The Wire
The court said on Monday that Gujarat’s government “acted in complicity with the convicts” and noted that if the convicts can “circumvent the consequences of their conviction”, peace and tranquillity in society would be endangered.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court has said that the Gujarat government does not have the power to grant the premature release of 11 convicts who had been sentenced to life for gang-raping a pregnant Bilkis Bano, members of her family, and also mass murdering at least 14 of them in the 2002 Gujarat riots.
Watch this video report by The Wire’s Yaqut Ali to know more.
In an interview with Karan Thapar, the Trinamool Congress MP said she strongly believes that her petition challenging the remission in the Supreme Court will be successful.
Trinamool Congress (TMC) Mahua Moitra believes that her writ in the Supreme Court against the remission granted to 11 people guilty of raping Bilkis Bano and murdering 14 members of Bano’s family will be successful. Moitra has forcefully said that she has full faith in the court and that when all the facts of the way the remission was handled in Gujarat are brought before the Supreme Court it will strike down and rescind the order. She also says that the ease with which remission was granted by the Gujarat government and the way the convicts were felicitated suggests that gang rape and murder have been normalised and weaponised in India.
In a 30-minute interview with Karan Thapar for The Wire, Moitra was first asked about the Supreme Court’s own earlier handling of this matter. She was questioned about the court’s decision that remission should be heard by the Gujarat government. Newspapers and several lawyers have said this is a breach of Section 432(7)(b) of the Criminal Procedure Code which explicitly states that the appropriate government is the state where the offender is sentenced. She was also asked why, given the many things that have gone wrong in the way Gujarat handled the remission, the Supreme Court did not take suo moto cognizance of the matter. After setting in motion the remission process did it not have a moral duty to rectify a ‘wrong’ outcome? Third, she was questioned about oral observations made on August 25 by Justice Ajay Rastogi, who is hearing the case, and said: “Merely because the act was horrific is that sufficient to say remission is wrong?”
In her answers to many of these questions, Moitra made clear that as a petitioner before the Supreme Court it would be inappropriate and wrong of her to comment on the court. Although an animated discussion took place, she very carefully avoided making any comments which, as a petitioner, would be deemed wrong.
The interview also discusses the response of the Narendra Modi government to the remission and how this remission impacts on and contradicts the prime minister’s Independence Day speech where he spoke at length about nari shakti (women’s power) and honouring women. Moitra makes clear that it’s almost impossible to believe that the Gujarat government would have granted remission without consulting the Union government, something it was also required to do under Section 435 of the Criminal Procedure Code for all matters investigated by the CBI.
Moitra says the Union government needs to decide whether Bilkis Bano is a woman or a Muslim. She suggests that the silence of the Modi government over the remission as well as its failure to appeal against the remission suggests that everything the prime minister and the government say about empowering women does not seem to apply in this case.
The TMC MP agrees this is a litmus test moment for Indian women, for the sanctity of justice and also for the sort of country we want India to be.
Note: An earlier version incorrectly stated that seven members of Bilkis’s family were murdered. The actual number is 14.
