Illiberal regimes do not only resort to censorship, they also rewrite history – and not only in textbooks, but on screens too.
Modi’s India is no exception, as evident from the recent films produced in the country, including The Kashmir Files, to Bastar: The Naxal Story, The Kerala Story and the recently released Sabarmati Report. The latter has been explicitly endorsed by the prime minister of India who watched it, last year, with several cabinet ministers after praising it for “revealing the truth”. Narendra Modi also declared that a “fake narrative can only persist for a limited period of time. Eventually, the facts will always come out!”. Now, the job of social scientists consists, precisely, in ascertaining facts before interpreting them – and this is necessary in this case too.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.
The Sabarmati Report claims that the fire on the Sabarmati Express, in Godhra, was the work of Muslim conspirators. This is what Narendra Modi declared immediately after this tragedy too. On February 27, 2002, he reached Godhra at about two in the afternoon and declared on TV in the evening that the Godhra incident was a ‘pre-planned attack’, explicitly contradicting the statement of the local Collector who had just said – also on TV – that there was no evidence that the crime had been planned. Senior BJP members, in New Delhi echoed Modi’s words and claimed that the ISI was involved.
That evening, on the government’s orders, most of the bodies of those who had died in Godhra were taken to Ahmedabad for a post-mortem and public ceremony. The arrival of the corpses was broadcast on television, generating considerable emotion, all the more so since they were shown merely covered with a sheet. The next morning, Modi alleged that no ordinary group could have committed such a ‘cowardly act’. The Godhra incident was, he argued, not “communal violence”, but a “one-sided collective violent act of terrorism from one community”. The reference to terrorism justified the way the Gujarat government resorted to POTO (the Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance, which later became an Act in 2002), ignoring the protests of the National Human Rights Commission.
On February 28, the VHP organised a bandh, or shutdown of the city, which established the conditions for a Hindu offensive, particularly in Ahmedabad. Hindu nationalist activists started to engage in violence, targeting minorities. The local policemen remained passive when rioters took control of the streets, some of them sending away cars driven by locals from the neighbourhoods the Hindu nationalist activists had targeted for their misdeeds.
The main targets were not the Muslims of the Old City, but rather those living in isolated smaller groups, in industrial suburbs, like Naroda Patiya and, to a lesser extent, in the residential areas of West Ahmedabad, including Paldi. In all these places women were often attacked first, rape being systematic in the affected localities. The rioters’ desire to eradicate Islam – and not only to displace the Muslims – also explains the many attacks against places of worship. Altogether, 527 mosques, madrasas, cemeteries and other dargahs (mausoleums of Sufi saints) were damaged or destroyed. Many of these places of worship were ‘replaced’ by a statue of Hanuman and a saffron-coloured flag.
Reviewing the chronology of events gives an idea of the forces of destruction that were unleashed in Gujarat during those few days.
On February 28, in Ahmedabad, in the Naroda Gaon and Naroda Patiya areas, an armed horde of several thousand people attacked Muslim houses and shops, killing 200 people. Six other neighbourhoods in the city were subject to similar attacks on a lesser scale. Three other districts, namely Vadodara, Gandhinagar and Sabarkantha, suffered comparable violence.
From March 1, mainly rural districts were added to the list of hotspots: Panchmahals, Mehsana, Kheda, Junagadh, Banaskantha, Patan, Anand and Narmada.
On March 2, Bharuch and Rajkot, which had yet to be affected by communal violence, were hit in turn.
On March 4, riots broke out in Surat, a city that had seen considerable Hindu-Muslim violence in the 1990s and that was much less affected this time. Violence, by then, had affected 151 towns and 993 villages.
Though it is widely believed that the official statistics concerning casualties of the Gujarat riots are underestimated, they provide some valuable indications: the official death toll is 1,169, but NGOs have mentioned the figure of 2,000 victims on the basis of information gathered from families about missing persons – those whose bodies were never found.
The clashes could not have spread so quickly and taken on such proportions had well-organised actors not orchestrated them. Nor were they a spontaneous reaction since they took place not more than 24 hours after the Godhra carnage and in the framework of the VHP’s bandh – spontaneous anti-Muslim reactions had been confined to Godhra itself on the 27th and were rather limited.
In fact, in contrast to what happened in previous episodes of communal violence, the faces of the perpetrators of the Gujarat riots are known and the way they prepared themselves for this eruption of violence too. They appear in footage taken in a sting operation by a reporter for Tehelka magazine, Ashish Khetan, who in 2007 approached Sangh Parivar leaders posing as a sympathetic PhD student. He recorded interviews with dozens of people involved in the massacres using a camera hidden in his laptop. In 2008 the National Human Rights Commission directed the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to authenticate Tehelka’s tapes, a work it completed on May 10, 2009.
The Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi, accused of being deeply involved in the clashes that officially claimed 89 lives on 28 February 2002 in Naroda Patiya, is thus seen declaring to Khetan:
“In Naroda and Naroda Patiya, we didn’t spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire, we set them on fire and killed them…We believe in setting them on fire because these bastards say they don’t want to be cremated, they’re afraid of it…It has been written in my FIR [First Information Report]…there was this pregnant woman, I slit her open…Showed them what’s what…what kind of revenge we can take if our people are killed…I am no feeble rice-eater. Didn’t spare anyone…they shouldn’t even be allowed to breed…I say that even today…Whoever they are, women, children, whoever. Nothing to be done with them but cut them down. Thrash them, slash them, burn the bastards…I came back after I killed them, called up the [state] home minister [Gordhan Zadaphia, the minister of state; the home minister was Modi himself] and went to sleep…I felt like Rana Pratap, that I had done something like Maharana Pratap [a Rajput king who fought the Mughals in the 16th century].
In Naroda Patiya and Naroda Gam, the local BJP MLA, Maya Kodnani, was directly involved, as is evident from what Khetan was told by one of the Dalits (from the Chhatri caste) who attacked local Muslims, Suresh Richard.
Haresh Bhatt, who in 2002 was vice president of the Bajrang Dal, told Khetan how the assailants were armed:
“I have my own gun factory…I used to make firecrackers…We made all the bombs there…Diesel bombs, pipe bombs, we made them there…and we used to distribute them from here as well…We ordered two truckloads of swords from Punjab…right here, in a village called Dhariya, we readied everything there…and then we distributed the samaan [arms].’
Several top civil servants and even one BJP leader, on condition of anonymity, admitted to National Human Rights Commission investigators and the Concerned Citizens Tribunal that senior BJP politicians were directly or indirectly involved in the 2002 violence. Later on, in January 2010, Sanjiv Bhatt, a senior policeman, explained to the Special Investigation Team appointed by the Supreme Court that as deputy commissioner (intelligence) of the Gujarat Intelligence Bureau from December 1999 to September 2002 and as nodal officer to dispatch useful information to the various intelligence agencies and armed forces, on February 27, 2002, following the Godhra incident, he had taken part in the meeting Narendra Modi convened at his residence. This meeting was, according to Bhatt, the point of departure for the official orchestration of the 2002 riots in Gujarat.
The fact that the assailants conspired against the Muslims does not mean that the latter had not done the same. But what did the investigators say in this regard?
On March 6, 2002, the government appointed a commission whose principal mandate was to investigate the circumstances surrounding the Godhra incident, hence its name: the Godhra Inquiry Commission. However, victims’ families and the media protested that its chairman and sole member, Justice K.G. Shah, was close to the government. Another retired judge, G.T. Nanavati, was appointed alongside him and took over the commission chairmanship. In an interview – recorded by hidden camera – that Ashish Khetan conducted with Arvind Pandya, advocate general of Gujarat, the latter, who was close to the chief minister, confided that Shah was “our man” and that Nanavati was in it “for the money.”
The Shah-Nanavati Commission waited till spring 2007 to ask the Gujarati government to analyse CDs containing recorded phone conversations between Hindu nationalist leaders and bureaucrats as well as policemen in areas devastated by the 2002 riots. The CDs had been handed over to the commission (which had not bothered to request them) by the superintendent of police Rahul Sharma, an officer who was anxious to shed light on the matter. He was deputy commissioner of police in Ahmedabad in April 2002 when he was charged with collecting data for the investigation into the massacres that took place in Naroda Patiya and Gulberg Society. He asked AT&T and Celforce to provide him with all the communications that had taken place in these areas on February 28. They contained evidence of the presence in Ahmedabad district of police officers who had claimed to be elsewhere and of Hindu nationalist cadres whom the survivors indicated as being among their attackers. Rahul Sharma compiled CDs of these recordings, constituting a wealth of incriminating evidence, and handed them over to his superiors in the Crime Branch – who misplaced them. He also gave a copy to the Shah-Nanavati Commission, which, in the end, made little use of them.
Justice Shah died in March 2008. He was replaced by another retired judge, Justice Akshay Mehta, and the Gujarat government extended the commission for a year in December 2008 – which it continued to do every year subsequently till 2019.
The Congress-led coalition that came to power in New Delhi in 2004 strove to counter the former Shah-Nanavati and the subsequent Nanavati-Mehta Commission. The minister of railways, Lalu Prasad Yadav, took advantage of his portfolio to appoint a commission of inquiry into the actions of the railway police. Its chairman, Justice U.C. Banerjee, a retired judge, concluded in 2005 that the fire in the coach that killed 59 in Godhra in 2002 was accidental and not premeditated. Immediately afterwards, the Gujarat high court issued a stay order against the implementation of the Justice Banerjee Committee report in March 2006, after having received in September 2005 a complaint disputing the legitimacy of this committee, given that the Gujarati government had already appointed the Shah-Nanavati Commission.
The Supreme Court rejected the stay order in a decision handed down on July 3, 2006. In October, the Gujarat high court declared the Banerjee Committee ‘illegal’. Manmohan Singh’s government counter-attacked by asking the Gujarat high court for permission to make the Banerjee Committee report public, by submitting it to parliament. The Gujarat high court delayed its decision and in March 2009 postponed the hearings on this issue sine die.
The Nanavati Commission finally submitted an interim report in September 2008, which concluded, contrary to the Banerjee Committee, that outside criminal elements had been involved in the Godhra blaze and thus described it as resulting from a conspiracy. The final report, more than 2,000 pages long, was submitted in November 2014, but it was not fully tabled in the Gujarat state assembly till 2019. It exonerated the Modi government.
But the judiciary continued to try to shed light on what happened in 2002. Drawing their own conclusions from the failure of the judicial process in Gujarat, the Supreme Court finally appointed a Godhra Riots Inquiry Committee, which re-examined 2,107 cases that had been closed within months after the violence. In view of the committee’s report, it concluded in February 2006 that 1,594 cases should be reopened and required further investigation. Another 13 complaints were lodged and 41 police officers involved in the riots were indicted. Over 600 accused were thus arrested while waiting to stand trial. This action, however, did not take the judicial process very far owing to the obstructionist practices on the part of the Gujarat government.
In March 2008, the Supreme Court decided to circumvent the obstacle by appointing a Special Investigation Team (SIT). The terms of reference of the SIT, outlined by the court in May 2009, restored the victims’ hopes. This new body was called on to concentrate on only a half-dozen cases, which amounted to an admission that full justice was impossible. The cases in question were Naroda Patiya, Naroda Gam, Gulberg Society, Sardarpura, Dipda Darwaja, Sabarkantha, Ode and Godhra. The latter is important to respond to the question: was the attack of the Sabarmati Express pre-planned?
Indeed, the first trial that was completed after the appointment of the SIT was that concerning the burning of the Sabarmati Express in Godhra. While 63 of the surviving 94 accused were released on February 22, 2011, after nine years in prison (five other prisoners died in jail) where they had been detained under POTA charges, 31 accused were found guilty and 11 of them – a record – were sentenced to death while 20 others got life imprisonment.
This harsh verdict was due to the conclusion that the judge, Justice P.R. Patel, had drawn from the first Nanavati-Shah Commission report, that it was a planned attack. However, Justice Patel contradicted himself by acquitting the two men the police considered to have masterminded the operation, Maulvi Umarji and Mohammed Hussain Kalota, the president of the municipality at the time of events.
How could they have been acquitted if they were behind the conspiracy?
Second, the conspiracy theory contradicted a previous decision by the high court. In 2005, the central POTA review committee had concluded that POTA could not apply to the accused in the Godhra case since it was not a case of terrorism or conspiracy.
The frustration of those who had been condemned and their advocates stemmed from two additional factors. First, the police officer placed in charge of the investigation by the SIT, Noel Parmar, had not only described Muslims as ‘all complete fundamentalists’, but was one of the state police officers who had been well treated by Modi’s government. He had been granted four extensions of service beyond retirement in 2004.
Second, in August 2010 the trial court had rejected an application by some of the accused to summon Ashish Khetan as a defence witness. Their counsels argued that the court would learn much from his interview – during his sting operation – with the two men from the Kalubhai garage who, allegedly, sold the petrol that was used to set the train ablaze. In his article on the subject, Ashish Khetan argues that (a) two of the nine men who testified that they had seen Muslims setting the train ablaze admitted during the sting operation that they were actually at home that day; and (b) the two petrol pump attendants mentioned above initially declared to the police that they had not sold any petrol, but one of them, Ranjitsinh, had been caught admitting on camera that he and “Pratap [the other witness] had been bribed Rs. 50,000 by [one] police office […] to do that” – that is, to change their testimony.
Last but not least, the lawyer and scholar Nitya Ramakrishnan points out that the judge considered the confession of one man, Jabir, a ‘proof of the conspiracy’ whereas, according to the law, ‘use of a post arrest confession to prove conspiracy is forbidden’.
The nature of the conspiracy was probably not sufficiently well established for executing those who had been condemned to the death penalty. In 2017 the Gujarat high court commuted their sentence to life terms. And in 2022-23, eight of the convicts were granted bail.
This article condenses information available in the author’s latest book, Gujarat Under Modi: Laboratory of Today’s India.
Christophe Jaffrelot is research director at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Professor of Politics and Sociology at King’s College London and Non-Resident Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His publications include Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2021, and Gujarat under Modi: Laboratory of Today’s India, Hurst, 2024, both of which are published in India by Westland.
