|
|  |
|
Legal Needs
| [This Network is not currently active and cannot accept new posts] | | Topics |
|
|
| |
| Feb 02, 2008 1:27 pm |
|
re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: Make your comments on Rape |
| RVIyengar
| |
Hope the publication of the news-item prods some Good Samaritan(s) to take up the case with the authorities and help the family get justice.
At Peace, At Last...
(Excerpts)
Courtesy: Outlook, 4 February 2008
There is something surreal about asking a mother about the day her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter Saleha was snatched from her arms, her skull smashed to the ground. March 2002 will always remain a month of horrors for Bilkis Bano. Familiar neighbours went on to gangrape the pregnant Bilkis and slaughter eight members of her family, including her mother who was also raped. The facts of the case are a matter of public record. So we chose instead to ask Bilkis what life is like today. "It's been very tiring for two days. We have talked to the media endlessly, answering questions.I have never faced this before."
The good news is that Bilkis only faced the media onslaught on January 21, when a Mumbai special court sentenced 11 accused to life imprisonment for the gang-rape and murders. Her case, for once, was intelligently handled and not allowed to degenerate into a circus. Away from the public glare, it moved slowly but consistently. Today, it appears quite a feat for a woman to have fought a case for six years against all odds, in the face of a hostile state government and police force. It requires nerve and resolve to face up to the men who brutalised you and your family, leaving everyone for dead. Bilkis managed this with a lot of support from individuals, the Muslim community, some activists (all of whom have chosen to keep a low profile), a high-profile lawyer, Harish Salve, who didn't charge a fee for arguing in the Supreme Court that her case be transferred out of Gujarat, and the CBI which made an exception in reinvestigating her case (the only Gujarat riot case where this happened). There was also the support of her husband, Yaqub Rasool Patel.
On March 3, 2002, the day her family was killed and she was left for dead, Bilkis hid in a cave. After 48 hours, she approached a tribal village in Dahod district and pretended to be a Hindu woman, raped by Muslims. They gave her water, food and clothes. She then went to a police station. The policemen wrote a complaint but refused to write the names of the accused (one of these policemen got two years' imprisonment in the verdict delivered last week). Bilkis, like several thousand other Muslims, then landed up in the Godhra relief camp. Twenty days later, she was lucky to find her husband Yaqub at the same camp (he was not at home when the family began their flight from their village in Dahod district).
Today, Bilkis and Yaqub are sitting in a Delhi home. Their children are playing. Hajra, the child Bilkis gave birth to a few months after the massacre, is smiling coyly—she is used to being treated as special. Bilkis and Yaqub laugh when they talk about people trying to attach their names to her struggle and give the impression that they were behind the verdict. Says Bilkis: "Those who helped me were quietly present at the Delhi press conference. They don't want publicity. But an impression is being created by better-known activists that they have helped me. I want you to tell everyone that I don't know these people who are talking about me on TV."
http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20080204&fname=Bilkis+%28F%29&sid=1&pn=1
PS:
It is not easy to fight against the system, I agree. One needs lots of patience and support. However, it is incumbent upon concerned and caring individuals to do whatever they could to stem the rot.Private Reply to RVIyengar (new win) |
|
| |
|
