New Delhi: For senior advocate Shobha Gupta, who fought 21 years to take the Bilkis Bano case to its conclusion, women’s rights are a personal cause. “My heart lies in women’s issues,” she said. “It beats for women’s issues.”
Gupta has been Bano’s lawyer since 2003, when she approached the Supreme Court, with the help of activists and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), to pursue the prosecution of men who raped her and murdered some of her family members, including her three-year-old daughter, during the 2002 Gujarat riots.
Bano moved the top court after the Gujarat Police filed a closure report in the case. The Supreme Court subsequently ordered the transfer of the probe to the CBI, and directed that the trial be moved from Gujarat to Mumbai.
These orders were pivotal in the case, finally leading to the conviction of 13 men in 2008.
A first-generation lawyer, Gupta, 53, said being a lawyer was a “dream” for her.
“Since the time a child starts thinking of becoming something, this was the only idea I had in my mind,” Gupta, one of 11 women lawyers designated senior advocates by the Supreme Court earlier this year, told ThePrint.
Growing up in Jaipur, Gupta had big dreams for herself. She is a B.Sc (Hons) graduate in computer science from Banasthali Vidyapith.
Everybody expected her to then pursue a Master’s in Computer Applications. However, she was resolute that she wanted to pursue law. “I had an absolute fascination for the uniform and the profession,” she said.
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A ‘champ’
Gupta, a middle child among three siblings, lost her father when she was in law college. In the aftermath, she witnessed her mother’s struggle to obtain a succession certificate in Ajmer.
“She would come back and say that the lawyers take every penny from you, and demand money on each date for one reason or the other other,” she said. Instances like these, she added, got imprinted on her mind, firing up her determination to become a lawyer who would never squeeze money out of their client’s pockets.
“So, we follow a few things,” she said. “Like, when the client comes, we always ensure that he has money to go back… He’s not paying money by selling his stuff. When a client reaches office, he or she is taken good care off…It’s that the client is already suffering, so let’s make her/his fight for justice little more respectful with least of stress.”
In 1994, right after graduating, she tried her luck in Delhi, but had to return to Rajasthan after failing to find a mentor in the capital. Back home, however, she began finding her feet in the profession soon enough.
Speaking to ThePrint, she recalled how she managed to change her senior’s opinion of her on her second day at work in his chamber. Initially reluctant to take in a woman, the senior, on the third day, referred to her as a “gem”.
“He had been extremely instrumental in shaping me… he had a huge number of cases and he would give me some 10, 15 matters to argue in a day,” she said, adding that she was the only junior who was getting paid — a sum of Rs 500 per month — at the time.
When she came to Delhi the next time, in 1997, she never left. She worked under advocate G.L. Rawal for a few months.
Throughout, her mind was set on making her way to the Supreme Court, she said. So, everyday, after finishing her work at the high court, she would go sit for an hour in the Supreme Court to watch the court proceedings and take notes. She then joined advocate S.K. Mehta and worked with him and his son, advocate Dhruv Mehta, for another five years till 2002.
“I was very lucky, I always got very good seniors…” she said. “They always showed extreme faith and confidence in me… Once I was arguing in a court and Mr Mehta said ‘my tigress is arguing’, he was that fond of me.”
The Bilkis Bano case
In 2002, Gupta became an advocate-on-record in the Supreme Court, joining the pool of elite Delhi-based lawyers who can file cases before the top court.
What has gotten her so far is honesty, she said.
“Firstly, with yourself, to tell yourself how much you know and what you need to know. And then, to be very frank and open to ask others, because if you are not informed yourself about how much you know, and what you have to know, you are not going to sail through,” she added.
“You have to be ready to know from where-so-ever you can get it, and knock every possible door,” she said.
Looking back at that time, the period from 2002 to 2003, Gupta said she knew of the cases arising out of the Gujarat riots, but was not aware of the Bilkis Bano matter until it made its way to her.
In February 2003, the Gujarat Police submitted a closure report in the case. The same month, former chief justice of India, Justice A.S. Anand, took over as the chairperson of the NHRC.
Gupta recalled that her name was suggested to Justice Anand for the Bano case by the then secretary of the Supreme Court Bar Association, Ashok Arora. As luck would have it, Gupta had argued her first matter in the Supreme Court before Justice Anand, and so the latter took no time in accepting the suggestion.
“At that point of time, I had no idea what I was doing. At that time, I was only feeling privileged about the fact that the NHRC was asking me to do something,” she said. “It was a very big honour for me.”
The matter itself, she added, shocked her.
Once she got to work, the petition in the Supreme Court changed the course of Bano’s case. It ensured an independent probe in the case.
Gupta said she ensured that the fact that Bano’s FIR was initially wrongly recorded — the FIR did not mention rape, despite clear allegations — was also brought to the Supreme Court’s notice. She also told ThePrint that it was her decision to file the petition in the Supreme Court in Bano’s name.
Justice Anand then asked her to send the NHRC her bills, but Gupta had already made up her mind.
“I said, ‘sir, I am not sending my bills in this matter’. He said, ‘we have enough funds’. I said, ‘you must have funds, but please spend it or use it for whatever other matters you want to. In this matter, I would not touch a single penny’,” she said.
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‘Lawyers who get agitated’
Over the course of a legal career spanning almost three decades, Gupta has continued to take up significant pro bono work.
In 2017, she founded ‘FLAG-Free Legal Aid Group’ to offer free legal aid to juveniles detained for being on the wrong side of the law.
While Gupta doesn’t like to pick favourites among her fields of practice, she said she had a special corner for women’s rights issues, and never charges a fee for any such case.
“This has been a subject dear to me. You can see it happening around you, day in and day out. How can you ignore it?” she said. “You are living by it.”
She added, “I personally feel that, as a country, including the judiciary, we are failing to fulfil one constitutional promise, and that is equal and respectful space to women… It has been more than 75 years since Independence,” she said.
However, not everybody around her approves of this. Without naming them, she recalled how a senior lawyer told her that she shouldn’t concentrate much on “women’s issues”.
“I said, this field cannot be neglected. It is a very essential constitutional issue,” she said. “Give them equal rights and space. Why should they keep asking for it? But we all are failing in it.”
Gupta walks the talk. She is the co-founder of an initiative called ‘We The Women of India’, which petitioned the Supreme Court in February 2022, demanding better infrastructure under the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005.
“Whenever there is a women’s rights issue, how can you just sit on a couch and only talk about it without actually doing anything? You have to do something about it,” she said.
In 2018, when certain lawyers in Kathua district obstructed police from filing the charge sheet in the gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl, the Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance of the matter.
This was after a group of lawyers, including Gupta, sought the apex court’s intervention, and mentioned the matter before the then Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra.
Recalling such instances, Gupta told ThePrint, “Sometimes a few of us lawyers in the Supreme Court can be tagged as people who get agitated very fast.”
“And yes, we are a few lawyers here in the Supreme Court who do get agitated,” she said. “We get into things.”
(Edited by Sunanda Ranjan)
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