Editorial
Gujarat riots verdict
The system of justice has worked, surely
Justice appears to have been done over the case of a woman brutalised during the Gujarat riots of 2002. Of course, as human rights groups in India have been saying all along, as many as 2,500 people were hacked, beaten or burnt to death in the riots. That means that there is yet a huge backlog the Indian judicial system needs to address if the questions raised over the riots are to be fully answered. But the fact that a court in Mumbai has now sentenced 11 Hindu men to life in prison for the gang rape of a pregnant young woman, Bilkis Bano, and has also punished a policeman for trying to divert the court of justice through falsifying evidence, is surely an encouraging sign.
The judgement should allay, to a large extent, the fears of those who so long might have remained apprehensive about the situation given the clearly dark role played by the Narendra Modi government in Gujarat over the issue. Indeed, the verdict in Mumbai testifies to the decisive role the Indian judicial system continues to play in holding wrongdoers to account. That the Supreme Court decided earlier on, in 2004, to move the case from Gujarat to Maharashtra in order for full and proper justice to be done speaks volumes of the sagacity and awareness of public welfare upon which the judicial system works in India. It is anybody's guess as to how the case might have turned out if it were gone through in Gujarat itself. But what has happened here is that the very legitimate fears of the public as well as human rights organisations about a likely miscarriage of justice in Gujarat were noted.
The verdict, in a number of ways, is a grim reminder of the pogrom which followed in the wake of the deaths of 59 Hindus in a train fire in Gujarat in 2002. The consequences were horrifying, with Hindu mobs turning upon the state's Muslim population in the belief that the dead Hindus on the train had been done in by Muslims. As murder and mayhem overwhelmed decency and good sense, it was the sheer callousness of the Modi government to the crisis that exacerbated the situation. It has long been the feeling that the government egged the rioters on. Now that justice has been done in the Bilkis Bano case, the expectation will be that a similar redress of grievances will be done regarding all other ugly incidents committed in 2002.
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