On Supreme Court’s decision in Bilkis Bano case: The meaning of ‘ordinary’
Azar Nafisi, in Read Dangerously (2022), voiced her fear about extraordinary, incredible, and shocking events turning ‘ordinary’ over a period of time, while quoting from Margaret Atwood’s Testaments: “When we think of totalitarian systems, we think of the extremes, of torture, of executions, of barbaric behavior,” she writes, “In Gilead, there are public hangings where the bodies of victims remain on display for days for all to see. There are hysterical murders in which masses participate, not so unlike the public hangings, stonings, tortures, and rapes of the Islamic Republic.”
“These are crimes of spectacle, designed to instill fear and paralysis in citizens’ hearts and spirit. I have seen pictures of Iranian children watching these public executions alongside the adults. What is extraordinary, what is incredible and shocking, becomes ordinary, routine, even mundane. As Aunt Lydia puts in the Testaments, “Ordinary… is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary”… this is what I fear the most: that things once considered horrific should become ordinary, that people should get used to even extreme violence and learn to live with it.”
A woman named Bilkis Bano (née Bilkis Yakub Rasool)— 21-years old at the time of the incident I summarize here, and five months pregnant — was gang-raped, and fourteen of her family members murdered (which included eight minors, children as young as a two-day old infant, and a three-year old child), by a group of twelve men during riots that took place in the state of Gujarat in 2002. Eleven men were confirmed with a life sentence in the case. The Indian criminal system, on the principles of reformative justice, allows for the “remission” in sentence following a period of 14 years from the date of imprisonment, subject to fulfilment of certain conditions, and following of procedural norms. In August 2022, following the strategic suppression of facts before various courts, the eleven convicts were released en masse by remission by the State of Gujarat. Aggrieved by this, Bilkis, along with a few other concerned citizens, filed Writ Petitions before the Supreme Court seeking setting aside of these remissions. The quashing of the remission was granted on 8 January 2024.
How do I know all of this? How am I summarizing the case for you? I read the judgment from 8 January 2024. Did I know anything about this case prior to the reading of this judgment? No. Was I following the case, if not from the date of occurrence of the incident, but from the date the judgment convicting the accused was delivered by the Bombay High Court perhaps? No. Not as someone from a different field of expertise maybe, but as someone who spent five years in law school and six years practicing disputes, did the case arouse my curiosity prior to the reading? No.
So why do I talk of this now? Or rather, why have I bothered acquainting myself with the facts of this case now?
I talk of this case, or mention it as a part of these blog posts here not to educate people who still aren’t aware of the case — my knowledge is two days old; it’d be consistent with my middle class hypocrisy if I poked at your ignorance after having read the judgment today — but only to confess that I knew nothing about the case until two days. Hence this post is a confession, you stand on the other side of the confession box.
I mention this case as a part of my blog to come clean with my ignorance, and continuing indifference to matters that require that my fur stand on its end, or goosebumps to cover my skin, or that my body push itself into a state of shock that’d take a while to recover. I mention this case here so I can tell you that it doesn’t: my body has done no such thing; I am indifferent.
A 21-year old, while pregnant, has been gang-raped, and her body of fourteen murdered… my body fails to react. I think this must have been shocking in 2002, but my body believes it is an every day occurrence now. “This happens in this city alone every alternate day,” I typed a message to a friend two days ago, as we discussed this issue on WhatsApp in the way only two middle-class indifferent people can: with barely any idea of the actual facts of the case, but an enthusiasm to discuss the affair only to reassure ourselves that we are still a part of this society, and that we keep ourselves informed about what happens in this country; a surface-level discussion. A thump on our nonchalant, privileged backs. On one hand, it is true. Just last week, six members of a woman’s family were murdered, and their bodies tossed in open drainages and bushes on the outskirts of Hyderabad city. The Hindu covered the investigation through an entire page. On the other hand, did I read the piece? No. Did my body shudder then? No. It stayed as still last week as it does now. The conversation preceded my reading of the judgment: “Eight of her family members got murdered, nine if you count her unborn child” she apprised me, this friend, and I did not object to these statistics. I did not know any better, and I presumed she knew slightly more than I did since she ventured to use numbers in the text. I wouldn’t have dared using stats, or act like I knew more about the case than I let on; I know nothing; she knows nothing; but if you use statistics, you probably spent a minute more than I did in reading the case, and we sub-consciously follow these rules to stay relevant. Thus, two ignorant, indifferent people talk. Together, we have the knowledge of half a person.
Is this the ordinary that Azar Nafisi, or Margaret Atwood has warned us about? India’s jurisprudence uses “rarest of the rare” as a criteria for determining whether the accused of any case deserves the highest punishment for the act. But the phrase “rarest of the rare” changes shape every hour, the existence of the phrase has unwittingly thrown an open challenge to criminals everywhere to keep changing the definition, raise the bar for what’s heinous higher and higher to a point where what used to be the rarest of the rare doesn’t even lift eyebrows anymore. Is this the ordinary that these writers had a premonition about? My body’s refusal to recoil, or flinch, at the events that led to the 8 January 2024 judgment… is that an indication on the litmus test that we now deem the extraordinary as ordinary, as commonplace as a rule? Have I passed? Have you passed? Has your body failed to respond to the case, too? Or have you realized that your curiosity has not been aroused until two days ago — or even now — to investigate the events from 2002, let alone examining your body to see how it responds? Hands up if you’re learning about what happened through this blog post here, assuming you’ve read till the end.
Welcome to the age of the ordinary.
