is a legal researcher and an advocate. She is the co-founder of the Criminal Justice and Police Accountability Project (CPAProject), a Bhopal based litigation and research intervention focused on building accountability against criminalisation of oppressed caste communities by the Police and the criminal justice system. Nikita has previously worked on issues of local governance, forest rights, and gender in Gujarat.

She graduated with a B.A. (Political Science) from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, LL.B. from Government Law College, Mumbai and an LL.M in Law and Development degree from Azim Premji University (APU), Bangalore. She is a visiting research fellow at the University of Oxford working on anti-discrimination law in India. Her writings have been at the intersection of policing, caste and digitisation of the criminal justice system in India and have been published by the AI Now Institute at NYU, Indian Express, the Hindu, Caravan among others.

Nikita will be teaching an elective course on "Criminal Justice - Policing, Caste & Carcerality in India in the upcoming August." This course will grapple with normative questions around law, caste and carcerality in the context of policing. This course will specifically focus on tracing the origins of policing through various criminal laws and legal provisions while situating the embeddedness of the institution of policing within structures of casteist carcerality. It will draw from socio-legal histories of policing, postcolonial theories and empirical accounts of policing along with anti-caste and anti-carceral formulations on criminalisation.