New Delhi
CNN
 — 

India’s prime court docket on Monday reversed a state authorities’s resolution to launch 11 males convicted of gang-raping a pregnant Muslim girl throughout Hindu-Muslim riots in 2002, and ordered for them to be despatched again to jail.

The males had been a part of a Hindu mob sentenced to life in jail for the gang rape of Bilkis Bano, who was 21 years outdated and pregnant on the time. The similar mob killed 14 members of her household, together with her 3-year-old daughter.

They had been launched in August 2022 after serving 14 years of their sentence following a call made by an advisory panel arrange by the Gujarat state authorities, which is led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

But on Monday, India’s Supreme Court quashed that call and ordered the lads to report again to jail authorities inside two weeks.

The Gujarat authorities was “lacking in competency” to go the remission orders because the trial and sentencing occurred in Maharashtra state, the court docket dominated. The court docket slammed the Gujarat authorities for abusing its discretionary powers in releasing the 11 convicts with out authority.

Bano welcomed the ruling saying she “wept tears relief”.

“I have smiled for the first time in over a year and half. I have hugged my children. It feels like a stone the size of a mountain has been lifted from my chest, and I can breathe again,” she stated in a press release.

When the convicts had been launched on remission in August 2022, Bano stated she felt she had “exhausted her reservoir of courage” however she then discovered power within the solidarity that got here her manner from hundreds of individuals throughout the nation.

“You gave me the will to struggle, to rescue the idea of justice not just for me, but for every woman in India. I thank you,” she stated.

The transfer was celebrated by supporters of Bano, who had decried the lads’s launch as an assault not solely on Muslims however girls’s rights in a rustic the place authorities information reveals a lady is raped each 17 minutes.

“Rule of law has been restored by this judgment. Many Congratulations to Bilkis and to all of us who stood by her and fought for her,” stated Shobha Gupta, Bano’s lawyer, on Monday after the ruling.

Aparna Bhat, an advocate for one of many petitioners of the case, additionally praised the ruling. “We really salute the judges who interpreted the whole provision of the law and for categorically directing that the accused should surrender,” Bhat stated. “This was an extraordinary case and a phenomenal judgment by the Supreme Court.”

The crimes dedicated in opposition to Bano happened in February 2002 when centuries-old divisions erupted in Gujarat between the bulk Hindus and the minority Muslim neighborhood.

It was one in all India’s worst non secular riots, resulting in the deaths of greater than 1,000 folks, most of them Muslims.

An inquiry discovered Modi – then Gujarat’s chief minister – wasn’t accountable for the riots.

Bano would later inform the court docket the lads ran towards them with swords, sticks and sickles. According to court docket paperwork, one grabbed her younger daughter and smashed her on the bottom. Three males raped her, whereas the others attacked her sisters, aunts and their daughters. She fell unconscious and woke hours later, surrounded by our bodies.

In 2008, after a high-profile trial, her attackers had been sentenced to life in jail for rape and homicide. But in August 2022, the state authorities granted them remission underneath a provision in India’s Code of Criminal Procedure that permits prisoners to be freed as soon as they serve 14 years.

The resolution sparked outrage throughout India, with protests held in help of Bano from Kolkata to Mumbai. Critics claimed the choice to launch the lads was tainted by politics, misogyny and non secular discrimination.