Gujarat government's decision to grant remission of sentence to 11 lifers in the Bilkis Bano case raises several disturbing questions. In May the SC had ruled without going into the merits of the case that the Gujarat government must decide on the convicts' freedom based on a 1992 policy that allowed remission for those who had served 14 years of their life imprisonment term. There is a previous SC verdict in which the court ruled that the state must determine "whether the offence is an individual act of crime without affecting the society at large" before granting remission. Surely the heinous nature of the crime and the tragic context and aftermath ; 14 people including several women and Bilkis's daughter were massacred and a heavily pregnant Bilkis herself was subjected to brutal gangrape during the 2002 Gujarat riots constituted enough grounds not to apply the remission statute. Also as recently as June, the Union Home Ministry guidelines on remission explicitly stated that life convicts and rapists were not to be granted freedom. A judicial review of the Gujarat government's criminally flawed decision to let out the 11 convicts is absolutely essential.
