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    Bilkis Bano lost 14 kin, moved 20 houses and waited 17 years for justice

    Synopsis

    The 36-year-old’s nightmare started four days after the attack on kar sevaks travelling in the Sabarmati Express in 2002.

    Bilkis
    Hope at last: Bilkis with her youngest daughter Aksha in Delhi.
    (This story originally appeared in on Apr 28, 2019)
    Bilkis Bano never allows her youngest, four-year-old Aksha, to stray too far. She is either in her arms, or sitting within reach. The only time the smile reaches her eyes is when she speaks about her five children. Otherwise a look of sheer exhaustion lines her face. It is as if, Bilkis Yakub Rasool, has not slept for 17 years. As if the last 17 years have been a waking nightmare.

    The 36-year-old’s nightmare started four days after the attack on kar sevaks travelling in the Sabarmati Express in 2002. As communal violence flared across Gujarat, her family decided to flee their home in Randhikpur village in a truck. But it was too late. On March 3, Bilkis, then five months’ pregnant, was pulled out of a truck, gang-raped, and forced to watch as rioters killed 14 members of her family, including her three-year-old daughter Saleha whose head was smashed with a rock.

    The rioters left her for dead but the brutalised Bilkis regained consciousness, covered herself with a petticoat and walked to find help.

    An unlettered Bilkis, who had till then almost never stepped out of home, was just 19. Though she filed a FIR the next day itself, the magistrate closed her case for want of evidence. The NHRC backed her, and it took many twists and turns before the case was handed to the CBI for investigation. After a trial in which she was cross-examined for 20 days, the Bombay high court in May 2017 convicted 12 people (one of the accused had died meanwhile) but handed out only life terms.

    It was post-2012 when the Nirbhaya gang-rape in Delhi was alive in people’s memory and when demands for death sentences for rape convicts had gathered momentum. But Bilkis did not succumb to the need for "badla" (revenge.)

    “Jaan ke badle mein jaan nahi chahiye. Badla nahi insaaf chahiye tha. (We didn’t want to take revenge. We wanted justice)” she says.

    And yet there is no one clear memory of the years of struggle. Instead Bilkis can remember being the only woman in her family (because her mother, sister, cousins were all killed by the mob), of raising her children in the shadow of fear, of threats from the accused out of parole, of new rooms that became home for a couple of months at a time (the family has shifted to over 20 locations in 17 years), of new schools that the children had to be admitted to, and new neighbours with whom one could chat but never confide.

    When the Supreme Court announced a compensation of Rs 50 lakh this week, Bilkis was in her one-room home in Devgarh Baria, in Gujarat’s Dahod district. “Bahut mushkil tha. Hamare asoon to sukhe hi nahi (It was very difficult. My tears have not yet dried),” she says about her legal struggle for insaaf (justice.) The compensation, considered the highest for a survivor of gang-rape in a communal riot, is significant not just because of the amount.

    Activists feel that the SC order recognises, for the first time, how women and children face the brunt of any targeted violence.

    Her eldest daughter, now in class XII, has expressed a desire to become a lawyer. “She saw her mother’s struggle with the justice system. It has affected her because she is the oldest and she understands her mother’s pain,” Yakub, her husband, says.

    In her soft-spoken voice, Bilkis has become the strongest champion of hope for women survivors. On Wednesday, she announced that some amount of the compensation awarded to her would be used to establish a fund in her daughter Saleha’s memory and would be used to provide legal aid to rape survivors and their children.

    In Delhi for the last two days, Bilkis remains unaffected by the media circus around her. The one thing that rankles her is that Saleha could not be given a proper burial. “Her body was lost in the tide of hatred that swept over my Gujarat in 2002. There is no grave for Saleha that I could visit and weep upon. That has haunted me, in ways I can never express,” she says.

    Yakub says that it was the memory of their dead daughter and their family that gave them courage to continue fighting though the long, legal battle.

    After the SC judgment, Bilkis and Yakub voted for the first time in 17 years. They now plan to return to their village in Gujarat, and maybe go for Haj once the children are settled.

    Bilkis dreams of ordinary days, and nights without the nightmares. “I want a new beginning. I want to live with my family again, to raise my children. To celebrate Eid together,’’ she says.


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    Subscribe to The Economic Times Prime and read the ET ePaper online.

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