SC to form special bench to hear Bilkis Bano’s plea against release of convicts

Gupta told the bench, also comprising Justices P S Narasimha and J B Pardiwala, that the matter was currently listed before Justice Ajay Rastogi who was sitting in combination with Justice Bela M Trivedi who had recused from hearing the matter.

As Gupta urged the court to set up a special bench to hear the matter, the CJI agreed and said he will list it for hearing at the earliest.

No reason was given for the recusal of Justice Trivedi. She had been deputed as Law Secretary to the Gujarat government from 2004 to 2006.

Bilkis was gangraped and her three-year-old daughter among 14 people killed by a mob on March 3, 2002, in the Limkheda taluka of Gujarat’s Dahod district during riots. The 11 convicts were released on August 15 last year.

In her plea, Bilkis had said: “The en masse premature release of the convicts… has shaken the conscience of society”. She said the Supreme Court had held in the past that en masse remissions cannot be permitted and that the case of each convict will have to be separately examined before extending the relief.

She termed the 2002 incident as “one of the most gruesome crimes this country has ever seen”. The premature release of the convicts came as a shock not only to her, but to her grown-up daughters, family, and to society at large, nationally and internationally, she said.

Narrating what she went through at the time, Bilkis said the premature release has also “relived” that “trauma”.

In December 2022, the Supreme Court dismissed a plea by Bilkis seeking a review of its May 2022 order that the Gujarat government was the appropriate authority to decide the prayer for remission by one of the 11 convicts who was sentenced to life imprisonment — and that the state’s 1992 remission policy would apply in the matter.