The latest supreme court verdict in the Bilkis Bano gang-rape and multiple murder case which dates back to the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat, has somewhat redeemed the image of the apex court which has failed to mandate the root and branch judicial reforms which independent India patiently awaits. An estimated 4,000 citizens of India’s 200 million Muslim minority community were murdered, plundered and violated over a period of three days, without meaningful intervention by the police.

In the final verdict which has re-incarcerated the 11 convicts who had been released after serving 14-year jail sentences — under law, life sentences are normatively commuted after convicts have served this time — the full-bench judgement delivered in 2019 and the latest (January 8) two-judge bench review judgement, the apex court has rightly held that the nature of the crimes committed against Bilkis Bano were so heinous — apart from Bilkis, her mother and cousin were gang-raped and murdered as also her three-year-old daughter, two minor brothers, two minor sisters and the cousin’s two-days-old child — that the normative commutation of life sentence for good behaviour after 14 years, cannot be applied in this case.

Yet it’s a measure of the majestic indolence of the criminal justice system that although these unspeakable atrocities were suffered by Bilkis Bano and her kin in 2002, a special CBI court convicted the accused in 2008. After that, Bombay high court upheld the conviction in 2017 but not before ordering the transfer of the convicts to prison in Gujarat (“their state”) where they reportedly enjoyed long periods of parole. In 2021, a Gujarat Jail Advisory Committee recommended release of the convicts on completion of 14 years incarceration on grounds of “good behaviour” while serving their sentences. Accordingly on August 15, 2022 (Independence Day), these convicts were released from prison and greeted with garlands by ministers of Gujarat’s ruling BJP government.

However while there is celebration that Bilkis has been granted justice, there’s little media and public comment that 22 years have elapsed since the commission of these atrocious offences before final closure. It’s also curious that the death sentence which the courts are obliged to impose in the rarest of rare cases, has been a blind-spot of several high apex courts, in this surely rarest of rare cases.

Several Law Commissions have recommended radical reform of the clearly dysfunctional legal system which has a backlog of 55 million pending cases. But for mysterious reasons, these reforms have not been implemented. Meanwhile the seemingly helpless justices of the Supreme Court could set the ball rolling by mandating modest procedural reforms such as greater reliance on written submissions; limiting the time of loquacious lawyers to address courts to 60 minutes; permitting digital depositions; restricting the number of witnesses, and barring more than two adjournments. Curiously their lordships of the apex court seem to have forgotten the most basic maxim of law: justice delayed is justice denied.