Thread by @tequieremos

Supreme Court has dismissed review plea of Bilkis Bano after Narendra Modi approved the release of 11 men who were convicted for gangrape of a pregnant Muslim woman and murder of 14 members of her family.

Who is Bilkis Bano and what happened during the Gujarat Pogrom 2002?

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Bilkis Bano was a resident of Randhikpur village in Limkheda tehsil, Dahod of Gujarat. Her father, Abdul Issak Ghanchi, used to sell milk in the village to support his family. Bilkis had two sisters and three brothers. She was married to Yakub Rasool from Devgadh Baria village.

On 27 February 2002, Bilkis, Yakub and Saleha, their three and a half year old daughter, were visiting her father’s house in Randhikpur to celebrate Bakr Eid. Bilkis was five months pregnant. The ‘Vishwa Hindu Parishad’ had called for a Gujarat bandh the very next day. In the..

..uneasy silence of that morning, gangs of feral Hindus began roaming the empty streets, looking for Muslims to kill. In Randhikpur too, a Hindu mob had started burning down the shops and houses of their Muslim neighbours. Bilkis and her family decided they would be safer if...

..they went to Yakub’s village of Devgadh Baria. Yakub and Bilkis’s brother left together, while Bilkis travelled in a group comprising 15 relatives. Many other Muslim families in the village also fled to save their lives.

Bilkis’s travelling party comprised two adult males...

..four boys, nine women and her little daughter. They were Bilkis’s mother, Halima; sisters, Mumtaz and Munni; aunts, Sugra and Amina; her cousins, Shamim, Mumtaz and Madina; her younger brothers, Aslam and Irfan; her uncles, Majid and Yusuf Musa; Hussain, just three, who was...

...the son of Shamim; seven year old Saddam, the son of Amina; and Saleha, Bilkis’s three and a half year old daughter. Saleha was playful, unmindful of the danger around her.

For the next three days, Saleha was on the road with her mother and their extended family, as they...

..walked from village to village, making their way through jungles and fields, hungry, thirsty, exhausted, terrified, looking for safety, for refuge.

An hour or so before noon, two white jeeps containing about thirty men pulled up on the kuchcha road beside the fields.

They were armed with swords, sickles and sticks. At least twelve of the men were from Randhikpur, where Bilkis’s father lived and where she was born and raised. Though Bilkis and her family were wearing Adivasi dress, they were identified: ‘Aa rahya Musalmano, emane maro kapo,’

..the men shouted. There they are, the Muslims, kill them!

Bilkis knew many of these men. They had been her neighbours for years. The house of Bipin Chandra Joshi, for instance, had faced her own. Bilkis’s father often visited Bipin’s father, who ran a clinic, for treatment.

Radheshyam Shah, an advocate, also owned a bangle shop in the village. The bangles Bilkis wore on her wrists that morning were from his shop. Pradip Modhiya ran a small hotel, as did Naresh Modhiya; Raju Soni owned a shop. These were all men who had known Bilkis’s family.

Shailesh Bhatt, who lived close to a mosque in Randhikpur, snatched Saleha from Bilkis. ‘Don’t hurt my daughter,’ Bilkis begged. Just a few weeks earlier, Shailesh had visited Bilkis’s house for a cup of tea. On this day, he killed a child by dashing her head against a rock.

Some other middle-aged Hindu men, including Jaswant Nai, Govind Nai and Naresh Modhiya dragged Bilkis towards a tree and tore at her clothes. She turned to Jaswant: ‘Chacha, I am five months pregnant, please spare me.’ She told Govind and Naresh that they had been like brothers.

Naresh held her arms down. Govind put the weight of his leg down on her chest and neck. All three men took turns to rape her. At some point during the assault, Bilkis lost consciousness.

The men, believing she was dead, left her ‘corpse’ on the side of the unpaved road.

While Bilkis was being raped, eleven other men hacked and stabbed the two adult males who were travelling with her, and raped and murdered the other women, including Shamim. And they killed her newborn.

After a few hours, Bilkis regained consciousness. All around her were the...

..bodies of her family, the horribly mutilated corpses of the people she loved. Here was her one-day-old niece. There was her own daughter, her bangles unbroken on her little wrists. Bilkis’s clothes were strewn beside her. She put her lehenga back on and crawled up a hillock.

After escaping from the scene of crime, Bilkis spent the rest of the day and night hiding on the hillock. It was her memory of this hiding place that helped her lead the CBI investigators to the scene of crime.

Besides Bilkis, 7 year old Saddam and 3 year old Hussain survived.

In January 2004, a crack team of forensic experts and doctors put together by the CBI, had pitched tents in a jungle in Dahod, Gujarat, and set up camp. The CBI is a federal agency that investigates crimes of national significance. This particular team’s task was to find the..

..bodies of fourteen people who had been killed and buried somewhere deep within the jungle in March 2002. They had been assigned this task by the Supreme Court of India because the Gujarat police had closed the case, stating that it had reached a dead end in its investigation.

It took an anonymous tip from a local for the investigators to find the mass grave on 31 January 2004. Divert a small stream flowing through the jungle, a villager told them, because the bodies are at the bottom. The CBI team hired an industrial excavator from Godhra.

Not long after digging had begun, a foul smell rose out of the pit; the team exhumed the remains of five corpses, each bearing signs of torture, mutilation and burning. The female bodies were marked by cigarette burns on their breasts and bottoms. Their genitalia had been cut...

..open and disfigured, and sharp objects had been thrust inside. A young boy, it was clear, had been sodomised before he was killed. The bodies had been almost uniformly decapitated. The murderers had strewn bags of salt into the graves to increase the speed of decomposition.

All convicts of the Bilkis Bano rape case were set free by Gujarat govt citing the 1992 remission policy after they had completed more than 14 years in prison and their conduct was found to be 'good'. Most of the convicts are now back in Randhikpur, where Bano once lived.

Today the Supreme Court has dismissed filed by Bilkis Bano against the release of 11 men who raped her and killed several of her family members.

In Bilkis Bano's fate lies the future of Indian Muslims.

Reference:
“Under Cover: My Journey Into the Darkness of Hindutva” by Ashish Khetan