“Hopefully, the Supreme Court will soon review the remission granted by the Gujarat Government and offer a legal cure to this terrible injury to our body politic. Along with the Supreme Court, the BJP and the Sangh Parivar should adopt a civilizational view and analyze this act of injustice towards a woman and its impact on the practice and principles of law in India. The BJP will not remain in power for all times to come in all states or the Centre, but if the Supreme Court does not overturn this decision, it will become the law of the land: any executive could then let off any convicted criminal depending on his caste, religion or political affiliation. This will make a mockery of the Indian judiciary, within our country and all across the world. The victim always need not be a Muslim.”

Bilkis Bano and TJ Joseph are two living metaphors that ought to become call signs or entry codes of public morality for politicians, activists, academics or journalists. The celebration of 75 years of India’s Independence was soiled by the release of 11 convicts who had gang-raped Bilkis Bano and killed her 14 relatives, including her three-year-old child. These rapists and murderers were feted outside the jail of their choice in Godhra and later at their village in Randhikpur, with relatives distributing sweets, bursting crackers and singing and dancing to the tunes of a disc jockey. The talisman for true journalism in India will have their names in it. We need to ask: Are we doing right by them?

A momentous occasion was marred and a day of deep significance was defiled for a bunch of criminals who never deserved the remission in the first place. The Godhra train tragedy — criminal arson or terrorist attack — and the killing of 60 pilgrims cannot justify the release and public adulation of people who committed heinous crimes. And this one episode has made Bilkis a metaphor for all that is wrong with our sense of justice as a society.

Worse, this episode sends a chilling message down the spines of all Indians: criminals will be pardoned for their worst transgressions if they are done in the name of a religion or a religious group. The next time around, won’t the people of Randhikpur repeat the gang-rape and murder, knowing well that they would be let off on an Independence Day and feted by their neighbors? Why just Randhikpur, will not this remission reassure criminals across the country? All that they need to do is to double-check their political and religious credentials — do they belong to the right religion and the right party? And the religion can get replaced by caste in certain cases. This was the BJP’s biggest grouse against caste-based parties in the Hindi heartland, yet it seems to have successfully replicated the model by replacing caste identity with religious identity, offering the same impunity.

Hopefully, the Supreme Court will soon review the remission granted by the Gujarat Government and offer a legal cure to this terrible injury to our body politic. Along with the Supreme Court, the BJP and the Sangh Parivar should adopt a civilizational view and analyze this act of injustice towards a woman and its impact on the practice and principles of law in India. The BJP will not remain in power for all times to come in all states or the Centre, but if the Supreme Court does not overturn this decision, it will become the law of the land: any executive could then let off any convicted criminal depending on his caste, religion or political affiliation. This will make a mockery of the Indian judiciary, within our country and all across the world. The victim always need not be a Muslim.

And that brings us to the case of Prof TJ Joseph of Newman College in a small town of Kerala. About 12 years ago, he was brutally attacked and his hand was chopped off in the presence of his family while he was returning from church. The intention of the attackers, in all likelihood, was to sever his hands and feet. This teacher of Malayalam was attacked for a reference to a character named Mohammed in a question paper that he set for a semester exam. Mohammed is the name of the Prophet, but it is also the most common Muslim name, and in the context of a passage referring to a Muslim character, the use of this name could only be considered a casual act of classroom indulgence. But the Islamist lawgivers of Kerala decided that Joseph had committed blasphemy and deserved severe punishment. So, they sent out their law-enforcement squad to chop off his limbs. After his right hand was severed and he was undergoing treatment, the Christian management of his college dismissed Joseph from service for setting a paper that ‘hurt religious sentiments’. Of course, the then progressive and secular Marxist government left it to the victim to appeal to the university tribunal, not taking any action against the college management. And Joseph was not spared homilies on good conduct by the minister concerned.

Joseph suffered in silence the loss of his right hand and his livelihood, but his wife, the primary caregiver, was devastated and decided to end her life of misery and penury. The Popular Front of India (PFI), which keeps hitting the headlines for its murderous feuds with the Sangh Parivar — recently attracting attention for threatening Hindus and Christians in a public rally — is the fountainhead of Islamist radicalism that threatens free speech in Kerala. All the accused in Joseph’s case were identified as members of the PFI, but the prime accused is still absconding and the second accused, who was convicted, has already secured his release.

Finally, this year, guilt-ridden Marxists have offered the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award for Joseph’s autobiography, which was recently published in English as A Thousand Cuts. But neither the state nor the Centre has chosen to ban PFI or its activists. Nor has the liberal intelligentsia called out the PFI Islamists who roam around in the garb of journalists and activists. Interestingly, a journalist who was arrested by the Uttar Pradesh Police while travelling to Hathras to report on the brutal rape and murder of a Dalit girl was earlier an employee of the now-defunct mouthpiece of PFI. His arrest and the legal fight for his release have become a cause celebre for activists, lawyers and journalist unions.

The mouthpiece of PFI cannot be treated differently from those of some gauraksha dals that keep sprouting regularly to lynch cattle traders or murder innocents like Mohammed Akhlaq of Noida. Of course, a journalist, as a pure professional, can offer his services to a radical religious newspaper and all employees need not share the political or communal ideology of the newspaper owner. But in this case, nobody has even tried to examine whether this celebrated PFI-linked journalist is a radical Islamist propagating hand-chopping ideas. The talisman for true journalism in India from now on will have two names in it: Bilkis and Joseph. And the question we always need to ask ourselves is: Are we doing right by them?

(The author is Editor-in-Chief, The Tribune)