This year’s Independence Day witnessed an unusual freedom. Eleven rapists and murderers, given life terms for the gang rape of Bilkis Bano and the murder of seven of her family members including her three-year-old daughter during the Gujarat violence of 2002, were granted remission from their sen­tences. Although the Supreme Court had asked the Gujarat government to look into the possible remission of the sentence for one of the convicts who had filed an application after spending, with the others, 15 years in jail, the other 10 were also released by the decision of a government commit­tee. Remission of sentence on a national occasion is not exceptional. But the Centre had decided that such releases for the 75th anniversary of Independence would not include rapists and mur­derers. That was in line with the prime minister’s Independence Day speech, in which he mentioned the need to preserve women’s dignity. It is re­markable that Gujarat completely overturned the Centre’s policy. The distance between words and action had been growing wider for a while — eight years? — and this was just one of its more striking examples.

The release of the convicts was celebrated openly, while Ms Bano and her family still live in fear. Both tragic and sinister, this situation repre­sented the spirit informing the committee’s deci­sion. Are prisons lightening their load of rapists in order to make more space for dissidents and protesters who can be incarcerated indefinitely without bail and without trial? But the central issue here is the policy of remission. The prin­ciples behind the traditional practice allow for ambiguity. Should a convicted rapist or murder­er given a life term have his sentence remitted just because he has served 14 years? That is the minimum period an offender must serve before a state government decides if he fulfils the condi­tions that would permit remission. The question is whether remission should depend on these con­ditions, including incarceration for 14 years, or on the severity or heinousness of the crime. It is a question about justice itself. Whom does justice serve? Why are state governments, which are at base political, empowered to free or restrain of­fenders by ticking boxes? The issue of remission certainly requires scrutiny, although that does not excuse the Gujarat government’s decision to free those convicted of gang rape and multiple murders.