The judgment on the Bilkis Bano case provides an opportunity to reflect on a range of issues relating to inter-community relations as well as the state and legal mechanisms available to deal with riots in India. Above all, an increasing political patronage to rioters and political justification of organised collective violence of a majority community against a minority, and the abuse of power and state-machinery by a ruling party, deserve debate. But the question is: will a law against communal riots, like the one contemplated by the UPA, solve this complex problem?

That the Bilkis Bano case was shifted out of Gujarat, where her family fleeing from the brutal riots in 2002 was murdered by a frenzied mob and that she was gang-raped, is a stark reminder of the collapse of the criminal justice system and lower judiciary in the country. The police not only cheated an illiterate Bilkis in registering the FIR, they also tampered with the evidence in the cruelest fashion by severing the heads of the victims after post-mortem.

While there is a reason to celebrate in Bilkis’s resolute and successful fight for justice, there is equally a reason to introspect whether it is possible to shift a case to another state every time a case of this kind comes up. The partisanship and disregard for the rule of law injected into an already politicised and incompetent police in this case may lead to more violence against minority communities.

The judgment in the Bilkis Bano case has laid bare the soft underbelly of democracy, which has virtually justified the communalisation of state and society and subverted the rule of law. In a sense, the justification of this social and ethical aberration, which appears to have been institutionalised in Gujarat, has economic underpinnings. The middle class that has gone gaga over ‘development’ has no time to ask whether these newfound opportunities are available for every citizen, or how the deep-seated animus, now perpetuated through a ‘majoritarian’ politics, is aggravating the divides.

... contd.