Gujarat riots: ‘They raped me, butchered my child because we were Muslims. 17 years on, I have justice – and faith in Indian law’
- Bilkis Bano watched a Hindu mob kill her child then gang-rape and murder her family in the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat, India
- Now at the end of her long fight for justice, she’s sometimes not sure which was worse – the crime or the trial
When the cargo truck carrying Bilkis Bano and her family shuddered to a halt in the Dahod district of Gujarat, India, the young mother was so afraid of what was about to happen that her shivering woke her three-year-old daughter, Saleha.
Bano, still just a teenager herself, rocked the wailing child but could not comfort her. Within seconds a mob of men armed with swords and sickles tore Saleha from her arms and smashed her skull against a rock, silencing her forever.
“Here are the Muslims, kill them, cut them,” chanted the men, most of whom Bano recognised. They were the Hindu residents of her village, men she had once addressed as brothers and uncles. She had known them since she was the same age as Saleha.
Bano and 14 members of her family had boarded the truck in a desperate attempt to escape communal riots that had swept her village and seen Hindu mobs set fire to 60 Muslim homes. They had hoped to escape to Ahmedabad, some 200km away, but were just minutes into their journey when the mob flagged down the vehicle.
Over the next few minutes, 12 men took turns to rape Bano, despite her being five months pregnant. Neither did they show any mercy to her cousin, Shamim, who had given birth a day earlier and was forced to watch as the men butchered her newborn child. The men murdered all of the 14 family members accompanying Bano that day, raping eight of the women in the process.
“Since I’d lost consciousness, they left me on the road, probably assuming I was dead,” recalls Bano, who was 19 at the time of the attack.