The Supreme Court on Tuesday listed for hearing on November 29 a petition challenging the Gujarat government’s decision to grant clemency to 11 convicts who gang-raped Bilkis Bano and murdered her family members during the 2002 Godhra riots. A bench of Justices Ajay Rastogi and CT Ravikumar granted time to the petitioners challenging the pardon order to respond to the affidavit filed by the Gujarat government.
During the hearing, the court told Advocate General Tushar Mehta that the Gujarat government’s affidavit was very voluminous. “It’s a very extensive answer… So many judgments in the answer. Where is the factual statement? Where is the application of the mind?” remarked the bench. The court asked the state government to provide a copy of the affidavit to the petitioners and sent it for hearing on November 29.
The Gujarat government on Monday defended its decision to pardon 11 convicts in the Bilkis Bano case before the Supreme Court, saying the pardon was granted because they had completed a 14-year jail term and their “conduct was found to be good”. The state government said it had adjudicated the cases of all 11 prisoners under the 1992 policy and the pardon was granted on 10 August 2022 and the central government also approved the early release of the convicts.
It is pertinent to note that the pardon was not granted under the circular governing the granting of pardon to prisoners as part of ‘Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav’ celebrations, he said. The affidavit said, “The state government considered all the views and decided to release the 11 prisoners as they had completed 14 years or more in prisons and their conduct was found to be good.
The Gujarat government has granted amnesty to 11 convicts who gangraped Bilkis Bano and murdered her family members during the 2002 Godhra riots. The State Government said that in a circular dated July 9, 1992, it had issued a policy for early release of those prisoners who had completed 14 years of imprisonment and had been sentenced to life imprisonment.
In this case, the investigation was conducted by the CBI and the state government obtained approval or appropriate orders from the Government of India, it said. The affidavit stated that the Government of India has expressed its consent for the early release of 11 prisoners on 11 July 2022 under Section 435 CrPC.
The government also questioned the standing of the petitioners who filed a PIL challenging the decision saying they were outsiders in the case. The government said the plea was neither legally tenable nor defensible on the facts and said the petitioners, as a third party, lacked standing to challenge the pardon order.
Communist Party of India (Marxist) member Subhashini Ali, journalist Revati Laul, social activist and professor Roop Rekha Verma and TMC MP Mahua Moitra filed pleas against the release of the convicts. The Supreme Court had earlier issued notices to the Gujarat government and the convicts, seeking their replies to the objections challenging the pardon order.
She also asked the state to produce the entire record of proceedings in the Bilkis Bano case, including the pardon order. The pleas sought to quash the order pardoning the 11 convicts and order their immediate re-arrest. “It is reported that it would appear that the composition of the members of the relevant body of the Gujarat government also carried political party allegiance and were also MLAs. Thus, it would appear that the competent authority was not an authority that was completely independent and an authority that could independently apply its opinion on the facts at hand,” the plea states.
The plea said that they challenged the order of the competent authority of the Gujarat government, according to which 11 persons accused in a series of heinous crimes committed in Gujarat on August 15, 2022, were allowed to walk free in accordance with the extension of amnesty.A pardon in this heinous case would be completely contrary to the public interest and would shock the collective public conscience, as well as being completely against the interests of the victim (whose family has made public statements of concern for her safety), the lawsuit said.
On 15 August, the Gujarat government released 11 convicts who had been sentenced to life imprisonment. All 11 lifers in the case were released under the amnesty policy prevailing in Gujarat at the time of their convictions in 2008. In March 2002, during the post-Godhra riots, Bano was allegedly gang-raped and left for dead with 14 members of her family, including her three-year-old daughter. She was five months pregnant when rioters attacked her family in Vadodara.
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