Mumbai: The release of 11 men who raped Godhra riot victim Bilkis Bano generated outrage and retired Justice Umesh Salvi, who sentenced the men to life imprisonment in 2008 said that while the Gujarat government had the discretion to remit them, it should have been sensitive while taking that decision.
Justice Salvi was speaking at a solidarity meeting organised in the city on Tuesday by United Against Injustice and Discrimination, a coalition of civil society groups convened by retired Justice Abhay Thipsay. The meeting was also attended by the general secretary of the All-India Ulema Council, Maulana Mehmood Daryabadi, advocate Gayatri Singh of People’s Unity for Civil Liberties (PUCL), Dr Vivek Korde from Mulbhut Adhikar Sangharsh Samiti and Uzma Nahid from India International Women’s Alliance (IIWA).
Justice Salvi, a special judge in the Mumbai City Civil and Sessions Court at the time, sentenced 11 men to life imprisonment for raping Bano and killing seven members of her family, including her three-year-old daughter, during the Gujarat riots in 2002. Bano was fleeing the Godhra violence when she was gangraped. She was 21, and five months pregnant at the time. Their conviction was later upheld by the Bombay high court.
The men were lodged in a Godhra jail and one of them had moved the Supreme Court seeking remission of sentence. The court directed the state government to form a panel to look into the issue of remission, which unanimously agreed to their release.
“The case had to come in front of me when I was a Sessions court judge after jumping over several hurdles. All due legal processes were followed before the conviction was reached, and all of it is on record,” said Justice Salvi.
While the remission was legal, was it just, he asked.
After the conviction was made by the court, it was in the government’s hand to carry out the sentence and they also have the discretion to remit the convicts, he added. However, the government should have sought better legal understanding of the circumstances and the people involved, he said.
Dr Korde brought up the remarks made by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Godhra legislator CK Raulji, one of the members of the panel that agreed to remit the sentence. Shortly after their release on August 15, Raulji said that the convicts were “Brahmins and had good values”. Korde said that the remarks indicated that this was akin to upholding the Manusmiriti — a Hindu text that codified social behaviours — over the country’s Constitution.
Maulana Daryabadi said that the most appalling part of the release was that the convicts were felicitated and fed sweets when they came out of jail. IIWA’s Nahid said the Gujarat government’s move seemed to be a warning to women who were survivors of gender-based violence, and made women around the country feel unsafe.
She didn’t just face the assault but also had to fight the entire system by herself until some activists and the National Human Rights Commission intervened,” said advocate Singh, who pointed to the failure of the system in recognising the crime.
Justice Thipsay, who convened the meeting, said the remission decision needed to be looked at from various angles. “We expect all government agencies to carry out their responsibilities with due integrity and not take arbitrary decisions that favour a certain section of the society,” he said.
Suggesting that an RTI enquiry should be filed to find out how many people convicted for gang rape were granted remission, he said, “In a society where people convicted of petty crimes due to poverty and hunger and stigmatised, how can we justify the felicitation of gang rape convicts?”