Resources for all concerned with culture of authoritarianism in society, banalisation of communalism, (also chauvinism, parochialism and identity politics) rise of the far right in India (and with occasional information on other countries of South Asia and beyond)
It was only after he had become chief minister of Gujarat
in October 2001 that Narendra Modi contested an election for the first
time in his life. Yet, Modi was apparently still such a political
lightweight that his victory margin was half that of his Bharatiya
Janata Party colleague who had vacated a “safe seat” for the
by-election. Within a week of this unimpressive electoral debut, the
Godhra tragedy occurred on February 27, 2002, setting off a chain of
events that ultimately propelled him to the office of prime minister.
Following
his “spot assessment of the situation” in which 59 people had been
burnt alive in a train, a press release issued by the Gujarat government
the same evening quoted Modi as saying that Godhra was a “preplanned
inhuman collective violent act of terrorism”. The casualties were mostly
kar sevaks returning in the Sabarmati Express from a controversial Ram
temple campaign launched in Ayodhya by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in
defiance of a Supreme Court order.
Modi’s immediate attribution of
the train burning to a terrorist conspiracy was a politically fraught
move. It turned the tables on Opposition MPs who had repeatedly
disrupted Parliament the previous day demanding action against the
Ayodhya campaign for exacerbating communal tension in the country. The
resolve he apparently displayed in dealing with Godhra, the “original
sin” of the 2002 Gujarat violence, has served to build Modi’s image as a
strong and decisive leader.
A face-saver
But
then, following the scrapping of the terror law by the Manmohan Singh
government in 2004, a statutory committee recommended that it need not
be applied to the Godhra case. The miscreants, it reasoned, had not used
any firearms or explosives and that they had attacked the train from
only one side and allowed passengers and kar sevaks to escape from the
other side. Once the Gujarat High Court endorsed the committee’s
recommendation, a special court set up in the Sabarmati jail in
Ahmedabad began the trial in 2009.
Despite the withdrawal of the
terror charge, the trial court, in its judgment delivered in 2011,
upheld the conspiracy charge. Given the magnitude of the retaliatory
violence in which over 1,000 people had perished, it was a face-saver
for the Modi regime to receive a judicial imprimatur for its claim that
the Godhra carnage was a premeditated crime. The finding was in the face
of all the evidence suggesting that the train burning was the outcome
of a group clash at the railway station located next to a Muslim ghetto.
Overcoming
the odds stacked against the conspiracy charge, the trial court
convicted 31 out of 94 accused persons. Unlike their Hindu counterparts
in the post-Godhra massacre cases, who had generally been granted bail
sooner than later, most of those found innocent in the Godhra case had
languished behind bars for periods ranging up to nine years.
The
acquittal of 63 persons and other aspects of the verdict laid bare,
however unwittingly, the lengths to which the Gujarat police – and
later, even the Supreme Court-appointed special investigation team – had gone to uphold Modi’s narrative. The appeals against the trial court judgment are pending before the Gujarat high court.
On
the 15th anniversary of the Godhra train burning on Monday, here is a
recap of little-known anomalies in the case that changed the course of
India’s history, the anomalies that betrayed a shockingly cavalier
attitude in the investigation of the alleged terror conspiracy, the
anomalies that put in perspective some of the controversies surrounding the current dispensation at the Centre. Police stand in front of the charred coach of Sabarmati Express. Image: PTI
Contaminating the forensic evidence
Despite
the allegations of arson and terror, the police did not call forensic
experts for a physical examination of the burnt railway coach for two
whole months even as it was freely accessible to the public from day
one. If the arson was the result of a terror conspiracy, as made out by
Modi on day one, it was all the more a reason to give top priority to
forensic evidence. In any case, the police were legally required to
preserve the scene of the crime – especially coach S6 where the bodies
had been found – until the arrival of forensic experts.
Yet, right
from the first day, the police did not stop the public from entering
the coach and exploring the devastation. When a fact-finding team of
the Editors Guild of India visited the Godhra railway station on April
3, 2002, they were
“surprised
to see this prime exhibit standing in the yard unguarded and stray
people entering it at will. Anyone could remove or plant anything in the
carriage, tampering with whatever evidence it has to offer with none
being any the wiser”.
It was only on April 28, 2002
that the police for the first time requested any forensic experts to
make a physical inspection of the coach. That’s how a team from the
Ahmedabad-based Forensic Science Laboratory made their maiden visit to
the spot on May 1, 2002, two months after the mass crime. The outcome of
this belated inspection conducted in such dubious circumstances was a
simulation experiment, which apparently indicated that the coach caught
fire after petrol had been thrown from inside it. After another couple
of months, the Forensic Science Laboratory conducted further tests on
the coach, displaying little concern about the contamination of the
forensic evidence. This was to corroborate the theory floated by then by
the police that the arsonists had entered the coach by cutting the
canvas vestibule and breaking the sliding door. Special
Public Prosecutor JM Panchal addresses media representatives following
the verdict on the 2002 Godhra train incident at the special court
inside the Sabarmati Central Jail in Ahmedabad on March 1, 2011. Image:
AFP
Rejected nationalist testimonies
The
testimonies of all the nine Vishwa Hindu Parishad members produced to
advance the Modi line that Godhra Muslims had attacked the train without
any provocation were rejected by the trial court. These nine VHP
members from Godhra were produced by the prosecution as independent
eyewitnesses to parrot a nationalist story: that they had all gone to
the railway station as early as 6 am, armed with garlands and food
packets, to greet the kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya. But when they
were cross-examined by the defence counsel, the VHP witnesses had no
answer as to how they could possibly have planned such a reception given
that the Sabarmati Express was originally due to arrive much earlier,
at 2.55 am. Such an unearthly hour could only have been, as the trial
court said in its verdict,
“for
peaceful sleeping journey, and can never be accepted as a proper time
for welcoming or offering tea-snacks to kar sevaks and thereby to create
disturbance to kar sevaks themselves, as also to other passengers”.
Even
otherwise, the VHP witnesses had no explanation for the timing of their
visit given that they were unaware of the five-hour delay in the
running of the train. Nor was there any corroborative evidence of their
visit. Though they claimed to have garlanded kar sevaks and handed over
food packets, none of the kar sevaks testified to have received any
such treatment at the station. Neither kar sevaks nor other witnesses,
including officials on duty, vouched for the presence of any of those
VHP members.
Another key issue that damaged the credibility of the
VHP witnesses in the eyes of the trial court was their “ignorance” of
the clash between kar sevaks and Muslim hawkers on the platform. They
were clueless about the evidence accepted by the trial court relating to
disputes over payments and the attempts by kar sevaks to make Muslim
hawkers shout Hindu slogans and to molest Muslim women.
Having found every one of the VHP witnesses “unreliable”, the trial court said that it was left with no option
“except
to discard their evidence in totality with regard to their presence at
the time of the incident, at or near the place of occurrence and about
witnessing of the incident as narrated by them”.
As a
corollary, the trial court acquitted over 30 Muslims named by VHP
witnesses as members of the mob that had attacked the train. One such
Muslim who had by then been incarcerated for nine years on the basis of
this trumped up evidence was Mohammad Kalota, who was the president of
the Godhra municipality at the time of the train-burning.
All initial arrests found wrongful
All
the 28 Muslims arrested within 24 hours of the train burning –and
before the eruption of the post-Godhra violence – were found to have
been framed. To the Gujarat police, what was more damaging than the
collapse of all the VHP witnesses was the exoneration of all the 28
Muslims arrested at the outset in the Godhra case. For the charges
against these 28 accused persons had been based mainly on the
testimonies given by policemen themselves.
They happened to be
arrested in two batches: 15 on the first day and 13 the next morning.
The 15 picked up on February 27, 2002 were claimed to have been arrested
“from the spot”, at 9.15 am. Out of the 94 tried in all the Godhra
cases, the evidence against 14 of the 15 arrested on the first day (one
having died before the trial) should, therefore, have been the
strongest. After all, those caught red-handed normally stood the least
chance of getting away with the crime. If the Godhra case deviated from
such a logical pattern, it was because of the sheer implausibility of
the alleged timing and location of those arrests.
In a bid to
reconcile their own contradictory records, the police claimed that after
they had been nabbed on the spot, those 15 Muslims were detained for
three hours in that “very tense” atmosphere at the very place where
rescue operations were going on in the vicinity of the Godhra railway
station. None of the eyewitnesses, including officials, corroborated
this improbable police claim. The trial court concluded that those 15
were more likely to have been picked up from their homes that evening in
the course of a “combing operation”. Similarly, it rejected the
testimonies of the same police witnesses claiming that 13 more arrests
had been made the next morning, at 9.30 am, allegedly because those
persons had been “noticed” in the mob that had attacked the train. The
launch of the Godhra investigation with such 28 false arrests was a
measure of the prejudice likely to have been caused by Modi’s outright
branding of the incident as a terror attack. Image: PTI
‘Framed for embarrassing Modi’?
The
mastermind who had allegedly ordered the burning of coach S6 was
acquitted after eight years of incarceration, leaving a gaping hole in
the conspiracy story. Maulvi Hussain Ibrahim Umarji was an unlikely
person to be involved in the Godhra violence, let alone masterminding
it. For he was the only community leader in Godhra to have been trusted
by the district administration to run a relief camp in the wake of the
2002 anti-Muslim riots. He participated in peace meetings called by the
district collector and apologised on behalf of Muslims for the
train-burning. Still, Umarji was arrested early one morning in February
2003, in a high-security operation, following a confession by a
co-accused.
In his bail application to the Supreme Court, Umarji
alleged that he had been framed for embarrassing Modi during Prime
Minister Vajpayee’s visit to Godhra in April 2002. He had given a
representation to Vajpayee on the alleged persecution of Muslims in
Godhra. When Vajpayee had asked him to elaborate, Umarji pointed to Modi
and said sarcastically that he would not “know better”. However, having
failed to obtain bail from any of the courts, he secured freedom only
on his acquittal, after he had been detained for eight years.
The
two grounds on which he was accused of plotting to burn the train were
tenuous. One was that, under the guise of running the relief camp for
riot victims, he gave financial aid to those accused of arson. The trial
court pointed out that the allegation pertained to “subsequent help”
and that it was “to some extent hearsay”. The other allegation was that
in a meeting called at his instance on the eve of the crime, one of the
conspirators conveyed a message from Umarji ordering them specifically
to burn coach S6. The prosecution gave no explanation for why he had
allegedly targeted coach S6 and why he was himself not in the meeting
allegedly held in a guest house near the railway station. Worse, as the
trial court said, “Except the bare words alleged to have been told by
co-accused Bilal Haji, [there was] no other supporting evidence against
this accused.”
Thanks to the exoneration of the alleged
mastermind, there was a vital gap in the chain of events. If the meeting
had actually not been called at Umarji’s instance to convey his deadly
message, then what was the alternative explanation for it? Since there
was none, the trial court simply said: “Conspiracy came to be hatched on
the previous day ie 26-2-2002 during the meeting held in Aman Guest
House between the conspirators ...” Flower
petals scattered by the relatives of Godhra riots victims are pictured
at the doorsteps of a train carriage, that was set on fire in 2002,
during the commemoration of the 12th anniversary of Godhra riots at
Godhra in Gujarat February 27, 2014. Image: Reuters
Why no eyewitness to petrol being splashed?
None
of the authorised passengers and kar sevaks traveling in S6
corroborated the prosecution’s claim that the arsonists had broken into
the coach and splashed petrol from 20-litre cans. They testified to have
neither seen nor physically felt any petrol in the overcrowded coach.
Making light of this infirmity in the prosecution’s account, the trial
court said:
“Admittedly,
at the time of the incident (around 8 am), all the doors and windows of
the entire train were closed because of the tense atmosphere and the
passengers were not in a position to see or identify the assailants and
that too, unknown assailants.”
The judgment was
walking a fine line as the issue was not so much of identifying the
assailants. The real gap in evidence, which remained unaddressed, was
that nobody inside the coach had seen or felt anybody break open the
door and splash petrol.
Why impunity for those who halted the train?
The
two Muslims who had allegedly halted the train twice near the Godhra
station as part of the conspiracy to burn it were produced not as
accused persons but, ironically, as prosecution witnesses. And when
Iliyas Mulla and Anwar Kalander had turned hostile during the trial, the
court relied upon their pretrial testimonies recorded before a
magistrate. Had their contention that their testimonies had been
extracted under torture been accepted, another crucial link in the chain
of events constructed by the prosecution would have gone missing. It’s
not unusual though for a retracted testimony to be relied upon. What
remains a mystery is the compulsion of the prosecution to have never
arraigned the two persons who had been ascribed such a pivotal role in
the execution of the alleged plot. Manoj Mitta is the author of The Fiction of Fact-Finding: Modi and Godhra and co-author of When a Tree Shook Delhi: The 1984 Carnage and its Aftermath.
