Now 28, youngest eyewitness in Bilkis case is a broken man: ‘Do not feel any happiness after verdict… Want my nightmares to end’

His voice quivering, he says on the phone to The Indian Express, “They are not innocent. They are convicted murderers. They deserved the death penalty… Nothing can change what I have lost. Even if they return to the jails for now, they will be set free again. I do not trust in the process outside of the judicial system. I do not feel any happiness.”

He was seven then, 28 now. One of the 73 prosecution witnesses in the Bilkis Bano case, he was part of the group that was attacked by a mob in Limkheda taluka of Gujarat’s Dahod district on March 3, 2002, days after the Godhra incident.

“I have seen their faces. They killed my Ammi… Every night, I see those images flash before my eyes… I wake up, scream and run,” he says.

His mother, then aged about 40 years, and sister were among the 14 persons killed by the mob that gangraped Bilkis. The 28-year-old, whose name and that of those associated with him are being withheld to protect their identities, is one of only three people from the group who survived that day.

In the last year and a half since the 11 convicts walked free on August 15, 2022, he says he has stayed updated on the case. He says, “I actually had no hope that they would return to jail again. But though the SC has asked for them to be sent to jail again, it has not made me happy. I do not think my pain can be lessened in this lifetime…”

He was about 12 when he first testified in the Special CBI court in Mumbai in June 2005. Corroborating the statement recorded by Bilkis Bano, he had identified five of the 11 accused — Jaswant Nai, Kesharbhai Vohania, Pradip Modhiya, Bakabhai Vohania and Rajubhai Soni.

In its 2017 verdict upholding the CBI court verdict declaring the 11 guilty, the Bombay High Court said the witness’s testimony had been crucial to the case. “Considering his age, he was capable of remembering the incident,” the court said. “He was cross-examined thoroughly as he was the only witness on the point of taking names of the accused as assailants corroborating the evidence of the prosecutrix (Bilkis).”

The trial court had held that the boy’s evidence, along with Bilkis’s, offers a “credible view of the incident”. Judge U D Salvi had also praised the “courage and consistency of the child” in identifying those who attacked his mother, Bilkis’s maternal aunt.

According to Bilkis’s evidence in court, her maternal aunt, the boy’s mother, was also raped and killed — the court had upheld that his evidence was “sufficient to generally corroborate the evidence of the prosecutrix”.

Following the incident, the boy was taken from Dahod to a relief camp in Godhra, where he met his guardian, an activist who was involved in arranging legal assistance for victims of the riots. The guardian, on getting to know that the boy was the only eyewitness in the Bilkis case and an orphan (he lost his father in 1998), shifted him to a hostel in Kutch for several months, until the CBI took over the investigation.

Bilkis Bano had filed her petition under Article 32 to enforce her fundamental rights under Article 21, which guarantees the right to life and liberty, and Article 14, which guarantees the right to equality and equal protection of the law. (File Photo/PTI)

“When the CBI investigation began, they asked for him… I had to bring him back from the hostel. On one of his visits to the crime scene, the boy had turned hysterical while describing the sequence of events… The CBI officers told me to take him to a psychiatrist. The doctor then suggested that he was suffering from unaddressed trauma and that he needed a family. So, I brought him to my mother’s house in Ahmedabad and entrusted him to her care,” the man, whom he calls uncle, said, adding that the episodes of trauma meant that the boy could never live a normal life or complete schooling. He dropped out after his Class 8.

Now, at 28, he is father to a four-year-old boy. He has never held a steady job and keeps himself engaged by working in a warehouse run by the activist.

“I keep trying to distract myself by thinking about normal life. So long as there is company – friends, relatives or even my son — I am mostly okay. But it’s when I am alone that my mother’s face, her voice, those images… they just don’t leave me. Even when I am at work, I sometimes go blank, forget everything else around then. Then, I can hear my mother’s screams, ‘Let my son go…’.”

Four years ago, after much persuasion, he visited his village Randhikpur to attend the wedding of a relative. It was his first visit to his village since the 2002 riots. Over the years, he has also fallen out with his older brothers and relatives. “We have not stayed in touch since we parted… I don’t intend to go back to the village now. I am not in touch with anyone from Randhikpur, not even Bilkis… All I want is for my nightmares to end,” he says.

His wife, his childhood friend, says that it has taken “years of consoling” to get him out of his trauma. “He has been despondent after the convicts were granted remission. The sentencing had never consoled him but at least there was a reason to speak to him about closure… Now he does not trust that the accused will be in prison for too long. It has taken us back to where we started. One can’t imagine the trauma of a child who witnessed such a crime against his mother… We have a son but we are struggling to build him a future. We wish to have a house of our own but it is a distant dream at the moment.”