Cold-blooded brutality and blood-thirst marked the murders and gangrape of at least seven persons, said Bilkis Bano, speaking through her lawyer on Monday in the Supreme Court. She recounted the deaths of at least seven persons, including her three-year-old child, at the hands of rioters in Gujarat in 2002.
“Parts of their bodies were smashed in. Heads and chests…” advocate Shobha Gupta, for Ms. Bano, submitted before a Bench led by Justice B.V. Nagarathna.
She recounted that of the 14 killed on March 3 at Pannivel village, the bodies of only seven were found. “The other bodies went missing,” Ms. Gupta told the Bench on the opening day of the hearing.
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The court is hearing a series of petitions, including one by Ms. Bano, challenging the premature release of 11 men who were sentenced to life imprisonment for the crime.
The case had come up before multiple Benches of the apex court but stubbornly remained a non-starter.
The case, at one point, had seen the Supreme Court even wonder whether some of the released convicts were making a “mockery” of or even “playing” with the court by either going incognito to hamper the service of notice of the case or seeking time to file counter affidavits.
In one of the hearings, advocate Shobha Gupta, for Ms. Bano, had mapped the long trajectory of the case in the apex court.
She said her petition was filed in November 2022. It came up for hearing before a Bench of Justices Ajay Rastogi and Bela Trivedi on December 13. But Justice Trivedi had recused. There was a hiatus of over three months during which Ms. Gupta said she had repeatedly mentioned the case before the Chief Justice of India for a listing.
The case was finally referred to a Bench of Justices K.M. Joseph and Nagarathna, who was Associate Judge on the Bench. However, Justice Joseph retired before long and the case followed Justice Nagarathna, who started heading her own Bench accompanied by Justice Ujjal Bhuyan as Associate Judge.
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The petitioners, other than Ms. Bano, include Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra, who said the release “completely fails to bolster either social or human justice”; CPI(M) leader Subhashini Ali; independent journalist and filmmaker Revati Laul; and former philosophy professor and activist Roop Rekh Varma.
The Gujarat government had relied on its remission policy of 1992 to approve the convicts’ applications for remission of the sentence and not the current policy of 2014. The men were released in August last year.
