Gujarat is quite the graveyard of justice, as we understand the term, with clean chits as the many white gravestones to score the passage of time.
But even as we have known miscarriages of justice since 2002, there is terrible obscenity in the release of eleven “staunch upper caste men” of Gujarat within days, you could say, of the token completion of their terms in the gang rape of a pregnant Muslim woman Bilkis Bano, while one of them smashed to death her three-year-old daughter, and the others continued with the gang rape of her other women relatives.
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Members of the state committee that reviews prison terms of convicts unabashedly told TV journalist Barkha Dutt that rapists though they be, these eleven were “sanskari” high-caste men who deserved to be let off. That they had been frequently on jaunts home in furloughs from prison for such strong reasons as the housewarming parties for their new homes apparently was further evidence of their excellent moral character. In a nation that has grown remarkably callous and deadened in the eight years leading to the national “Ämrutkal” celebrations, dismissing as routine rapes and murders of Dalit girls and tribal women, Hindus, the release of the eleven has shaken civil society from its torpor. Perhaps even more so than when the “Bilkis Case” had first been exposed by human rights activists of the kinds of Teesta Setalvad, now in jail for pursuing the mass slaughter of Muslims in a gated housing society in the State capital.
The Supreme Court has been now moved against this premature freedom to the rapists and killers. Civil society Public Interest litigations have been moved, separately, by Trinamool Congress member of the Rajya Sabha, Mahua Moitra, retired Lucknow university vice chancellor Roop Rekha Verma, journalist and author Revati Laul and others. Issues at stake in the court include how the State government’s committee arrogates itself powers to order release on remission of convicts sent to jail in an investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigations.
Would it, however, be in the power of the Supreme Court to adjudicate on the real issue that faces the nation in these case – the moral decay which has taken India to this abyss? There would again be many who would worry over the shadow of Supreme Court’s judgements in the tenures of its last few chief justices – even if one were to exclude the aberrant understanding of law by members of the bench led by then chief justice and now Rajya Sabha member Ranjan Gogoi. One dreads a repeat, for instance, of the recent judgements that have sent human rights activists Teesta and Himanshu Kumar to jail for pursing cases in which prima facie the mightiest in the land could be indicted.
Writing not as a reporter but as a woman and addressing herself to other women in the nation and the world, Barkha, brings out the many layers of horror the young Bilkis faced 20 years and a half ago at the hands of her neighbours. I am not a woman, and therefore can do no better than copy her words: “Can you even imagine what it feels like to be five months pregnant and have a mob of men lunge at you, one by one, as they rape you? Then, imagine, that you are forced to witness the gang rape of your mother, who has just been compelled to helplessly watch yours. Then comes the turn of your two sisters. And if this isn’t macabre enough, think of yourself lying bruised and bleeding on the floor, your arm broken by your rapists, as your three-year-old daughter is killed in front of your eyes Worse, imagine that you know these men. They aren’t strangers; they are your neighbours. They buy milk from your family. You thought they were your friends.”
Bilkis spent 17 years of her life in this cruel battle for justice, fearful for not only her own life but that of her husband and the surviving relatives and the children she had as she rebuilt her life.
Barkha quotes a Bharatiya Janata Party legislator, CK Raulji, one of the members on the Gujarat panel that recommended the release of these convicts, “these men were “Brahmins, and Brahmins have good sanskaar (culture). Their conduct in jail was good.”
As a much older reporter, I am glad I did not interview this man. I would have puked.
But like her and many of the women and men reporters I have had the good fortune to have worked in the field in over a half a century, I can recall incidents where the nation retched and hollered for justice when it saw an innocent girl child or young woman assaulted, gang raped, murdered. Not just the now celebrated case of the physiotherapy students code named Nirbhaya by the media in 2012, but many others. It was the public outraged that brought a modicum of justice.
Leaders of the Congress and the Marxist parties have tweeted and issued statements, but one misses the anger from the ruling groups in Gujarat in New Delhi. And from the Bench itself. Is this not a case where senior judiciary at the Gujarat high court should take notice? Or should not the many women in the Union cabinet make a joint appeal to the Prime minister? The national commissions, who come alive only to target a non-BJP government or a Muslim or Christian school or hostel, remain comatose.
The crime was not the more heinous because Bilkis was a Muslim and her tormenters Hindus. She was a woman gang raped, a mother whose child was killed before her eyes, a sister of other women gang raped with her. She was vulnerable as a daughter of India, as we described Nirbhaya too.
Her religion does not make a step daughter. I opposed the death penalty for Nirbhaya’s rapists. They were hanged at the cry of her mother. This rapists and murders deserve to be in jail for the rest of their lives. No less.
(John Dayal is an editor and activist from New Delhi)
