The Supreme Court of India dismissed on Friday applications seeking to extend 11 convicts’ time to surrender to jail authorities in the Bilkis Bano case. The bench, comprising of Justices B V Nagarathna and Ujjal Bhuyan, did not find any merit in the applications. The convicts’ time to surrender expired on Saturday.

The court had agreed to entertain these applications on Thursday, which were mentioned before Nagarathna. Subsequently, Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud ordered the reconstitution of the bench which heard the case, in accordance with the Supreme Court Rules of 2013. The same bench was to hear the 11 convicts’ appeal to extend their time to surrender to jail authorities.

In the same case, on January 8, the court allowed the petition by Bilkis Bano against the premature release of the 11 convicts. All 11 are charged with the gang-rape and murder of Bano family members. They were previously convicted in 2008. The bench quashed the 11 convicts’ order of remission, passed by the Gujarat government in August 2022. That order had reduced the 11 convicts’ original prison sentence to less time.

The key question presented before the court through the January 8 petitions was whether the Gujarat government was competent to pass the order of remission. This was based on the finding that the state government of Gujarat did not fall within the meaning of the term, “appropriate government,” as used in section 432 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (India), which deals with the “power to suspend or remit sentences.”Furthermore, the court stated:

[T]he State of Gujarat has acted in tandem and was complicit with what the petitioner-respondent No. 3 [one of the convicts] herein had sought before this Court. This is exactly what this Court had apprehended at the previous stages of this case and had intervened on three earlier occasions in the interest of truth and justice…

Earlier in October 2019, the court had ordered the Gujarat government to provide compensation amounting to USD 70,000 (INR 5 million) to Bilkis Bano.