This piece comments on the Bhima Koregaon arrests, the multitude of problems with the UAPA as well as its empirically evident history of sinister targeting of those defending the powerless against State excesses. UAPA criminalises ideology and association. By virtue of declaring an organisation 'unlawful’ or/and ‘terrorist’ and banning them, it criminalises their ideologies de facto” and verily creates a regime of thought crimes. A disturbing pattern of targeting those working for the rights of minorities subscribing to ideologies at variance with that of the dominant state brass emerges if one were to look at those who were detained for years under the UAPA.
This part analyses the judicial biases manifest in legalising the ‘gender’ wage gap through perverse logic that has held patriarchal inequalities as the ‘intelligible’ differentia for ‘reasonable’ classification to premise further inequality in treatment and work/service conditions. It critically analyses the jurisprudence in this regard so far and leaves us pining as we often do, for nothing short of normative, structural overhauls in society to bolster law enforcement.
