The gang rape of Bilkis Bano and other members of her family was totally politically motivated and she was a victim of the politics of hatred. When the country is celebrating its 75th anniversary, minorities and the marginalised are becoming more and more insecure in India, Revati Laul, activist and journalist, who challenged in the Supreme Court the remission of the sentence of the convicts in the Bilkis Bano case has said.
“Where the country is heading and what is the message given when all the convicts in the Bilkis Bano case are freed when the country is celebrating the Azadi Ka Amrut Mahotsav,” she asked while addressing a meet-the-press programme organised by the Thrissur Press Club on Monday.
Bilkis Bano was the victim of a pogrom. The attackers wanted to teach the Muslims a lesson. Our silence was supporting the violence. There were many victims of Gujarat violence whose cases were not even considered, she said.
Ms. Laul was among the three who challenged in the Supreme Court the Gujarat government’s decision to free the 11 convicts in the Bilkis Bano case.
Human rights defenders, who challenged religious, institutional and corporate rights violations had been under increasing risk, she said.
Condition in Kerala
“Conditions are the same everywhere, including in Kerala. If you think Kerala is isolated from social and religious discriminations, it is not true. It is actually covered up really well. Though the overall politics of the State is humanitarian compared to other States, we cannot afford to shut our eyes, no matter where we are living,” she noted.
Though both the government and the Opposition in Kerala spoke of many things, they did not do anything different from governments in other parts of the country. There was a gap between what political parties preached and did irrespective of their political affiliations.
“There has been a dilution of ideology everywhere. There is criticism against every government. But the Left has not criticised itself as much as it should. We need to be more self critical. We are intolerant and insecure as a society,” she said.
Ms. Laul, author of the Anatomy of Hate, which looks at the 2002 Gujarat riots using the accounts of some perpetrators of the violence, said she was attacked by a convict in the Gujarat riot case. “Since I had written Anatomy of Hate, I have been living in the book,” said Laul, who founded the Sarfaroshi Foundation in Uttar Pradesh. The aim of the Foundation is to empower and unite people and to make them understand that they can only be strong as a collective, not as groups on the basis of religion or caste.
On press freedom
Talking about the challenges to press freedom, Ms. Laul said: “We have to rethink on the way to find finance for the media. We have to turn back to more subscription- and less advertisement-based models if we really want freedom of the press. Without changing the financing pattern of the media, we cannot expect a free press. There are many online media that are trying this alternative pattern. We need to build alternatives to crony capitalism. We need to build cooperative models,” she said.
