Jyoti and Bilkis: Different daughters
For over a decade, Bilkis fought her case bravely even as she had to move home repeatedly and couldn’t return to her village out of sheer fear that her attackers were still around.
Bilkis’s case slowly became just another Gujarat riots case even as the Jyoti Singh case became a cause celebre, a symbol of the fight for gender justice. Those who supported and fought for Bilkis were accused of being pseudo-secular “jholawallah” liberals only seeking to malign the government in Gujout arat. Those who took up the Jyoti Singh case were seen as being at the vanguard of redefining rape laws. Global documentaries were planned in memory of Jyoti Singh’s courage, hardly anyone wanted to visit Bilkis and her family.
While the accused were punished in both the cases, the judges final orders reflected the contrasting public mood. Describing the Delhi gang rape case as ‘demonic’, the judges saw it as a “crime against humanity” and ruled that it was a “rarest of rare” case that deserved the death penalty. In the Bilkis case, the judges rejected the conspiracy charge, claiming that the crime had occurred on “the spur of the moment” even while admitting that the accused were “hunting for Muslims”. While rejecting the death penalty for the rapists, the judges said, the “accused were boiling with revenge” after the Godhra train burning.
Ironically, when I asked Bilkis if she was satisfied with the verdict, she softly replied: “I always wanted justice, never revenge!” My counter-question to the world at large is simply this: Is ‘justice’ then for a gang rape victim in a communal riot different from ‘justice’ for a gang rape in a bus in Delhi?
Post-script: Bilkis is now 34. The child she was pregnant with when she was gang raped is now 15. “He wants to be a lawyer”, she tells me with a smile. Maybe, he will one day be able to tell ‘new India’ the true meaning of justice.