Bengaluru, AUG 28 2022: More than 1,000 people from all walks of life, including women’s organisations, workers’ unions, student unions, lawyers and artists gathered at the Freedom Park in the Indian southerin city Bengaluru on Saturday demanding justice for gang rape victim Bilkis Bano. They condemned the remission of sentence demanding that the same be invalidated and the culprits be immediately sent back to prison to continue their full life term.
Similar protests simultaneously took place across 15 districts across the state. The 11 convicts were serving a life sentence for the brutal and barbaric gang rape of Muslim woman Bilkis Bano and several other Muslim women of her family along with the murder of her family members, including her three-year-old daughter by BJP-RSS hidnutva members during the communal riots in Gujarat in 2002.
Speaking during the protest, K S Vimala of AIDWA asked why rapists were welcomed back as war heroes and why the government released them. Nandini, an activist and member of Slum Mahila Sanghatane, said, “The remission again shows how we have not yet received social independence”. She stressed how real independence will be won only if communalism is fought and caste is annihilated.
Dr K Mohanraj, state convenor, Dalit Sangharsh Samiti, attacked the government for playing the religion and caste cards when there were serious problems, like unemployment facing the country. “The Dalit community stands strongly with Bilkis”, he said.
Meanwhile, a group of as many as 134 former Indian civil servants have written an open letter to the Chief Justice of India, Uday Umesh Lalit, asking him to quash the Gujarat government’s order granting premature release to 11 persons convicted for the murder of 14 persons and gang rape of Bilkis Bano, during 2002 anti-Muslim riots in the Indian state. The seven-page letter by the Constitutional Conduct Group (CCG) says that the members are particularly puzzled by the manner in which the Apex Court asked the Gujarat government to urgently take a decision on a plea by one of the convicts for remission as per Gujarat’s 1992 policy, and not its current one.
The letter said surely the Supreme Court could not be unaware of the major changes in the punishment for rape and murder and the policy for remission which were made much more severe in 2014 after the Nirbhaya case, wondering, “Can persons who committed rape and murder in 2002 be less liable than persons who rape and murder at the present time?”
The group had pleaded to the CJI and requested him to rectify this horrendously wrong decision. “Like the overwhelming majority of people in our country, we are aghast at what happened in Gujarat a few days ago, on the 75th anniversary of India’s Independence. The premature release has outraged the nation. We write to you because we are deeply distressed by this decision,” they said.
The group contended that it was only the Supreme Court that had the prime jurisdiction, and hence the responsibility, to rectify this “horrendously wrong decision”. The retired bureaucrats who signed the letter included Harsh Mander, Aruna Roy, T K A Nair, Amitabha Pande, K Sujatha Rao and Wajahat Habibullah