Two decisions
in two days
by the higher judiciary have reaffirmed the common man’s faith in the country’s much reviled judicial system. In the first verdict on Thursday, the Bombay High Court not only upheld the conviction of 11 men for gang raping Bilkis Bano, a five-month pregnant Muslim woman fleeing from the worst ever communal carnage in Gujarat in March, 2002; it also set aside the acquittal of seven others – five cops and two doctors – found complicit in shielding the culprits. In the second judgment delivered today, the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence on the four persons convicted for the most unimaginably brutal and violent gang rape of Nirbhaya in a Delhi bus on a cold December night in 2012.
