SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF

The new year has brought a glimmer of hope for 2002 Gujarat riots case victim Bilkis Bano. But when the Supreme Court on January 8 set aside the remission granted to the 11 convicted for gang-raping her and killing 14 members of her family, the symbolic freight it carried went well beyond the tale of individual fates.

- Jumana Shah

Coming in the year of a general election, it’s bound to have a political edge—though it’s difficult to say which way it will cut.

Overturning the Gujarat government’s August 2022 decision, the SC rapped the state for “acting in tandem” with the convicts and pulling a “fraud” on the court. The state was not the competent authority to decide on the remission issue, it said, as the case was tried and convicted in a special CBI court in Maharashtra in 2008.

The SC order, signed by Justices B.V. Nagarathna and Ujjal Bhuyan, used the word ‘fraud’ 25 times and explained in detail the sequence of events that led to the remission, aided by a May 2022 order “fraudulently obtained at the hands of this Court” by “suppression and misrepresentation of material facts”. The court ordered the convicts to report to jail within two weeks and serve their remaining sentence.