On August 15, 11 convicts serving life terms for having committed mass murder and gang-raping Muslim women in the Indian state of Gujarat in 2002 were released. The state government had ordered their remission. It is not a coincidence that their release came on a day when India marked 75 years of freedom from colonialism. The men were garlanded when they stepped out of prison.
Bilkis Bano, the lone survivor among a group of Muslims who were chased and attacked with lethal weapons as part of a pogrom against the community, received the news of the release of her assaulters with shock and disbelief. “How can justice for any woman end like this?” she asked in a statement.
Bilkis, who was five months pregnant at the time, was among three women who were gang-raped by the convicts now set free. Her daughter Saleha’s head was smashed before her, killing her instantly. She was three years old. In all, 14 people were murdered in the attack.
From that moment, Bilkis fought against the odds — and the might of the Gujarat state government then led by current Prime Minister Narendra Modi and still headed by his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — for justice. The local police officer who registered her case, after she walked almost naked from the scene of the crime, distorted her account to make the case weaker, according to the Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s premier investigative agency. A court found later that police officials and doctors fudged the facts, tried to manipulate the autopsy process and falsify records and destroy evidence. It was only when the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) took up her case that the wheels of justice slowly started turning.
The case was moved out of Gujarat because the Supreme Court was convinced that a fair trial was not possible in that state. In 2008, a special court in Mumbai convicted the accused of rape and murder, a verdict upheld by higher courts. In 2019, the Supreme Court asked the Gujarat government to give Bilkis Bano Rs 50 lakh ($62,560), a house and a job as compensation. The amount was unprecedented for such cases and underlined the extraordinary nature of the crime.
This story was originally published in aljazeera.com . Read the full story here