BJP govts in Center, Gujarat acted in complicity with the gang-rape convicts: CPI-M

New Delhi: The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) while welcoming the Indian Supreme Court’s verdict quashing the remission given to eleven convicts of Bilkis Bano gang-rape case has said that Bharatiya Janata Party-led governments at Center and in Gujarat had acted in complicity with the convicts.

According to Kashmir Media Service, Indian top court on Monday nailed down the Gujarat government’s illegal actions of granting remission to eleven convicts who had been sentenced to life for gang raping pregnant Bilkis Bano, members of her family and mass murdering at least fourteen of them during the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in the Indian state.

The court has asked the convicts to surrender back to prison within two weeks.

“The bench has also stated that a fraud has been played by the Gujarat government in presenting the facts in justifying the remission order,” the CPI-M statement said.

The CPI-M said, the judgment has stated that if the convicts can “circumvent the consequence of their conviction, peace and tranquility in the society will be reduced to a Chimera”.

The fact that the Gujarat government has furnished that the decision was also based on the concurrence of the Central government, makes the Modi government equally complicit in this ‘complicity with the convicts’, it added.

That the remission did not take into account the brutality of the crimes and its larger consequence on the society and the rule of law is obvious.

Governments are constitutional entities and if they act in violation of the jurisdiction and considerations of law, it will play havoc with our very existence as a democracy, the party said.