The Supreme Court of India has directed the state government of Gujarat to pay Bilkis Bano Rs 50 lakhs, provide her with a job, and furnish her accommodation.  Much of the world, indeed most of India, is not likely to have heard her name.  From a conventional standpoint, she has absolutely no claim on the world’s attention.  She is a Muslim woman of little education and from a working-class background.  She commands neither looks nor wealth.  If all this were not enough to make her into a non-entity in a world that is dazzled only by riches, the inanities of ‘celebrity culture’, or “achievements” as these are usually understood, Bilkis Bano is also “damaged goods”.

The year was 2002.  Muslims were being slaughtered in Gujarat, whose Chief Minister at the time, Narendra Modi, later claimed before a special investigative team that he was unaware of the hundreds of killings that were taking place practically under his nose.  Thousands of people were injured, killed, maimed, wounded in spirit; few suffered as much as Bilkis Bano, a 21-year old who on March 3 was gang-raped in her village home near Ahmedabad while she was seven months pregnant.  Bano’s 3-year old was also killed before her very eyes.  Altogether 14 members of her family were murdered.  Bano was left alive, as the killers thought, to nurse her wounds—and, more importantly, to serve as a palpable reminder to members of her community of how they should mind their place in a predominantly Hindu society.

Where most others in her situation would have succumbed and fled to safety, Bano decided to press charges against her assailants.  Mr. Modi has spoken of the Gujarat “model of development”, but the state which gave the world Mohandas Gandhi has in the last two decades become India’s laboratory for seeding new modes of barbaric hatred. In her quest for justice, Bano received not an iota of assistance from the state government; to the contrary, since her life was under constant threat, she had to move more than a dozen times, and her apprehensions that witnesses could be harmed and the evidence tampered with were doubtless well-grounded. Her lawyers successfully had the court case, which commenced in Ahmedabad, shifted to Mumbai.

The trial dragged on but Bano was not one to be intimidated.  Few would have thought her likely to have such resilience. In January 2008, a special court convicted 11 men of raping her and murdering her family members and sentenced them to life imprisonment.  The policemen and doctors who were acquitted would be convicted in July 2017 of negligence in the performance of their duties and tampering with evidence.

For every Bilkis Bano who has prevailed, there are thousands of women and men whose sufferings have not even entered the history books. It remains to be seen whether the Gujarat government will comply with the court’s order within the stipulated two-week period.  While the ruling in the Supreme Court might justly be celebrated, dozens of other cases languish in the courts.  Nevertheless, for the moment we must be focused on how we might understand the singular achievement of Bilkis Bano.  Though Bilkis is not a lettered woman, she recognized that the communal outlook is so deeply entrenched in Gujarat that no institution of either state or civil society can be said to be free of its grip or reach.  She did not wilt under rigorous and aggressive cross-examination by the defence, unflinchingly identified all the accused in court, and could not be cowed into abandoning or contradicting her testimony.

Remarkable as all that is, there is still something more exceptional about Bilkis Bano.  The rich in India have been opting out of the state over the course of the last two decades, except of course in the matter of receiving subsidies in the form of tax breaks, easy access to credit lines, and so on.  They certainly have no use for the Constitution of India.  Bano’s courage, dedication to the truth, and faith in the judicial system offer a faint glimmer of hope that Indian democracy is not entirely moribund.  It appears that her husband and lawyers stood by her through the long dark years while she struggled for justice, but the greater marvel is that Bano sustained her faith in the Constitution of India when all the odds were stacked against her.   The Constitution is the only document that every Indian can stand by, and perhaps that may one of the many reasons why so few are willing to put their trust in it.  The educated in India should take some lessons from Bilkis Bano.

(Vinay Lal is a writer, blogger, cultural critic, and Professor of History at UCLA.)

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