The Supreme Court on Friday refused to give convicts in the Bilkis Bano case any further “breathing time” to surrender. “When we passed our direction on January 8 for you to surrender, we gave you two weeks to put your affairs in order,” Justice B.V. Nagarathna, heading a Bench comprising Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, told the convicts’ lawyers. One of them said he was a 62-year-old bachelor and needed time to settle his affairs. “Well, is that not all the more reason for you to not seek more time?” Justice Nagarathna asked. The convicts had cited several reasons concerning their health or that of their family members’, the wedding of a son, harvesting season, ailing parents, etc, to seek more time to report back to jail. “We find no merit in the reasons cited... These reasons do not prevent them [convicts] from complying with our directions of January 8, 2024,” Justice Nagarathna said in the order at the end of a brief hearing during lunch hour. The Bench of Justices Nagarathna and Bhuyan had, in its judgment on January 8, ordered the convicts to report back to jail. The verdict had concluded that the remission of their life sentence by the Gujarat government in August 2022 was illegal.
Applications from the convicts had started trickling in since Thursday, requesting postponement of their impending surrender. Three of a total 11 convicts in the case — Govindbhai Nai, Mitesh Chimanlal Bhatt, and Ramesh Rupabhai Chandana — had mentioned their pleas on Thursday for urgent hearing as the deadline for their surrender would expire on Saturday. Justice Nagarathna had asked the Supreme Court Registry to inform the Chief Justice of India about the convicts’ pleas and seek orders to reconstitute a Bench of herself and Justice Bhuyan on Friday. The 11 men were serving life sentence for the gangrape of a pregnant Ms. Bano, the rape and murder of her family members, including a two-month-old infant during the 2002 riots. They had served 14 years of their sentence at the time of their premature release by the Gujarat government in August 2022. The 251-page judgment of the top court on January 8 had described the crimes of the men as “grotesque and diabolical crime driven by communal hatred”. The January 8 judgment had thrown light on the role of the Centre which had approved the men’s premature release. As an editorial in The Hindu pointed out, any rational remission policy should encompass humanitarian considerations and the convicts’ scope for reform without violating the rule of law or societal interests. “In this case, none of the conditions for remission was met.”
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