The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that the petition filed by Bilkis Bano challenging the remission of 11 convicts is maintainable.
A bench of Justices B V Nagarathna and Ujjal Bhuyan had reserved its verdict in the matter on October 12 last year after an 11-day hearing on the petitions, including the one filed by Bano.
Reading out the judgment on Monday, Justice Nagarathna also said that Gujarat government lacked competence to pass the remission order as the trial was being held in Maharashtra. The court also observed that the convicts who had filed the Gujarat government's direction considering remission did so by suppressing relevant facts and also made misleading statements.
The Gujarat government had allowed the release of all the eleven convicts sentenced to life imprisonment in the 2002 post-Godhra Bilkis Bano gang rape case from the state's Godhra sub-jail on August 15, 2022.
The 11 convicts -- Jaswantbhai Nai, Govindbhai Nai, Shailesh Bhatt, Radhesham Shah, Bipin Chandra Joshi, Kesarbhai Vohania, Pradeep Mordhiya, Bakabhai Vohania, Rajubhai Soni, Mitesh Bhatt, and Ramesh Chandana -- walked out of jail on independence day.
Several pleas were moved in the top court against the remission. TMC's Mahua Moitra, Communist Party of India - Marxist (CPI-M) leader Subhashini Ali, journalist Revati Laul, and professor and social activist Roop Rekha Verma among others.
During the hearing, the Supreme Court had questioned the parole given to the 11 convicts saying the gravity of the offence should have been considered by the state. "Apples cannot be compared with oranges, similarly massacre cannot be compared with single murder," the court said.
Bilkis Bano was 21 years old and five months pregnant when she was gang-raped while fleeing the horrors of the communal riots following the train burning incident in Godhara in 2002. Seven members of her family including her three-year old daughter were killed in the riots.
The trial of the case was later taken on by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and was transferred from Gujarat to Mumbai. In 2008, all the 11 convicts were awarded life imprisonment by a special court in Mumbai and the decision was upheld by a division bench of the Bombay high court in 2017.
SC Slams Guajarat Government
While delivering the judgment, the Supreme Court slammed the Gujarat government saying it was "complicit and acted in tandem with one of the convicts" who had approached the top court with his plea for premature release. The bench said it failed to understand why Gujarat government did not file a review petition against the judgment dated May 13, 2022, which directed the Gujarat government to consider the plea of a convict for premature release as per the State policy of July 9, 1992.
In 1992, the Government of Gujarat had come up with a fresh remission policy under which pleas of those convicts who were sentenced to life imprisonment and had served a minimum of 14 years of sentence could be considered after a favourable opinion from the Jail Advisory Board.
"Taking advantage of the May 13, 2022 order of this court, other convicts also filed remission applications and the Gujarat government passed remission orders. Gujarat was complicit and acted in tandem with respondent No. 3 (convict Radheshyam Shah) in this case. This court was misled by suppressing facts. Use of power by Gujarat was only an usurpation of power by the State," the bench said.
"If the convicts can circumvent the consequences of their conviction, peace and tranquillity in the society will be reduced to a chimaera. It is the duty of this Court to correct arbitrary orders at the earliest and to retain the foundation of trust of the public," the court said.