Supreme Court restores sentence in 2002 Gujarat gang rape case, asks convicts to surrender

The Supreme Court of India has restored the life prison sentences for 11 convicts who raped a woman during the deadly 2002 riots in Gujarat and ordered them to surrender within 15 days. The men were convicted in 2008 and were released in 2022.

In the order issued on Monday, the court said the previous order was passed “on extraneous or wholly irrelevant considerations, without application of mind”, and is mala fide”. It added that relevant materials were “kept out of consideration”. The bench comprised of Justice BV Nagaratna and Justice Ujjal Bhuyan.

It also said that the Government of the Gujarat had “no jurisdiction to entertain the prayers seeking remission of respondent” The court quashed the previous order and labelled it as “illegal, and vitiated”.

Questioning if personal liberty may prevail in accordance with the law, the court said that constitutional rights may prevail when the rule of law prevails. “In other words, whether liberty of a person would have any meaning at all under our Constitution in the absence of rule of law or the same being ignored or turned a blind eye? Can rule of law surrender to liberty earned as a consequence of its breach? Can breach of rule of law be ignored in order to protect a person’s liberty that he is not entitled to?”

The bench added that, “It is the primary duty and the highest responsibility of this Court to correct arbitrary orders at the earliest and maintain the confidence of the litigant public in the purity of the fountain of justice and thereby respect rule of law.”