The struggle to punish the guilty must be continued without let-up

On January 21, 2008, a Sessions court in Mumbai sentenced 11 of the accused in the Bilkis Bano case to life imprisonment and ordered a fine of Rs. 2000 on each count. According to the judgment, the accused were charged with murder, gang-rape, conspiracy, rioting with deadly weapons, causing disappearance of evidence and unlawful assembly. The head constable of the Limkheda police station was also sentenced to 3 year imprisonment for framing false records and refusing to lodge Bilkis Bano’s first complaint.

Bilkis Bano and 16 members of her family were attacked by a mob at Chapparwad village near Randhikpur on March 3, 2002, at the height of the state organized genocide of muslims in Gujarat. They had fled their Limkheda taluka village earlier, fearing attacks, and taken shelter at Chungadhi village, 6 km from Randhikpur, from where they were hounded out earlier that day.

Bilkis, then 23 and five months pregnant, and three other women, including her sister, were raped. She witnessed the head of her four-year-old daughter Saliha being smashed, before she passed out; the attackers raped her and left, assuming that she was dead.

In all, eight persons were killed, including Bilkis’s teenaged brothers. Six have been untraced since the incident. Her husband, Saddam, and another boy, Hussain, survived.

Bilkis filed an FIR a few days later but the policeman who was taking down the details reportedly omitted names and fudged details to protect the accused who were all believed to be influential people close to the political establishment. The case based on the FIR was dismissed for ‘lack of evidence’.

Bilkis appealed to the Supreme Court which then asked the CBI to take over investigations, after which the case was re-opened in a second Gujarat court. Even as the trial was underway in the Dahod court, Bilkis, witnesses and CBI officers began getting threats from those whom she had accused but who had got away scot-free.

The trial was shifted to the Mumbai court in April 2004 after Bilkis, with help from the National Human Rights Commission, moved the Supreme Court a second time, to have her case tried outside Gujarat, as she did not expect a fair hearing in Gujarat.

For the last six years, Bilkis Bano has been courageously fighting to bring the culprits to book, even while being on the run with her children and constantly under threat. This was a period when key witnesses in other cases were bribed, intimidated and silenced, when all ruling class parties had turned their backs on the victims of the Gujarat 2002 massacre and the Congress Party led ‘secular’ UPA government at the centre did nothing to punish those guilty of the massacres. In these hostile circumstances Bilkis Bano continued her fight for conviction of those who had devastated her family and her life forever. The judgment of the Mumbai court is an outcome of her determined struggle.

Bilkis has declared that her struggle is not over. Out of the 19 people whom she had accused, the remaining seven, including five Gujarat policemen accused of shielding the culprits and a doctor couple who are believed to have fudged post-mortem reports, were acquitted for ‘lack of evidence’. She is determined to file an appeal against their acquittal.

The court sentence against the 12 accused is also the first officially recorded acknowledgement of the organized and pre-meditated nature and extent of the horrific crimes that were carried out against Muslims, with the full connivance of the state, in Gujarat in February-March 2002. Thousands of people were massacred and women raped by murderous mobs, led by known political figures of the state and all these crimes have remained unpunished.

The case of Bilkis Bano shows how difficult, if not impossible, it is to secure punishment of those guilty of state organized crimes against the people, under the existing legal and judicial system. For more than 23 years now, the victims of the state organized massacre of Sikhs in 1984 are still battling for justice, while the accused continue to go scot-free and even enjoy the privileges of office. Other victims of state organized communal violence continue to suffer the same fate.

The legal and judicial system is but an arm of the state to ensure that the ‘law of the land’ prevails. Experience clearly shows that this ‘law of the land’ allows parties of the ruling class and the state machinery to commit the most horrendous crimes against the people. The single function of the legal and judicial system is to safeguard the capitalist system and the rule of the bourgeoisie, the existing system of unbridled exploitation and oppression of the working masses to guarantee super profits for the foreign and Indian big capitalists. It is not a mechanism to ensure justice for the victims of state terror and oppression, as the harrowing experience of Bilkis Bano and countless others shows.

Across the country, masses of people are coming forward demanding that those guilty of crimes against the people be severely punished. People are demanding fundamental changes in the system, so that people’s rights and concerns are given priority, rather than the interests of the capitalist exploiters. This popular movement has to be strengthened and the struggle to punish the guilty must be continued without let-up.