MUMBAI, 22 January 2008 — A judge yesterday sentenced 11 rape-and-murder convicts in the Bilkis Bano gang rape case to life in prison. A policeman who falsified records and refused to register a case against the convicts was given three years.
The court of Additional Sessions Judge U.D. Salvi was pronouncing judgment on the 13 people convicted Friday in a trial seen as a test case for Muslim victims of the 2002 riots in the western Gujarat state.
The special court which heard the case in Mumbai, the capital of Maharashtra state, found 13 men guilty of a variety of crimes from rape and gang rape to murder and destruction or falsification of evidence. One accused has since died.
“The court handed life sentence to 11 of the accused and three years to the policeman,” defense counsel Rajendra Shirodkar said. “We will appeal the verdicts within a fortnight.”
The policeman has already spent four years in remand and is likely to be released. The 11 men sentenced yesterday were convicted on Friday of gang-raping Bilkis Bano Rasool and murdering 14 members of her family, including her three-year-old daughter, on March 3, 2002.
In the courtroom yesterday the convicts pleaded with the judge for leniency, while members of their families cried out as the sentences were pronounced and refused to leave afterward.
Human rights groups say about 2,500 people, mostly Muslims, were hacked, beaten or burned to death in the riots that started after 59 Hindu activists burned to death inside a train in Gujarat. Hindu groups blamed Muslims for the train fire, but a subsequent inquiry panel said it was an accident.
Thousands of cases were filed by Muslim victims but a couple of them came to be seen as key to winning justice for hundreds of women who have sexual assault cases pending from the riots. One of them was Bilkis, a young Muslim mother who was gang-raped when, her lawyers say, she was three months pregnant.
In 2004, the Supreme Court moved the trial to the neighboring state of Maharashtra in response to pleas that a fair trial was impossible in Gujarat, ruled by the Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party.
The failure of the Gujarat government to stop the riots was also slammed by the Supreme Court which compared its chief minister, Narendra Modi, to the Roman Emperor Nero, who is said to have played the lyre while Rome burned.
In a news conference in the capital New Delhi, Bilkis said her fight for justice had not ended and she would continue it until seven other accused in the case who were acquitted were also punished.
“This judgment does not mean the end of hatred that I know still exists in the hearts and minds of many people... but it does mean that somewhere, somehow justice can prevail,” Bilkis said with son Mohammad in her lap and husband Yakub by her side.
“This judgment is a victory not only for me but for all those innocent Muslims who were massacred and all those women whose bodies were violated only because, like me, they were Muslims,” she said with a tinge of emotion in a language that was a mix of Urdu and colloquial Gujarati.
Still traumatized, she did not falter for words. “I shall continue my fight till the other accused are also convicted,” she said. Bilkis is reluctant to return to her village and too scared to disclose where she has been staying or how and where she lived in the last five years.
She said her family in Gujarat still lived in fear of being attacked. “If they are still scared, then the Gujarat government should ask them not to get scared and should have said ‘we will provide you protection’,” she said. “I owe much of this victory to a large number of friends and supporters who stayed with me and held me when I faltered and felt I could not go on any more,” Bilkis said.
She said that “for 20 days I was cross-examined in a courtroom and the strength of my truth saw me through.” She expressed her gratitude to all her supporters, specially senior Supreme Court counsel Harish Salve, the National Human Rights Commission and the Central Bureau of Investigations without whose efforts she felt she could not have got justice.
— Additional input from agencies
