Supreme court lawyer and activist Vrinda Grover on Saturday said that the remission granted to 11 convicts of Bilkis Bano gang rape and murder of 14 people is "part of erasing the truth of 2002 (post-Godhra riots.)" She said that apart from the burning of coach S-6 of Sabarmati Express train, in which 59 persons were killed and people were convicted, "everything else is being erased from judicial records."
Grover was speaking at an event named "On the remission of convicts in the Bilkis Bano case by Gujarat Government" in Ahmedabad organised in memory of noted lawyer late Girish Patel. The event was held at the terrace of advocate Anand Yagnik in Ahmedabad which was closely watched by local police. Grover mentioned in her speech how public space for critical debates is shrinking in Gujarat and what is happening in Gujarat today, may happen in Delhi in the future.
"The case of remission in Bilkis' case to my mind is actually part of erasing the truth of 2002 and that is the eraser. Except burning of S6 train (coach) where, yes, people died and there are convictions and those people are sentenced...except for that everything else that happened in 2002 usko erase kar diya jaye Hindustan ke judicial record se (should be erased from the judicial record of the country) and communicate to the international community that a set of people with political agenda and activists with other ulterior motives created the stories."
"This eraser is not new. I have been to Jammu and Kashmir. This eraser started there and we didn't pay attention. The state is a creature of habit. It keeps repeating; it has patterns and it tests these patterns on people from different constituencies," Grover said. The supreme court lawyer was also the lawyer of Shamima Kausar, mother of Ishrat Jahan, who was killed in a police encounter in 2004 by Gujarat policemen. The CBI probe found that it was a fake encounter.
On August 15, following recommendation of Jail Advisory Committee, whose members consisted of two BJP MLAs along with district collector, among others, 11 convicts of life imprisonment for gang rape and killing of 14 persons including Bano's children and close relatives, were released from jail on remission. Grover in her speech elaborated how the state government used this executive discretion arbitrarily despite the case being "rarest of rare."
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