Date: Monday, January 8, 2024
The Polit Bureau of the CPI(M) welcomes the judgment by the Supreme Court nailing down the Gujarat government’s illegal actions of granting remission to eleven convicts who had been sentenced to life for gang raping of pregnant Bilkis Bano, members of her family and also mass murdering at least fourteen of them in the 2002 Gujarat communal carnage. The court has categorically asked the convicts to surrender back to prison within two weeks.
The Supreme Court division bench, going beyond the `competence’ of the Gujarat government to pass the remission order, has actually stated that it acted in `complicity’ with the convicts. The bench has also stated that a fraud has been played by the Gujarat government in presenting the facts in justifying the remission order. The scathing judgment has stated that if the convicts can “circumvent the consequence of their conviction, peace and tranquility in the society will be reduced to a chimaera”. The fact that the Gujarat government has furnished that the decision was also based on the concurrence of the Central government, makes the Central government equally complicit in this `complicity with the convicts’. That the remission did not take into account, the brutality of the crimes and its larger consequence on the society and the rule of law is obvious.
Governments are Constitutional entities and if they act in violation of the jurisdiction and considerations of law, it will play havoc with our very existence as a democracy.