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Godhra train burning

incident in Godhra, Gujarat, India in February 2002
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Godhra train burning was an incident that occurred on the morning of 27 February 2002, in which 59 people died in a fire inside the Sabarmati Express train near the Godhra railway station in the Indian state of Gujarat.

Quotes

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  • After the unfortunate happenings in Gujarat, the Congress and its pseudo-secular supporters took the lead in a sustained campaign against my party by propagating, essentially, three lies, which are still in circulation... [The third lie is] that the carnage in Godhra, due to the gutting of two compartments of Sabarmati Express, was accidental—or, worse still, self-inflicted. I deem it to be my duty to nail all the three lies.
  • Strangely, instead of clearly, straightforwardly condemning the act, the Indian English-language press tried to justify it: “Pilgrims provoked by chanting pro-Hindu slogans” (they were not slogans but bhajans, or devotional songs, ending with “Jai Sri Ram” (Victory to Sri Rama). “It’s because they were returning from Ayodhya, where they asked for the reconstruction of a temple at the traditional birth place of Rama; this offends the feelings of the Muslims.” In sum, the victims, roasted alive, were guilty.
    • The Godhra Riots: Sifting Fact from Fiction by Nicole Elfi, 2013
  • Violence broke out on 27 February in Godhra, a district headquarters in eastern Gujarat. Fifty-seven Hindus were killed, including 25 women and 14 children, who were burned alive aboard the Sabarmati Express...
    Those who were originally from Gujarat and were returning home aboard the Sabarmati Express had gathered together in a few coaches. They chanted Hindu nationalist songs and slogans throughout the entire voyage, all the while harassing Muslim passengers. One family was even made to get off the train for refusing to utter the kar sevaks' war cry: “Jai Shri Ram!” (Glory to Lord Ram!). More abuse occurred at the stop in Godhra: a Muslim shopkeeper was also ordered to shout “Jai Shri Ram!” He refused, and was assaulted until the kar sevaks turned on a Muslim woman with her two daughters. One of them was forced to board the train before it started going again...
    The anti-Hindu riot was thus a reaction to provocation from Hindu nationalist activists. The aftermath of the events clearly showed that the violence reached unprecedented proportions precisely because of the political strategy these Hindu nationalists employ.
    • Christophe Jaffrelot describing the Godhra train burning attack. in: Communal Riots in Gujarat: The State at Risk? July 2003. HEIDELBERG PAPERS IN SOUTH ASIAN AND COMPARATIVE POLITICS.
  • "It is very strange and saddening to see that when such acts are perpetrated against the minorities, all political leaders rush to issue statements of condemnation. But when persons belonging to the majority are subjected to similar perpetration of heinous crimes, not a single political leader has so far issued a statement condemning this barbaric crime. Such acts of senseless violence should be condemned no matter who is responsible for them and no matter who the victims are. It is not as though a crime is a crime only if it is committed against the minorities and not so if it is committed against the majority community. This should be viewed as a crime committed against humanity...remind all the political leaders in India that it is not only the minorities who enjoy rights under the Constitution. The majority have rights too."
  • If "someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind, even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not? Of course it is. If I’m a chief minister or not, I’m a human being. If something bad happens anywhere, it is natural to be sad."
    • Narendra Modi during an interview in 2013 as the head of the BJP's election campaign.
  • The mob was reportedly armed with petrol bombs, acid bombs and swords. The attackers poured petrol into the compartment and then set it afire. Two thousand people were standing on all sides of the compartment to prevent the karsevaks from running away and saving their lives from the fire. The karsevaks were literally caught between devil and the deep sea. There was fire inside and armed Muslims outside. 59 karsevaks were burnt to death in a most horrifying manner. Many of the bodies were charred horrifically. The victims included 15 children, including some toddlers and some old people of above 65. They were all done to death in the most brutal manner...
    People were carrying weapons like Gupti, Spears, Swords and such other deadly weapons in their hands and were throwing stones at the train. We all got frightened and somehow closed the windows and the doors of the compartment. People outside were shouting loudly, saying ‘Maro, Kato’ and were attacking the train. A loudspeaker from the Masjid closeby was also very loudly shouting ‘Maro, Kato, Laden na dushmano ne Maro.’ (“Cut, kill, kill the enemies of Laden”)These attackers were so fierce that they managed to break the windows and close the doors from outside before pouring petrol inside and setting the compartment on fire so that nobody could escape alive... I have seen my parents and sisters being burnt alive right in front of my eyes.
    • Deshpande, M. D. (2014). Gujarat riots: The true story ; the truth of the 2002 riots.
  • That is, old women were pleading: “Don’t kill us” but the attackers did not spare anyone, neither children nor old people, and certainly not the women. Most horrific was the attackers’ act of not allowing anyone to escape and watching with their eyes 59 Hindus roasting to death, crying with pain, pleading for mercy... Can anyone imagine 2,000 Hindus burning to death 59 Muslims at Karachi Railway Station in Pakistan? If Hindus had mustered courage to do that, each and every Hindu in Pakistan would have been killed after horrible tortures.
    • Deshpande, M. D. (2014). Gujarat riots: The true story ; the truth of the 2002 riots.
  • “Sixteen-year-old Gayatri Panchal saw her mother, father and two sisters die before her eyes in the train fire as they returned home after participating in a religious ceremony at Ayodhya. ‘We were sleeping and I opened my eyes when I felt the heat. I saw flames everywhere. My mother was in flames, her clothes were on fire,’ she said. ‘Someone pulled me out of the compartment and then I saw my father’s body being taken out. He was covered in black. Then I fainted.’”
  • That the survivors of the February 27 Sabarmati Express blaze at Godhra are a bitter lot will be an understatement. Few politicians, human rights activists or media persons have had a kind word for them.
    • Publication: UNI Date: March 8, 2002 also reprinted at [1]
  • The arguments they put forth to rubbish the charge of pre-planned attack by a group of miscreants (some with pronounced Congress Party links) not only added insult to injury but also revealed the extent to which the Congress Party could go in defending those guilty of mass murder.
    • Kishwar, Madhu (2014). Modi, Muslims and media: Voices from Narendra Modi's Gujarat. p. 197
  • Unfortunately, in the coverage of Gujarat riots, The Hindustan Times and most other newspapers dutifully allowed the Congress Party bias to creep in all their reporting. Consequently, very few are aware that the Nanavati Commission and courts found Godhra violence to be the handiwork of mischievous elements within the Congress Party who also allegedly had links with Pakistani outfits.
    • Kishwar, Madhu (2014). Modi, Muslims and media: Voices from Narendra Modi's Gujarat. p.209
  • One cannot help but get the impression that Modi’s sympathy for those who were charred to death by anti-social elements at Godhra was held against him as a cardinal crime. An even more cardinal crime was that his government took prompt action and arrested and put on trial those who led or masterminded the Godhra killings. The fact that Modi did not try to underplay the seriousness of Godhra incident and condemned it as an example of anti-national activity made enemies of all those whose politics thrives on garnering the Muslim vote bank through inculcating a sense of permanent victimhood in such ways that even if Muslim criminals and terrorists are nabbed, they cry foul and dub it as an instance of anti-Muslim bias. It is the same mind-set that defends Kashmiri secessionists, guilty of unleashing ethnic cleansing of Hindus in the Valley but have never taken up the cause of Kashmiri Pandits, even though they were ousted from their homeland through violence and terror. The media tried bulldozing Modi into de-linking the post-Godhra riots and the Godhra incident but because he did not yield to that pressure, he was painted as a Hindu bigot.
    • Kishwar, Madhu (2014). Modi, Muslims and media: Voices from Narendra Modi's Gujarat. p.301
  • Most Hindutva sources, searchable on the internet but otherwise quite unreported in the Western media, have emphasized that most victims were "women and children", implying a big question-mark over the description of the Godhra victims as "militants". Because of this inconvenient implication, most authors propagating the "secularist" viewpoint before ignorant Western audiences have simply left out the detail that the victims were "mostly women and children", so as to make the allegation of "militancy" more credible, along with the justifying suggestion that those fanatics had it coming to them.
    • Elst, Koenraad, The Problem with Secularism (2007)
  • Every word that Modi uttered following the Godhra incident was twisted and distorted by the well-oiled misinformation machinery set up by the Congress and the Left.
    • Madhu Purnima Kishwar: Modi, Muslims and Media. Voices from Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, Manushi Publications, Delhi 2014. (p.287)
  • NDTV, the most steadfast mouthpiece of the Congress Party, played a key role in creating a distorted discourse on Godhra carnage because of the prestige it then carried. Its sanitised version of Godhra incident on February 27, in sharp contrast to its hysterical coverage of post-Godhra riots, became the standard template for all others. ... The headline in The Times of India dated February 28, read: “Mob attacks Gujarat train, 55 die.” The writer of this report, Sajjad Shaikh, literally justified the mass murder on the basis of rumours floated by the perpetrators of the violence.... The moment retaliatory violence sparked off in the rest of Gujarat, the Godhra massacre was underplayed and sought to be erased from public memory as if it had nothing to do with the riots that followed. On a parallel track, reports in print media as well as TV began reiterating that it was the logical outcome of the Ram Mandir movement.
    • Madhu Purnima Kishwar: Modi, Muslims and Media. Voices from Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, Manushi Publications, Delhi 2014. (p.204)
  • As a dispassionate observer, and after a year of detailed research, it is clear to me at least that, from the beginning, the narrative of 2002 has lacked balance and objectivity. Facts were the first victim. The initial bulletins almost all declined to describe the mob as Muslim (even in 2011 Patrick French would use the modifier ‘reportedly’, despite the conspirators and many of their accomplices already being convicted). It was well known that Godhra was a densely Muslim area, and a pretty volatile one at that. Nonetheless, reports of the Godhra atrocity mostly failed to detail the bare but indisputable facts. The Asian Age wrote of a mob ‘reportedly belonging to a minority community’ attacking the train, with the result that ‘several’ – rather than fifty-nine – passengers died. The Times of India also mentioned a strangely anonymous mob, but in The Hindu it was only ‘a group of people’ and on NDTV the reportage described the attackers as ‘unidentified persons’. Even though the attackers were a mystery the reporters still seemed to know accurately the identity of the passengers aboard the train. Justice Tewatia’s report concluded: ‘Most of the national newspapers and news channels played down the intensity of the Godhra carnage and projected it as a result of provocation by pilgrims.’ ... Like so many false witness statements surrounding the events in February 2002 – including those later coerced, tutored and paid for by egregious human rights activists – Sofiabanu’s statement has gone down in history as part of the tapestry of demonstrable untruths that have vitiated a sensible, objective and balanced debate on the tragic events of those days.
    • Marino, Andy (2014). Narendra Modi: A political biography. Ch. 7.
  • One particularly motivated charge is that the train fire at Godhra Junction was started either as the result of an electrical short circuit or passengers cooking in the cramped carriage and had nothing to do with a mob throwing petrol bombs at the train. This account was dismissed multiple times – by the Justice Tewatia Committee, the Special Investigation Team (SIT) and the Supreme Court that reviewed its report, as well as by the Nanavati Commission. Forensic scientists demonstrated, according to the laws of physics, exactly how the combustible accelerant thrown into the train carriage by the accused spread and did its deadly work. Only one investigation, the Banerjee Committee of 2004, consisting of a single judge in Bihar sitting at the request of Lalu Prasad Yadav – who needed the local Muslim vote for an upcoming election – decided that the attacking mob had nothing to do with the fire. The Banerjee report when published, two days before Lalu’s vital election, was widely discredited for its one-sidedness. It, however, remains a potent weapon in the hands of those who regard, rightly or wrongly, the Modi administration as being either complicit or at the very least negligent in the matter of the riots.
    • Marino, Andy (2014). Narendra Modi: A political biography. Ch. 7.
  • Why had the Sabarmati Express been attacked in such a frenzied and lethal manner and – always the essential question – why then?... Godhra presented a cheap, good-value operation from Pakistan’s point of view....The aim of the militants was not only to spill Hindu blood but Muslim blood as well. Godhra was merely ‘a sprat to catch a mackerel’, a goading of the Hindus to set off an entirely predictable and much wider conflagration. Thus the operation against the Sabarmati Express was launched in cynical disregard for the well-being of the state’s Muslims.
    • Marino, Andy (2014). Narendra Modi: A political biography. Ch. 7.
  • The television news channels showed the pictures of the burning S/6 coach and the dead bodies throughout the day. But something was missing. The rage was missing... There was no trace of indignation ...A few days after the event, Jaya Jaitley of the Samata Party, wrote: “...on Godhra there was stubborn silence when the Treasury benches begged the Opposition to join in a unanimous condemnation of the event...” Sonia Gandhi did not feel the need to call on the prime minister on February 27...The silence on February 27, 2002 was deafening. The indifference was complete. The insensitivity was infuriating.
    • S.K. Modi, Godhra: The Missing Rage (New Delhi: Prabhat Prakashan, 2004), pp 26-29 quoted from Kishwar, Madhu (2014). Modi, Muslims and media: Voices from Narendra Modi's Gujarat. p. 204
  • I have allowed the media to behave as it wants. [...] I am not worried. The truth will certainly be known.... I have always criticised violence in my speeches but the way the trouble in just two per cent of the area is blown up and used against us should be countered. Arundhati Roy paints Gujaratis as rapists and then goes scot-free by apologising. Isn't it an insult to Gujarat? .... In this country we do have a justice system. In this country you buy an argument when someone claims that just because a few karsevaks didn’t pay the money for the tea they bought, it led to the torching of the # S6 compartment. This is possible and you consider it valid. But when the police investigates the case and puts forward the case, you consider it invalid. Don't you have a biased mind? All over the world you circulate the e-mail narrating a fictitious event which claims a girl was abducted on the platform, she was raped and that lead to the torching of S6. You can show that within just three minutes all this is possible. For people like you the question should be: Whom do you trust?
  • Decades ago, a prominent Congress leader, Kanhaiya Lal Munshi (1887-1971) had warned his party colleague, and the then Prime Minister, Jawahar Lal Nehru (1889-1964) in a letter stating, “If every time there is an inter-communal conflict, the majority is blamed regardless of the merits of the question... the springs of traditional tolerance will dry up.” Far from heeding this warning, under the guise of upholding secularism, the Congress Party has made demonisation of the majority its main political plank. This perversion is unthinkable in any other country of the world.
    • KM Munshi quoted from Kishwar, Madhu (2014). Modi, Muslims and media: Voices from Narendra Modi's Gujarat. p.210, with quote from K.M. Munshi, Indian Constitutional Documents: Pilgrimage to Freedom, 1902-1950,
  • Internationally influential media like the Washington Post copied from an Islamist website rumors about Hindu provocations behind the Godhra carnage, falsely claiming a Gujarati journalist as source, and never publishing a correction when the journalist in question denied ever having put out such a story. With such media, who needs rumors? ... In spite of strong and widespread anti-Muslim feelings, Hindus have shown remarkable patience and forbearance in past instances of Islamic terrorism. There was no retaliation after the numerous selective mass killings of Hindu and Sikh villagers or bus passengers in Jammu and Kashmir, nor after the attacks on Hindu pilgrims there; nor after the Mumbai bomb blasts (March 1993); nor after the bomb attack against a BJP gathering in Coimbatore (February 1998); nor after the attacks on the Parliament buildings of Srinagar and Delhi (September and December 2001). After handfuls, dozens or hundreds of Hindus were massacred, Hindus all over India maintained calm and refused to take their anger out on their Muslim neighbors. This should be kept in mind when assessing the Hindu loss of self-control after the Godhra massacre. In spite of secularist predictions that the communal situation in Gujarat was fast spinning out of control, possibly for good, this Hindu self-restraint re-asserted itself after the Akshardham massacre. ... Strangely, the effective cut-off date for this period of tension was another violent incident: on 24 September 2002, two Muslim terrorists entering the Hindu Swaminarayan shrine of Akshardham in Gandhinagar.
  • There is something profoundly worrying in the response of what might be called the secular establishment to the massacre in Godhra...Some versions have it that the karsevaks shouted anti-Muslim slogans; others that they taunted and harassed Muslim passengers. According to these versions, the Muslim passengers got off at Godhra and appealed to members of their community for help. Others say that the slogans were enough to enrage the local Muslims and that the attack was revenge...it does seem extraordinary that slogans shouted from a moving train, or at a railway platform, should have been enough to enrage local Muslims, enough for 2,000 of them to have quickly assembled at eight in the morning, having already managed to procure petrol bombs and acid bombs.
    ...There is one question we need to ask ourselves: have we become such prisoners of our own rhetoric that even a horrific massacre becomes nothing more than occasion for Sangh Parivar-bashing?
  • It will be some time before we can establish the veracity of these versions, but some things seem clear. There is no suggestion that the kar sewaks started the violence. The worst that has been said is that they misbehaved with a few passengers. Equally, it does seem extraordinary that slogans shouted from a moving train or at a railway platform should have been enough to enrage local Muslims, enough for 2,000 of them to have quickly assembled at eight in the morning, having already managed to procure petrol bombs and acid bombs. Even if you dispute the version of some of the kar sewaks – that the attack was premeditated and that the mob was ready and waiting – there can be no denying that what happened was indefensible, unforgivable and impossible to explain away as a consequence of great provocation.
    • Vir Sanghvi, Chief Editor of The Hindustan Times, One-way Ticket: My Take on the Godhra Tragedy When It Happened, February 23, 2011, Hindustan Times, Quoted from Kishwar, Madhu (2014). Modi, Muslims and media: Voices from Narendra Modi's Gujarat. p. 209
  • The plan was to burn the entire train with more than two thousand passengers in the wee hours of February 27, 2002. It was a terrorist action plan that partly failed. The perpetrators of the terrorist acts received support from jehadi elements operating from Godhra. These included some Congress members of the nagar palika.
    • Justice D. S. Tewatia, Dr. J. C. Batra, et al., Godhra Carnage-Justice Tewatia Report, Council for International Affairs and Human Rights, Delhi, April 2002, Quoted in Kishwar, Madhu (2014). Modi, Muslims and media: Voices from Narendra Modi's Gujarat. p. 193
  • By contrast, the sizably smaller Gujarat riots were two-sided. A genuine pogrom was, however, what triggered them: Muslims setting a train wagon on fire, killing 58 Hindu pilgrims. In the original East-European setting, if 58 Jews got killed, that was called a pogrom, right? So, Muslims committed a pogrom, and then riots ensued; big riots but by no means “unprecedented”. And completely dwarfed by the treatment the Pakistanis gave the East Bengali Hindus in 1971, where the death toll was at least a million, the immense majority of them Hindus, with even the Bengali Muslims killed for anti-Hindu reasons (Sanskritic language and script, non-Muslim dress habits, non-Islamic linguistic nationalism, secularism). The average victim of communal violence in independent South Asia is a Hindu, though you wouldn’t say it if you trust this book, let alone Indian secularists’ writings.
    • Koenraad Elst, On Modi Time : Merits And Flaws of Hindu Activism In Its Day Of Incumbency – 2015 Ch 30
  • But then, four years into the BJP regime, the prayers of the secularists were answered at last. A Muslim mob threateningly gathered around a train carrying Hindu pilgrims returning home from Ayodhya, and then, in the secularist version, a wagon suddenly caught fire from the inside. Was this a modern case of jauhar, self-immolation by women (26 of the victims) determined to escape rape by Muslim brutes? If you are a secularist, then yes, that is what you must believe, for the Muslim mob itself cannot have done anything unseemly. It was the Hindus who, in their communalist paranoia, overreacted to an imagined threat from a crowd of fellow Indians.... After this expression of American brain-dead parroting of Indian secularist propaganda, it was no surprise that the USA subsequently refused an entry visa to Narendra Modi when he was scheduled to visit the country. The stated reason was his violation of the International Religious Freedom Act. Indo-American Communists and American Christian fanatics jointly hailed this ban as a great success for their own lobbying.
    • Elst, Koenraad. Return of the Swastika: Hate and Hysteria versus Hindu Sanity (2007)
  • Inside the coach, 58 charred bodies were found. These included 26 women and 12 children. Those who had seen the charred bodies shiver even weeks after the incident while recalling the gory scene. Even a cursory look at the photographs of the charred bodies is a chilling experience... The question why a large number of Hindus were roasted alive at the hands of Muslim crowds at Godhra and also what was the motivation to enact such a ghastly act needs to be answered... The plan was to burn the entire train with more than two thousand passengers in the wee hours of February 27, 2002. It was a terrorist action plan that partly failed. The perpetrators of the terrorist acts received support from jehadi elements operating from Godhra. These included some Congress members of the Nagarpalika.
    • Justice Tewatia Committee report. FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES- GODHRA AND AFTER- A Field Study By Justice D. S. Tewatia, Dr. J. C. Batra, Dr. Krishan Singh Arya, Shri Jawahar Lal Kaul, Prof. B. K. Kuthiala. also at [2]
  • “‘Pata chala kaun kiya?’ (‘ Do we now know who did it?’), asked the copy editor to the input guy, who immediately replied ‘Musalmaan sab aur kaun?’ (‘ The Muslims did it, who else?’) in a hushed but disgusted tone. After a brief pause, the copy editor said, ‘Ab yeh toh nahi likh sakte na.’ (‘ Now, we can’t really write this.’) I furtively tried to have a look at the input guy. He didn’t say anything after this. Anger was discernible on his face and so was the disgust. His eyes met mine and I immediately averted them, lest he thought I was trying to spy. He then walked away, leaving some fax or photocopies at the desk of the copy editor, presumably the raw reports sent by the reporters from the ground. I too walked back to my desk, silently. This conversation of barely ten seconds, which would include some uncomfortable pauses, too, revealed so much in retrospect. The mainstream can write headlines like ‘Frenzied Hindu mob brings down sixteenth-century mosque’ and ‘Dabang Rajputon ne Dalit dulhe ko ghodi se utaara’ (when some men from the Rajput community force a Dalit groom to alight from the horse during a wedding procession), mentioning the religion or caste of the perpetrator of a reported crime in some cases, but it feels greatly uncomfortable about mentioning the religion when the perpetrator of the crime is a Muslim—this when religion was clearly the main element in the crime committed at Godhra. ‘Muslim mob sets a train carrying Hindu pilgrims on fire’ is not seen as a legitimate or ‘responsible’ headline, even though it is factual.”
    • Rahul Roushan in his book ‘Sanghi Who Never Went To A Shakha’
  • “People were carrying weapons like Gupti, Spears, Swords and such other deadly weapons in their hands and were throwing stones at the train. We all got frightened and somehow closed the windows and the doors of the compartment. People outside were shouting loudly, saying ‘Maro, Kato’ and were attacking the train. A loudspeaker from the Masjid close by was also very loudly shouting ‘Maro, Kato, Laden na dushmano ne Maro.’ (“Cut, kill, kill the enemies of Laden”) These attackers were so fierce that they managed to break the windows and close the doors from outside before pouring petrol inside and setting the compartment on fire so that nobody could escape alive.”
    • Gayatri Panchal, a teenage survivor, who saw two of her sisters and parents being burnt alive and somehow managed to jump out a broken window and crawled under the burning train to survive in [3]

Nanavati-Mehta Commission

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  • This report has established that a group of Kashmiri terrorists of Jammu & Kashmir in collaboration with Pakistan’s ISI and some Muslim fundamentalists of Godhra hatched and executed this conspiracy in order to push the country into a communal cauldron. As documented by the Nanavati Commission 1 , some of the leading accused and convicted turned out to be Congressmen of Godhra.
    • Madhu Purnima Kishwar: Modi, Muslims and Media. Voices from Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, Manushi Publications, Delhi 2014.
  • Till July, 2002 neither the Jan Sangharsh Manch, nor the Gujarat Pradesh Congress Committee, nor anyone else had suggested that the Godhra incident had not happened in the manner reported by the media and as stated by the State government and others including the concerned railway personnel and the passengers...
    • Justice Nanavati and Justice Mehta, “Part I: Sabarmati Express Train Incident of Godhra,” , quoted from Kishwar, Madhu (2014). Modi, Muslims and media: Voices from Narendra Modi's Gujarat. p.198
  • The determination of the mob to cause mass killings is evident from the account of Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) B.R. Simpi (Witness-25). When he reached the site of accident from Vadodara at about 11a.m., he saw a mob of about 2,000 to 2,500 persons near Ali Masjid. He testified, that they were “shouting slogans which had the effect of hurting the religious feelings of the other community,” and heard announcements like Islam khatre me hai, Maro, kato ( Islam is in danger, let us cut them up and kill them)– coming from loud speakers of the Ali Masjid. He had to order firing in order to control this aggressive mob calling for the murder of more Hindus.
    • Justice Nanavati and Mehta quoted from Kishwar, Madhu (2014). Modi, Muslims and media: Voices from Narendra Modi's Gujarat. p. 194, with reference to Justice Nanavati and Justice Mehta, “Part I: Sabarmati Express Train Incident of Godhra,”
  • There is absolutely no evidence to show that either the Chief Minister and/or any other Minister(s) in his Council of Ministers or Police officers had played any role in the Godhra incident or that there was any lapse on their part in the matter of providing protection, relief and rehabilitation to the victims of communal riots or in the matter of not complying with the recommendations and directions given by National Human Rights Commission. There is no evidence regarding involvement of any definite religious or political organization in the conspiracy. Some individuals who had participated in the conspiracy appear to be involved in the heinous act of setting coach S/6 on fire.
    • Nanavati Report, Report of the Commission of Inquiry Consisting of Justice Nanavati and Justice Mehta, and also quoted in The Godhra Riots:Sifting Fact from Fiction by Nicole Elfi (2009)
  • On the basis of the facts and circumstances proved by the evidence the Commission comes to the conclusion that burning of coach S/6 was a pre-planned act. In other words there was a conspiracy to burn coachS/6 of the Sabarmati Express train coming from Ayodhya and to cause harm to the Karsevaks travelling in that coach. All the acts like procuring petrol, circulating false rumour, stopping the train and entering in coach S/6 were in pursuance of the object of the conspiracy. The conspiracy hatched by these persons further appears to be a part of a larger conspiracy to create terror and destabilise the Administration.
    • Nanavati Report, Report of the Commission of Inquiry Consisting of Justice Nanavati and Justice Mehta, and also quoted in The Godhra Riots:Sifting Fact from Fiction by Nicole Elfi (2009)
  • But from day one of its appointment, the Congress Party and its allied NGOs attacked the Commission and questioned the integrity of the appointed judge. They alleged that the Godhra incident was due to government’s failure or complicity, not a planned attack by Muslims. The Commission was reconstituted .... But even the appointment of Justice Nanavati became a target of wild aspersions by Congress-supported NGOs, even though the judge had not been arbitrarily chosen by Modi.
    • Madhu Purnima Kishwar: Modi, Muslims and Media. Voices from Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, Manushi Publications, Delhi 2014.
  • My idea was to bring out whatever lapses occurred either by way of decision-making or in the implementation of orders in both these cases. That would help us learn from our mistakes. Justice Nanavati is a retired Judge of the Supreme Court. I did not handpick him but I asked the Supreme Court to suggest names. They named Nanavati because he had headed the Commission of Inquiry into the 1984 riots. I personally didn’t know Justice Nanavati. I took whatever name was suggested by the Supreme Court because I wanted this enquiry to be done through a proper judicial process. In fact, I even added in its terms of reference that all the charges against me should also be examined. If I wanted to escape scrutiny, why would I appoint a commission to probe charges against me? They had given a memorandum to the President against me. I handed over to the Nanavati Commission the entire list of charges they had listed in their memorandum. And yet, they went hammer and tongs at me.
    • Narendra Modi on the choice of Nanavati to head the commission. quoted in Madhu Purnima Kishwar: Modi, Muslims and Media. Voices from Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, Manushi Publications, Delhi 2014.
  • “Till July 2002 neither Jan Sangharsh Manch nor Gujarat Pradesh Congress Committee nor anyone else had suggested that the Godhra incident had not happened in the manner reported by the media and as stated by the State Government and others including the concerned railway personnel and the passengers but it had happened in a different manner,” the Nanavati Mehta Commission stated....
    Regarding the ‘scuffle’, Nanavati-Mehta Commission had concluded, “From the evidence of all these witnesses and other material on record it becomes clear that except overcrowding in the train and occasional raising of slogans inside the train and on platforms of the intervening stations, the Ramsevaks had not done anything and no incident had happened earlier which could have led to the incident which later on happened at Godhra. In absence of any evidence whatsoever indicating any incident on the way, the Commission has no hesitation in coming to the conclusion that the suggestion made by JamiateUlma-E-Hind that a quarrel had taken place between Ramsevaks and vendors at Ujjain railway station is without any basis. Its journey from Ayodhya to Godhra was trouble-free.”

Banerjee Committe

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  • After Nitish lost the railway minister’s post following the defeat of the NDA government in 2004, the Congress Party-led UPA government appointed Lalu Yadav as the new railway minister. Yadav played even worse games by appointing the UC Banerjee Committee to give a clean chit to the Godhra accused. ... the appointment of the U.C. Banerjee Committee was both unconstitutional and against the government’s own rules and regulations. The Banerjee Committee submitted its report on March 3, 2006 just ahead of the Bihar assembly election with the barely-veiled purpose of consolidating Muslim votes in favour of Lalu’s party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal and its ally, the Congress Party. Thus far, all evidence had showed that a Muslim mob had attacked and set fire to the Sabarmati Express. But Justice Banerjee came up with the conclusion that the fire in Sabarmati Express was “accidental” and that the train had not been attacked from outside. 11 Lalu Yadav, in fact, rushed the Committee to release its interim report just ahead of the 2005 assembly polls in Bihar. ... Unfortunately, these bizarre stories about the self-ignition of the coach were given respectability by the then Railway Minister Lalu Yadav who appointed the one-man committee in September 2004 under retired judge U.C. Banerjee. The Committee report declared that the train compartment being so high above the ground could not possibly have been set fire to by outside attackers and that it was a mishap or accident. The Banerjee Committee also argued that the mob at Signal Falia consisted of “innocent” bystanders and that the fire could have been either due to stove burst or electrical short circuit.
    • Madhu Purnima Kishwar: Modi, Muslims and Media. Voices from Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, Manushi Publications, Delhi 2014.

Court judgement

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  • “The petrol Cans which were stored at Aman Guest House were taken in a loading rickshaw, near the “A” Cabin and the bogey was set on fire by putting burning rags inside the compartment and through broken windows by the miscreants. Few culprits had forcibly entered into the compartment by cutting open the vestibule and petrol was emptied in that compartment. The passengers were terrorized by beating them and pelting of stones and were prevented from coming out from the burning compartment, provocative slogans were shouted from the loudspeaker from a nearby mosque (“Pakistan Zindabad”, “Hindustan Murdabad” and “Hindu Kafiro ko Jala dalo”, i.e. burn the Hindu unbelievers) to arouse passions in the violent mob. Fire tankers were prevented from going near the place of the incident.”
    • prosecution lawyer quoted in [4]
  • [32] Mehbub Yakub Mitha @ Popa, Mehbub Khalid Chanda, Ayub Abdulgani Patliya, Yunus Abdulhaq Ghadiyali etc. went near Coach S-2 with weapons and started breaking window glasses ect. and also thrown a burning rag inside the said Coach S-2.
  • [33] Abdul Rajak Kurkur and absconding accused Salim Panwala went near Coach S-6 and poured petrol from the broken window, just near the closed door (towards engine/front side) of the Coach S-6.
  • [34] Mehbub Ahmed Yusuf Hasan @ Latiko who had with him a big knife (Chharo for cutting meat) first made holes on the upper part of the Carboys and then, cut the canvas vestibule of Coach S-7, situated between the Coaches S-6 and S-7 (corridor).
  • [35] Mehbub Ahmed Hasan and Jabir Binyamin Behra climbed up the said corridor place and by use of force with kicks etc, opened the eastern side sliding door of Coach S-6.
  • [36] Mehbub Ahmed Hasan @ Latiko, Jabir Binyamin Behra and Saukat Ahmed Charkha @ Lalu then entered into Coach S-6 from the said sliding door with Carboys containing petrol.
  • [37] Absconding accused Saukat Lalu opened the East-South corner door of the Coach S-6, from where the remaining three i.e. Imran Sheru, Irfan Bhobha, Rafiq Bhatuk entered in the Coach with Carboys and poured petrol.
  • [38] Ramjani Binyamin Behra and Hasan Lalu were throwing petrol from the outside of the Coach, towards windows.
  • [39] Hasan Ahmed Charkha @ Hasan Lalu put on fire coach S-6 by through burning rag (kakdo).
  • [42] If there was no plan at all, it would have not been possible to gather muslim persons with deadly weapons within five to six minutes and to and to reach near ‘A‘Cabin on the railway tracks.
    [47] Godhra is known for its past history of communal riots.
    [48] For Godhra, this is not the first incident of burning alive innocent persons belonged to Hindu community.”
    • court judgement quoted in [5]

Post-Godhra riots

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  • Rioting did not start in the morning of February 28. Hindus started with pelting of stones on Muslim houses in Naroda Patia area. Muslims also retaliated with stones. Between 10.30 and 11.00 a.m., an auto driver named Ranjeet Vanjara was parked near a masjid in Naroda Patiya. A group of Muslims dragged him into the gali near their masjid. On seeing this, Hindus began shouting for help. Police came within 20 minutes. When they went in the gali, they found the dead body of Vanzara outside the mosque. His eyes had been gouged. This inflamed the Hindus and they went on a rampage. This case has also been registered in court but no action has taken place over it. No one is giving this case its due attention because it is a case of Hindu killing. The second incident took place around 11 a.m. A Muslim owner of an Eicher truck was surrounded by a Hindu mob. In panic, he mowed down the crowd. One person was crushed to death. This too enraged the mob and they went on a rampage. In the third incident in Naroda Gam, a group of Muslims murdered a Hindu cyclist. Thus, the first three persons to be killed in mob violence on February 28 were Hindus. Therefore, the theory that the post-Godhra riots of 2002 were part of a well-crafted BJP conspiracy is all bunkum. Nor were they as one-sided as they came to be projected.
    • Uday Mahurkar quoted from Madhu Purnima Kishwar: Modi, Muslims and Media. Voices from Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, Manushi Publications, Delhi 2014.
  • I was a personal witness to the following incident. On 3 rd or 4 th of March, I entered Shah Alam dargah, which had been converted into a refugee camp. Baldeep Singh photographer was with me. On one side of the dargah there is a big room where one lady named Belim was briefing the press and giving highly exaggerated accounts of what had happened. She was crying hysterically in front of journalists. As soon as the media persons moved away, she instantly stopped howling. This made it obvious that it was all a play-act. On the other side of the partition, there was a squint-eyed man from Karnataka. A lady was sitting with him with a tape recorder tutoring this Muslim from Karnataka to say, “I am so angry at the riots that I am going to become a terrorist.” Teesta has a real perverse streak in her. She had started tutoring witnesses from the start as though she was just waiting for this riot to break out.
    • Uday Mahurkar quoted from Madhu Purnima Kishwar: Modi, Muslims and Media. Voices from Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, Manushi Publications, Delhi 2014.
  • Does anyone remember who the chief minister of Maharashtra was during Mumbai riots which were no less deadly than the Gujarat riots of 2002? Does anyone recall the name of the chief minister of UP during Malliana and Meerut riots or Bihar CM when the Bhagalpur or Jamshedpur riots under Congress regimes took place? Do we hear the names of earlier chief ministers of Gujarat under whose charge hundreds of riots took place in post-Independence India? Some of these riots were far more deadly than the 2002 outburst. The state used to explode into violence every second month? Does anyone remember who was in-charge of Delhi’s security when the 1984 massacre of Sikhs took place in the capital of India? How come Narendra Modi has been singled out as Devil Incarnate as if he personally carried out all the killings during the riots of 2002?”
    • Salim Khan, quoted in : Madhu Purnima Kishwar: Modi, Muslims and Media. Voices from Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, Manushi Publications, Delhi 2014. Ch. 1
  • The writer Arundhati Roy asserted that a pregnant Muslim woman had been murdered and then her foetus ripped from her womb by rioters. When it became clear that nobody knew of the incident and Roy was asked to come and help the police inquiry to find the unfortunate victim, she replied through her lawyers that there was no power which could compel her to attend. She claimed in addition that Ehsan Jafri’s daughters had been murdered alongside him at Gulbarg Society. This prompted Jafri’s son to write from the United States that there was only one daughter and she was in the US with him.
    • Marino, Andy (2014). Narendra Modi: A political biography. Ch. 7.
  • After this question I finally let out the Djinn of Godhra which has been disturbing me from past eight years and Mr. Modi as well, on whose mind Godhra has been looming for a long time. Mr. Modi paused for a little while and then started explaining to me in detail the events which happened on that day and thereafter. Such was his minute detailed explanation that I felt being transported to Godhra and Gujarat of those times. He gave a detailed description about government action on rioters, curfews which were imposed in Gujarat as soon as riots were started, the police action on rioters and many more things. He even compared the Godhra riots with the Anti-Sikh riots of 1984 and talked about the difference between the actions taken by the government in both the cases as soon as the killing started. Along with it, Mr. Modi even emphasi[s]ed on the fact that in Gujarat, peace was restored in most of the places within 72 hours of riots while in 1984 riots, nothing was done in the first three days, which caused dangerous losses to the minority community involved. Then Mr. Modi described the actions took by him, like dispatching immediate orders to reserve police for taking strict actions against the erring people, strongly dealing with casualties and finally providing for rehabilitation.
  • What they narrated to me showed that the media, particularly, English-language media were lapping up one-sided news portraying Modi as the Demon and all his opponents angels. They told us about the earlier riots in which the Hindus were mostly at the receiving end. There were several instances of stone-throwing on Hindus passing through Muslim dominated areas of Ahmedabad. The governments of the day kept a blind eye to all this. All the suppressed passions broke loose at the Godhra carnage, and no government, Modi or no Modi, could have stopped what followed—despicable and condemnable as both the Godhra and post-Godhra killings were.
  • BJP leader V.K. Malhotra has aptly ridiculed this facile allegation in a speech in the Lok Sabha: "The country has witnessed 2500 riots between 1950 and 1990. Godhra city had communal riots in 1947, 52, 59, 61, 65, 67, 72, 74, 80, 83, 89 and 90. Were all of these caused by the Rathyatra ?" He pointed out that those who were painting a grim picture of the minorities being massacred, were doing a great disservice to the country and giving it a bad name. The fact was that 90% of the people killed in Hyderabad were Hindus. (...)
    • V.K. Malhotra , Reported in Times of India,17/12/1990. Quoted from Elst, Koenraad (1991). Ayodhya and after: Issues before Hindu society.
  • What is always overlooked in a discussion of the Gujarat carnage, is how exceptional this type of Hindu retaliation to a Muslim act of aggression (the Godhra pogrom, cfr. infra) turns out to be once we take a larger perspective. There was no Hindu retaliation to the Mumbai bomb blasts of March 1993; to the numerous group killings of Hindus in Jammu and Kashmir; to the mass killing of Hindu activists in Coimbatore in February 1998; to the frequent reports of pogroms on Hindus in Bangladesh; or to the attacks on the Parliament buildings in Srinagar and Delhi in the autumn of 2001. Even the Gujarat carnage remained confined to a few cities in one state, and when Islamic terrorists killed more than thirty Gujarati Hindu worshippers in the Akshardham temple in Gandhinagar only a few months later, there was no Hindu retaliation, in accordance with the old pattern. By and large, Hindus have shown remarkable self-restraint in the face of violent provocation, a fact for which they are given insufficient credit...
    The extremely brazen-faced application of double standards in the name of secularism was a ubiquitous feature of the media's reporting and comment on the Gujarat riots.
    • Elst, Koenraad. The Problem with Secularism (2007)
  • By all means, preserve the Godhra articles and columns in a special folder, one day they will be the object of a spectacular case study in the human capacity for doublethink. Though disgusting, it was at the same time quite funny to watch the extreme inventiveness of the secularists in blaming the victims. They were very annoyed that the Gujarat carnage was so unambiguously started by Muslims with their massacre of Hindu pilgrims, mostly women and children. So, they falsely started describing the victims as "extremists" and inventing stories of how these Hindu children had kidnapped a Muslim woman into their riding train. That canard was borrowed from an Islamist website. There is never much difference between secularist reporting and Islamist propaganda anyway, which is why Indian theocratic Islamists call themselves "secularists". The latest is their "report" claiming that the Hindus in the train had themselves lit the fire, in a gigantic mass suicide. I suppose free speech includes the right to speak nonsense. For four years after the BJP's accession to power in 1998, in spite of numerous massacres of Hindus by Muslim terrorists, the Indian Muslims were left alone. Hindus had often refused to be provoked into taking their anger out on their Muslim neighbours, e.g. after the Mumbai blasts of March 1993, all remained quiet. Hindus again showed remarkable restraint after Islamic terrorists killed forty BJP activists, allegedly "Hindu Nazis", in Coimbatore in 1998... Hindus have been killed with great frequency in Jammu, even the parliament buildings in Srinagar and Delhi were attacked, yet the Muslims remained unharmed. So, the secularists were losing credibility day by day. They needed the Gujarat carnage, and they thanked Heaven when it finally materialized. They were suddenly back in business, getting invited all the way to Washington to tell their scare stories.
    • Koenraad Elst: Religious Cleansing of Hindus, 2004, in: Elst, K. The Problem with Secularism (2007)
  • ‘Did you forgive Rajiv Gandhi for what happened in 1984?’ I knew even as I asked the question that I would get the usual reply. ‘I don’t know what happened in 1984,’ she said, ‘but I was in Ahmedabad in 2002 and I know what happened and blame Modi for it.’ It was a response I had heard many times and yet it never failed to annoy me. The Gujarat riots were not the worst communal riots even by Gujarat’s own standards. Many more people had been killed in communal violence in successive routine riots that sometimes led to more than 200 days of curfew, as happened in 1989, but because the violence in 2002 was India’s first televised communal riot it had come to be known as ‘the worst communal violence anywhere in India since 1947’. This lie was perpetuated not just by the Indian media but by important international newspapers. When measured just by numbers what happened to the Sikhs in 1984 was twice as bad. In three days more than 3,000 Sikhs were killed in Delhi alone and not one Hindu. It was a pogrom, not a riot, and on a scale never seen before or since 1947. The violence in Gujarat was terrible but it was a real communal riot since both Hindus and Muslims were among the dead.
    • Singh, T. (2016). India's broken tryst. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India : HarperCollins Publishers India, 2016.
  • Those who criticise me for that statement, never mention that within months of Godhra, there was an Islamic terrorist group attack on Akshardham and yet my Gujarat remained peaceful. This was followed by serial bomb blasts. No one talks about the fact that we maintained absolute peace even after that provocation. Some people have decided to pillory one man for their vested interests. That is their only agenda.
    • Narendra Modi quoted from Madhu Purnima Kishwar: Modi, Muslims and Media. Voices from Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, Manushi Publications, Delhi 2014.
  • The charge that the CM forced the relief camps to close while the victims were not ready to go back is baseless. .... They were interested in continuing with the camps because they had started siphoning off a portion of government funds and relief. The existence of camps gave them legitimacy to raise funds within the country and abroad. Therefore, they wanted to drag on the camps for as long as they could. The camps had also become important showpieces for certain NGOs. It had become a daily ritual to bring in media persons, especially the foreign media, to talk to tutored victims, who began to exaggerate and overstate their case in order to garner more funds from abroad. Even in dealing with the government, some of the camp organisers had started inflating figures regarding the number of inmates.
    • K. Srinivas quoted from Madhu Purnima Kishwar: Modi, Muslims and Media. Voices from Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, Manushi Publications, Delhi 2014.
  • The relief camps had become a big scam. People started using them to garner massive funds from within India and abroad. It became another political platform for racketeers. There was no one to ask them for accounts. Therefore, keeping camps going had become a lucrative business for some.
    • Abdullah Ibrahim Syed, quoted from Madhu Purnima Kishwar: Modi, Muslims and Media. Voices from Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, Manushi Publications, Delhi 2014.
  • HRW’s most extensive publication on India was its 2002 report on the Gujarat violence. The report claimed that the attacks on Muslims were all state sponsored and planned in advance of the Godhra incident. Virtually all the blame for the violence is placed on the Sangh Parivar and BJP government. A detailed examination of the events shows that elements of both planning by Hindu extremists and a spontaneous uprising of the populace at the outrage of Godhra were present in the Gujarat violence. HRW, however, did not provide one iota of evidence in the report to back up its assertion of the state having planned the violence in advance. It also dramatically distorted the role of the police in the Gujarat violence. The bias is further confirmed when the report titled the chapter on attacks on Hindus as “Retaliatory Attacks on Hindus” while the chapter on attacks on Muslims was titled, “Overview of the Attacks Against Muslims.” While the Hindu mobs were said to have chanted “Jai Sri Ram” when attacking Muslims, the report conveniently avoided incidents where the Muslim mobs shouted “Kill Hindus. Allah is with us” when attacking Hindus.
  • About 550-odd residents of the Prem Darwaja Vagheri Vas, Dariyapur, had no choice but to leave behind their belongings and take shelter in a near-by temple, following the violence of March 21. These Dalit families claim that they had been attacked by the people belonging to the minority community, who damaged their houses, property and drove them out of the area.
  • The Muslim manager of this hotel, got together fanatic Muslim youths from the same locality and set the houses in the locality on fire, first taking care to remove all inhabitants of Muslim houses to a safe place. They burnt houses of 35 Hindu families.... Yusuf Ajmeri with a 1000 strong mob and with swords and guptis in their hands rushed to Hindu locality shouting "Kill Hindus, Allah is with us".
  • We read all over about a “genocide of Muslims”. Do we remember a single report on the Hindus who heroically helped save Muslims in their neighbourhood? Was even one family of Hindu victims interviewed following the criminal burning of the Sabarmati Express? One fourth of the dead in the ensuing riots were Hindus. How to classify those 250 victims? Who evoked the dead on the Hindu side? According to reports, Congress Party councillor Taufeeq Khan Pathan and his son Zulfi, notorious gangsters, were allegedly seen leading Muslim rioters. Another such character, Congress member of the Godhra Nagarpalika [municipality], Haji Balal, was said to have had the fire- fighting vehicle sabotaged beforehand... Which newspaper article stated that the most violent events took place following provocations by leaders of this sort? The Union Home Ministry's Annual Report of 2002-03 stated that 40,000 Hindus were in riot relief camps. What made those 40,000 Hindus rush to relief camps? To seek protection from whom? Why was it necessary if they were the main aggressors? More than the barbaric event itself, it is the insensitivity of the Indian “elite” and of the media that infuriated the Gujaratis. Those accused of terrorism often receive political support, are benevolently portrayed by the media, and a host of “human rights” organisations are always on hand to fight for them. But those victims whose lives are cut down for no reason, are they not “human” enough to get some rights too?
    • The Godhra Riots: Sifting Fact from Fiction by Nicole Elfi, 2013

See also

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