Counterview Desk In a statement, activists from the Telangana Women and Transgender Organizations Joint Action Committee (WT-JAC), commenting on the Supreme Court-appointed Commission Report in the ‘Disha Encounter’ Case, in which four young people were killed on December 6, 2019 in Telangana, have insisted that FIR be registered against all the policemen “specifically named and indicted by the Commission and they be arrested.” Signed by petitioners before the Apex Court K Sajaya, V Sandhya, M Vimala and Meera Sanghamitra, the statement, even as welcoming the Commission’s Report for “upholding ‘rule of law’ and recommending criminal action against 10 policemen guilty of murder of four persons, including 3 minor boys”, says, “We remind the senior police officers, political leaders and celebrities who applauded this fake encounter, that as social activists, we will hold them responsible and accountable to secure our right to justice, while challenging unconstitutional method
By Yanis Iqbal* As someone who is about to complete his final year in high school, I can’t help but reflect on the kind of social experience that I accumulated there. A school is never just an isolated institution of learning. It is inextricably embedded in the structural webs of hierarchies and inequalities that are prevalent in the society. As such, my schooling period was also shaped by the influence exercised by dominant ideologies. The presence of ruling class frameworks of understanding and interacting was centrally prominent in gender relations within my co-ed school. A rigid gender separation was enacted through the silently enforced marginalization of opposite sex friendship. Many people harbored the view that all different-gender friends are inherently either “girlfriends” or “boyfriends”. This perspective – which is prevalent in almost all Indian schools – is implicitly based upon the supposedly insurmountable differences that exist between males and females – a proposition