Bilkis and the Buddha: What the BJP will never get past

She’s a saint, she’s a victim, she’s everything we need to know about hate wrapped up in one name, and she’s everything we need to learn about courage. All of this is us, hyperbole-hungry Indians, fattening ourselves on one or the other discourse. 

One: the shock of what happened to Bilkis Bano in 2002 – the gangrape of her, her mother and her cousin; the murder of her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter and 12 of her family members before her eyes; her struggle for justice past corrupt policemen, courts and doctors, past a botched-up investigation; and finally, the conviction of the 11 men. Only to have them released on India’s 75th Independence Day on August 15, 2022. And now, finally, the convicts have been sent back to jail at the behest of many petitions in the Supreme Court by her and citizens’ groups. 

The other narrative: the victory discourse in which a brave woman stood against all odds, in which many citizen groups, lawyers, and people who cannot be named helped her move home and hide from murderers 12 times, until finally, the good side won. 

Both of these stories sound like pantomimes of each other, in which there is very little room for you and I, for normal people, to figure out what to do with this and how to process it. As a recent migrant from the big, anonymising city of Delhi to small town Shamli in western Uttar Pradesh, I have new eyes – given to me by my colleagues at the grassroot organisation we have set up to work against gender, caste, and religious violence. These are Buddha eyes, or the ability to look past either extreme and stay in the middle. That is the only vision I have, even as I signed on as one of the petitioners in the Bilkis case that won in court on January 8, 2024. 

From a median position, it’s possible to see how the right-wing and the governing BJP will use everything in their power to push their position. They have hung on for the longest time, to the coat-tails of another famous Muslim woman to do it. Shah Bano. Remember her? The Muslim woman from Madhya Pradesh divorced her husband in 1978 and applied to the Supreme Court of India for maintenance. She was granted the right to alimony. 

But fearing a backlash from Muslims, the Congress party, with a brute majority, passed a new law in 1986, which mandated that Muslim women had to adhere to Islamic law to avail of the right to alimony. This landmark case was a blot on India’s secular history, and Shah Bano became the thorn in the Congress’s side that the BJP could use forever to show the people of India that the Congress only built vote banks – it appeased Muslims and didn’t care about the rights of women. 

It took a very long time from that verdict in 1986 for the BJP to harvest the Shah Bano idea into a full-fledged political reversal in 2014 – with, of course, one period of government as the NDA coalition under Atal Bihari Vajpayee in between. So, it’s interesting to see how another Muslim woman will turn the tide of Indian history yet again. But to really see what this means, we have to centre ourselves and look past her, look past the case, and look at the long durée of the politics of our times. Be zen about it and wait. And then, like a slow drip filter coffee, we will be able to taste the notes of caffeine, find that there is no chicory, and be able to smell and see. 

In mid-sight, between victory and terror, is the cold calculus of time and politics in its mundane and everyday form. We mostly inhabit this space made up of everyday decisions. The banality of evil must be countered by the banality of the un-evil in day-to-day life. In moments such as these, shall we go to the dinner party where a former rapist is now being feted, or shall we stay away? Now, in the scepticism of this question to ourselves is the word Bilkis. Will our action enable another Bilkis to be treated as a rape trophy and her rapists celebrated? In other words, are we helping keep the system from fixing itself? Bilkis the answer the next time. 

When we have to decide if we’re impressed with a strident political speech or a movie that valorises an animal instinct, we can Bilkis ourselves and figure out how to be, what to do, what to watch, participate in, and what to stay away from. 

At the same time, we must also ask ourselves why our country performs these grotesque masterpieces of hate over and over again. And how can we stop being the consumers of and audience for the hate with which the three-and-a-half-year-old’s skull was smashed on a rock, mother raped, grandmother raped, and then re-purposed for India’s 75th day Independence celebration as we, the people, stood by dazed and confused. We did not protest; we stood and stared. 

We must not stop and think that everything will change at once. In a cellular way, like the Shah Bano case, which tore away the lies and pretence of the Congress government but still took a few decades to properly shred, this megapolis of hate will take a long time to dismember. But like Shah Bano allowed a foot in the door to the BJP, Bilkis will forever be that word for the new Congress in saffron clothing. 

In other words, it is up to us, the public, to take power back, to realise our potential as people, and to use the sheer power we have to never forget. To think of our 75th Independence Day as the blackest, foulest day in our independent history. To write it and describe it properly as the death of our democracy and yesterday’s verdict as a small chink of light that should remind us of the darkness that engulfs us and the need to keep shining the light, derived from Bilkis. If she has to be a word, a part of history, a cataclysm, then let us make it this one: light. 

Revati Laul is a journalist, activist, and author of the book The Anatomy of Hate. She is also the founder of UP-based NGO Sarfaroshi Foundation.