On the 28th of February in 2002, 19-year-old Bilkis Bano was visiting her parents in Randhikpur, the village where she was born and brought up in. It was just a few miles away from Godhra in Gujarat were on the previous day a passenger train had caught on fire, resulting in the death of 60 Hindu Pilgrims. Bilkis had brought along with her, her three-year-old daughter and was pregnant with her second child.
She was in the kitchen of the home she had grown up in, preparing food for her family, when her aunt and her children came running in after their houses had been set on fire and they had no choice but to flee with nothing except the clothes on their skin. There were 17 of her family members in the village at the time and all of them had the normalcy of their lives forcefully taken from them, when they were thrust into a situation of desperation, forced to abandon and flee their own homes, travelling from village to village, begging for shelter in mosques and surviving on the kindness of Hindu neighbors.
On the morning of 3rd March, five days into Bilkis and her family going into hiding, they decided that they must set out to a neighboring village that was deemed safer for them. But they were found and stopped by a group of men before they could leave the village.
Bilkis narrates that the attackers came at them with swords and sticks. They snatched her three-year-old daughter from her arms and threw her onto the ground, bashing her head against a rock. They then physically assaulted and gangraped her, right along side her cousin who had just given birth a few days ago while on the run. The sheer horror that she felt when she realized that these were the very men she had grown-up with, neighbors that she’d see on the street and smiled at, men who had seen her be born and grow up from a child, these were the very men who had dined at her home and whose homes she had visited. They kept on violating them, ignoring their screams of pain and pleas for mercy, and when they were finally satisfied with the heinousness of the crime they had committed, they left them for dead.
So, who were these men and what horrible sin had Bilkis and her family committed to justify the horrendous fate they suffered?
These men were a part of a Hindu mob out to punish the offenders of a crime committed against their religious pilgrims a few days prior, and the reason why Bilkis and her family was hunted down was because they were Muslims.
The Gujarat Riots in 2002, was a 3-day period of communal violence after the death of 60 Hindu pilgrims, returning from Ayodhya on a passenger train, who died in a fire on the train on the 27th of February. This resulted in a horrifying situation of state terrorism and ethnic cleansing done by the Hindus in Gujarat against the Muslims, as the Hindus believed it was the Muslims who had set fire to the train with the intention of murdering the pilgrims. In the span of these three horrific days, the riots resulted in the death of over a thousand people, most of them Muslim and some Hindu, there were also many cases of brutal killings and rapes that went unreported and ignored thus the death toll might actually be much higher than estimated. The present Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was the then Chief Minister of Gujarat was accused by the State Investigation Commission (SIT) of condoning the violence that took place by not taking adequate actions to prevent it, but was cleared of complicity in the violence in 2013 due to lack of evidence. He remains determined in his stand that he committed no wrongdoings and thus will not apologize for what had happened in the riots.
Out the 17 family members who were attacked and assaulted that day, only Bilkis and two young boys- aged seven and four, survived.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the end of Bilkis’s turmoil, as what proceeded this would be a long-wrought quest for justice, a process that would be as heart-shattering and traumatizing as the original event that brought it into place. It has been documented that the police and state officials tried to intimidate her out of filing her case and even tried to destroy the evidence of the happening, this is most evident when we learn that all of the dead were buried without autopsies. Even the doctor who examined her refused to acknowledge that she was raped despite the fact that it was clear that she had been brutalized.
In spite of all of this, Bilkis remained steadfast in her determination to attain justice for herself and her family. The first arrests of the case were made in 2004, after the Indian Supreme Court handed over the case to federal investigators, this was done since the higher courts realized that the courts in Gujarat weren’t capable of delivering justice for Bilkis and thus, her case was transferred to the Mumbai Court.
She and her family still had to live in fear of being discovered and silenced. They state that they are still afraid every time they go home. They believe that the police and the state administrators are the ones helping the attackers. Bilkis has also stated that things are so dire that even today, her family still covers their faces and hide their addresses when they visit Gujarat and they shudder at the thought of what would happen if their identities and location were revealed.
Even though Bilkis and her lawyers called for death penalty for all the accused, in 2017 the Mumbai High court sentenced them to life imprisonment. Despite her pleadings not being heard, Bilkis stated that she accepted the court’s judgement as she had full faith in the judiciary and because she wasn’t interested in revenge and only wanted the convicts to understand the enormity and brutality of what they had done, she wanted them to understand how great their sin of killing innocent women and children was. Along with this she also hoped that they would spend the rest of their lives in prison to ensure that they would never get the opportunity to hurt another soul again. She concluded by stating that this judgement has finally given her the hope for peace.
On the 15th of August 2022, when the rest of our nation was embroiled in the celebrations of the 76th year of independence, our country granted freedom to 11 men who were convicted and jailed for the rape and murder of 14 out of 17 family members of Bilkis Bano, and they plunged a woman who spent her entire life trusting our justice system to avenge her family and her honor, into a cage of fear and distrust. All 11 of the men were prematurely released by the state of Gujarat on the grounds of “good behavior” in prison and were warmly welcomed back by their families, who were eagerly waiting with flower garlands to receive them outside the jail. They were garlanded and honored by touching their feet, and celebrated as heroes as they were escorted back home with their heads held-up high.
After the news of the convicts’ release came out, Bilkis’s husband- Yaqub Rasool had stated that his wife is incredibly distressed and melancholic. She feels as though the battle she fought for so long was disrupted and wrapped up in just one moment. He also stated that they were absolutely distraught by the fact that they have not even had enough time to process the news before all the convicts reached their homes, safe and happy.
State Officials stated that since the men had spent more than 14 years in prison since the first conviction in 2008, they have been released in consideration of factors such as their age and good behavior in prison. They feel like the convicts have paid their dues and thus should be finally allowed pardon. The federal prosecutors have argued that the convicts have been released prematurely and that no leniency must be given to criminals who have committed a grievous crime of this extent and that releasing them now would be a testament to our country and its people, that such crimes are not seen as “heinous, grave and serious” enough.
In the light of the unfair treatment her trauma and lose had suffered at the hands of the State, Bilkis once again approached the Supreme Court with the hope that justice will be upheld,… and uphold justice it did. A bench of Justice B V Nagarathna and Justice Ujjal Bhuyan said the Gujarat government’s decision to grant remission to convicts was “an instance of usurpation of jurisdiction and… of abuse of discretion” and that the State “acted in tandem and was complicit” with the convicts. The Supreme Court said Gujarat was not the “appropriate government” to decide on the remission plea of the 11 men convicted for this “grotesque and diabolical crime driven… by communal hatred”. The bench pointed out that “Section 432(7)(b) of The Code of Criminal Procedure, which deals with the power of remission, clearly indicates that the State within which the offender is sentenced, is the appropriate government to pass an order of remission” and not the one where the crime took place or where the convict was imprisoned. Thus, since the accused were convicted in the state of Maharashtra, the State of Gujarat was not entitled to the right to grant them remission.
Yesterday, on the 8th of January 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that these 11 men convicted of raping Bilkis Bano and killing 14 members of her family during the 2002 Gujarat riots but released early for “good behavior” must return to jail, re-establishing the ever-standing rule in India; “the Rule Of law” and re-instating the importance given to the rights of victims over the rights of convicts and social interest at large. The convicts have to surrender within two weeks- the court said, cancelling Gujarat’s decision to release them.
Bilkis Bano is a woman who has been fighting an intense and long-strung battle against many demons- both internal and external. But with this judgement, there comes new hope that she and many others like her would be able to overpower and eradicate all the demons that try to suppress them into the cage of silence and injustice, and that the Justice system of our country would support them in these endeavors.
Following the decision by the Supreme Court, this is what Bilkis has to say: “Today is New Year for me. I have wept tears of relief. I smiled for the first time in a year and half… hugged my children. It feels like a stone the size of a mountain has been lifted from my chest. This is what justice feels like.”
