Bilkis Bano case: Rape has no religion, but it can be used as lethal weapon against a community

I was in school when Babri Masjid was demolished. A sepia stained newspaper clipping sent last week to me, on WhatsApp, a grim reminder of the violence that erupted following the demolition. I am born in the second week of December and even now I can recall how eerie our residential para (locality) had felt — how there was no birthday cake from Nahoum’s, a 115-year-old Jewish bakery in New Market, an annual ritual.

The bakery was founded by Nahoum Israel Mordecai, a Baghdadi Jew in 1902. Kolkata, the city of my birth, was once the home of around 4,000-6,000 Jews during the first half of the 20th century. Israel began his bakery business with a door-to-door model, till Nahoum and Sons opened doors in 1916 in the colonial New Market area.

I remember walking up to a Muslim classmate, after our school, an elitist, all girl’s convent, hugging her, gauntly. ‘I am sorry about what happened…’ I blurted, my words sticking to one another, like grains of warm rice: ‘Are… are you scared? Is your family scared? Do you think Kolkata will be next?’

She had a twin sister. Her paternal grandparents had gone for Hajj, the same year.

I had not received an answer.

Maybe, it was the wrong thing to say.

Maybe, it was the beginning of the end.

All day today, I thought of Bilkis Bano who recently moved the Supreme Court challenging the release of 11 convicts who had gang-raped her and killed seven members of her family during the 2002 Godhra riots in Gujarat. Bilkis also filed a review petition against the apex court’s order in May permitting the Gujarat government to decide on the remission of these convicts. Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud is all set to take a decision on whether both pleas can be heard together and before the same bench.

In August, this year, the Gujarat government had released the rapists on grounds of ‘good behaviour’, the reason cited to the Supreme Court, on the matter.

I want to throw up as I replay the phrase, ‘good behaviour,’ staring outside my window, feeling strangely vacuous, recollecting the state sponsored carnage. Female victims stripped, paraded naked, gang raped and in a lot of cases, burnt alive. Their insides, bloodied.

It is almost 10 pm now, and I don’t know how I remember incidents on the night of 8-9 December 1992. A predominantly Muslim slum in Surat being subjected to a planned attack that led to at least a dozen women gang raped by mobs.

More headlines screamed and jostled for space.

Was that why my classmate was ominously silent?

Did she hate me?

Hate us?

Hate this country?

Hate her own religion?

Mine?

Bilkis Bano, 19-year-old, five months pregnant had escaped from her village, Randhikpur in eastern Gujarat, accompanied by several relatives as communal riots had erupted across the state with Muslims fleeing en masse, fearful of rowdy mobs of hard-line Hindus from right-wing groups rampaging village after village, setting properties ablaze and plundering homes.

Bano’s family found refuge in an obscure village, where Shamim, her cousin, soon went into labour, delivering a baby girl at a local midwife’s house.

Barely two days later, as they passed through a slim road, rioters wielding swords and sickles in two white vehicles, hysterically screamed: “These are the Muslims, kill them, cut them!”

In one of the most bone-chilling incidents of the large-scale anti-Muslim violence that swept across Gujarat, 13 members of Bano’s family were killed, including her three-year-old daughter and Shamim’s two-day-old baby. Bano was gang-raped. She survived by playing dead and soon lost consciousness.

In April 2019, after a 17-year battle, the Supreme Court directed the Gujarat government to pay $71,000 (Rs 50 lakh) to Bano as compensation, along with a job and accommodation of her choice.

It was the highest compensation on record given to a rape survivor or riot victim in India.

In a cultural context where victims of sexual violence and their families are largely ostracised — a tendency to victim blame, leads to most rape survivors having to fight for their dignity in their own communities, as well.

Bano clearly was one of the few gutsy survivors who came forward to testify, waging a historic battle to secure justice. Hers was the first conviction ever for rape during communal violence in independent India. A victory for an entire sex, who are the first targets — sexually brutalised during most communal riots so as to humiliate and demoralise their men. Teach an entire demographic a lesson.

To gag us into submission. To break our spine. To brutalise our existence.

“I’m very happy with the judgement,” Bano, then 36, declared emphatically in interviews to news channels, “It was a very difficult time for us. We have suffered a lot of misery. They killed my family … They killed my daughter. They didn’t even let us clean our dead and give them a burial. How could I forget this?”

At least 2,000 people were killed in Gujarat after a train fire in which 60 Hindu pilgrims were burned alive.

Rape has no religion.

And yet, as an instrument of war and oppression, especially, during riots, pogroms and genocides, mass rape of women has been wielded as a lethal and fully loaded weapon against a community. This happened in Gujarat against Muslims in 2002. This happened in Kashmir against Pandits in the 1990s.

From World War II, the Rwandan genocide, the Bangladeshi struggle for independence and even parts of North Eastern India where the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) renders unfair immunity to the Indian Army – I question, tonight, if rape as a weapon of war, though recognised under international law, will ever carry the weight of my sex’s entire collective conscience?

Drenched in tears and shrieks and blood and bones and nakedness and regrets.

I go back to Article 27 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (1949).

“Women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault.”

In 1993, the United Nations (UN) Commission on Human Rights (replaced in 2006 by the UN Human Rights Council) declared systematic rape and military sexual slavery as crimes against humanity punishable as violations of women’s human right.

In 1995, the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women specified that rape by armed groups during wartime is a war crime.

In 1998, the Rwandan tribunal in a landmark case ruled that “rape and sexual violence constitute genocide.”

In 2008, the UN Security Council affirmed that “rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide.”

And yet…

The writer is the best-selling author, Sita’s Curse, Status Single, Leading columnist on gender & sexuality, Community Founder – Status Single, India’s first and only community for 75 million single Indian women. Views expressed are personal. 

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