Bilkis Bano case is bellwether of democracy

WITH the Supreme Court agreeing to hear a petition challenging the remission by the Gujarat Government of the 11 convicts in the tortuous Bilkis Bano rape and murder case, the sense of national dismay and outrage that followed their release on August 15, soon after the Red Fort speech of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is now tempered by a sliver of hope. A slender hope, that the highest court will ensure that justice is not sullied or denied to a hapless victim who was subjected to the most horrific and diabolical degree of sexual assault in 2002 during the Gujarat riots.

Bilkis Bano, a pregnant young mother, was among the many victims engulfed by the post-Godhra anti-Muslim hatred that seized Gujarat at the time. She was forced to witness her family members being violated, seven brutally killed and her infant child’s head smashed by the perpetrators. The fact that the murderers were neighbours of the victim added to the diabolical nature of this crime.

While there are many dimensions and layers to the Bilkis saga — and a saga it is if the chronology of this episode is recalled in detail — the current socio-political context accords this case a seminal quality. August 15 marked the 75th anniversary of India attaining freedom in 1947 and Prime Minister Modi in his expansive address to the nation dwelt on India’s many achievements and the potential of the nation and hailed India as the “mother of democracy”.

A special mention was made by Modi of India’s ‘feminine power’ and his agony about the treatment accorded to women was palpable when he added with anguish: “What I wish to share is that it hurts me to say that we have witnessed a perversion in our day-to-day speaking and behaviour. We have been casually using expletives and cuss words which are abusive and against our women. Can we not pledge to get rid of every behaviour, culture that humiliates and demeans women in our daily life?”

That very afternoon (August 15), the Gujarat Government approved the application for the remission of the life sentence of the 11 convicts and they walked out of the Godhra sub-jail as free men.

To compound this unprecedented act of according clemency to those convicted of the most heinous crimes (gang-rape and murder, including that of a three-year-old child), the freed convicts were met with garlands by their supporters — an event reported with some unbridled glee in certain sections of the Indian audio-visual media.

The subtext was that the convicts did not deserve the punishment meted out to them by a Bombay court and that ‘justice’ had finally been awarded to them!

The contrast between what Modi said about women in general and his exhortation that they not be demeaned and humiliated was stood on its head by the Gujarat Government with impunity as it took recourse to a legal technicality. But what is even more shameful is that not a single representative of the government chose to deplore or chastise this travesty of justice in relation to the Bilkis case.

Exceptions do exist and to her credit, an IAS officer of the Telangana cadre, Smita Sabharwal, shared her disbelief in a tweet where she noted: “As a woman and a civil servant I sit in disbelief, on reading the news on the #BilkisBanoCase, we cannot snuff out her right to breathe free without fear again, and call ourselves a free nation.” Further, a handful of women BJP members and Devendra Fadnavis, a senior Maharashtra BJP leader, have condemned the remission, but they are exceptions.

Civil society was up in arms and at last count, over 10,000 citizens have issued a statement urging the SC to revoke the remission of the 11 convicts. This case will soon be heard by the highest court.

The Bilkis saga has a distinctive relevance at multiple levels for India@75, now seeking to burnish its profile as an exemplar of democracy and freedom. One relates to the arduous path that a rape victim has to undergo to obtain justice from an insensitive and venal investigative machinery comprising the police-and-local-politician combine; and when this is finally awarded outside of the state after years of litigation, a casual executive decision snatches away whatever modicum of justice that the victim has received from a higher judicial body.

Godhra 2002 has also shaped the Indian political trajectory and of Modi’s ascendancy within the BJP. His rise — from being the Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time to his assumption of office as Prime Minister in 2014 — is illustrative of this orientation. It is instructive to note that the collective Indian response to another horrific gang-rape in 2012, the Nirbhaya case, was very different. The national outrage was tsunami-like and the institutional redress relatively swift.

This begs that uncomfortable but inescapable question of whether the Bilkis case has elicited an ostrich-like response only because of her religious identity, that she is a Muslim first and her Indian citizenship discounted? This kind of collective moral amnesia among the majority community and state complacence or, worse, state complicity, have shrouded pogroms in India. The inexcusable 1984 Sikh killings in the aftermath of PM Indira Gandhi’s assassination testify to this pattern.

How the Supreme Court deals with the remission of the Bilkis Bano case convicts is a bellwether for the judiciary and will shape the Indian journey towards 2047, the centenary of the “mother of democracy”. Will the state be Janus-like: a constitutional hare when the forum mandates such fidelity and a rabid communal hound when dictated by opportunistic electoral compulsions? And will the judiciary remain mute to such duplicity?

Even as India appears to be jettisoning Mahatma Gandhi and his commitment to religious harmony and tolerance, the resolution of the Bilkis case will also be a test of the Ambedkar tripod: to what degree has India@75 been faithful to the pursuit of liberty, equality and fraternity?

Fraternity remains stubbornly elusive for a large cross-section of India and the caste-creed-religion tag remains tenaciously alive in the body-politic. Whether the vulnerable Indian citizen is doomed to remain the eternal supplicant to the vagaries of the State and its elite or he can claim the status of the much-cherished freedom that August 1947 heralded will define the texture of the world’s largest democracy as it ambles towards the centenary, fettered by its own certitudes.