No Justice to Rape Victim Bilkis Bano

She was pregnant and was gang raped,14 members of her family brutally murdered, But, No Death Penalty For Convicts, Says Bombay High Court

MUMBAI:  

HIGHLIGHTS

Bilkis Bano gang-raped during Gujarat riots; she was 19 and pregnant, 14 of her family members, including her daughter, were murdered CBI had sought death penalty for three out of 11 convicted in the case The Bombay High Court has turned down the CBI's request for the death penalty to three men accused of gangraping Bilkis Bano, a 19-year-old pregnant woman, and brutally murdering 14 members of her family, including her three-old daughter, in Randhikpur near Ahmedabad, during the Gujarat riots of 2002.  

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had told court that this was a "rarest of rare case" and that the death penalty must be awarded to three out of 11 people convicted in the case, to send out a "stern message." A trial court in Mumbai had sentenced all of them to life imprisonment, which the High Court upheld today.   

The High Court has, however, accepted the CBI's other plea to reverse the acquittal of five Gujarat police officers and two doctors in the case.  The agency has alleged that the policemen connived with the convicts by "fudging documents and compromising the inquest panchnama." A total of 19 people were convicted by the court today.

The CBI had sought the death penalty for Jaswant Nai, Govind Nai, and Sailesh Bhatt , saying there was direct evidence that they brutally gangraped Bilkis, who was five months pregnant, and her sister and her mother. Sailesh Bhatt also allegedly snatched Bilkis' three-year-old daughter from her and crushed her head on a stone. The child died on the spot.

Bilkis's mother and sister were among the 14 of her family and 17 people from the village killed by the rioters on March 3, 2002.  Bilkis Bano, who lives in central Gujarat with her husband, had identified her rapists.

The trial was transferred out of Gujarat for the fear that witnesses might be intimidated or influenced.

The trial court had in January 2008, convicted 12 people, sentencing them to life imprisonment. They had all appealed against their conviction in the High Court. One of them has since died.

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Collective Violent Act of Terrorism in Gujarat

🔻On the 15th anniversary of the Godhra train burning, a recap of little-known anomalies in the case that changed the course of India’s history.

It was only after he had become chief minister of Gujarat in October 2001 that Narendra Modi contested an election for the first time in his life. Yet, Modi was apparently still such a political lightweight that his victory margin was half that of his Bharatiya Janata Party colleague who had vacated a “safe seat” for the by-election. Within a week of this unimpressive electoral debut, the Godhra tragedy occurred on February 27, 2002, setting off a chain of events that ultimately propelled him to the office of prime minister.

Following his “spot assessment of the situation” in which 59 people had been burnt alive in a train, a press release issued by the Gujarat government the same evening quoted Modi as saying that Godhra was a “preplanned inhuman collective violent act of terrorism”. The casualties were mostly kar sevaks returning in the Sabarmati Express from a controversial Ram temple campaign launched in Ayodhya by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in defiance of a Supreme Court order.

Modi’s immediate attribution of the train burning to a terrorist conspiracy was a politically fraught move. It turned the tables on Opposition MPs who had repeatedly disrupted Parliament the previous day demanding action against the Ayodhya campaign for exacerbating communal tension in the country. The resolve he apparently displayed in dealing with Godhra, the “original sin” of the 2002 Gujarat violence, has served to build Modi’s image as a strong and decisive leader.

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