Godhra: A forgotten history of tragic escalations

Mumbai: Is Narendra Modi, newly elected Prime Minister, “India’s worst nightmare”? This is a recent cover story of a British magazine, theNew Statesman, written by historian William Dalrymple.  The introduction to the article says: “Modi, implicated in a massacre in 2002 while chief minister of Gujarat, is poised to become India’s next prime minister. Is he a dangerous neo-fascist, as some say, or the strongman reformer that this country of 1.2 billion people craves?”

Mr Dalrymple, in his essay, attempts to answer this question. He appears to favour the view that Mr Modi is indeed a nightmare, even quoting Yeats in the process.

The real core of his view comes from the event that had so far defined Mr Modi’s life as a politician: the Godhra riots of 2002. That is the massacre referred to in the essay, in which 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were killed.

Mr Dalrymple describes it thus:                                          

“Modi took office on 7 October 2001. He had been chief minister only four months when, on 27 February, a party of Hindutva activists, returning from Ayodhya, where they had been holding a tenth-anniversary celebration of the destruction of the Babri Masjid, were caught in a burning wagon as their train stopped in Godhra station. Fifty-nine people were burned to death. A subsequent investigation found that the fire started by accident, due to a malfunctioning gas cylinder, but Modi, without evidence, immediately announced that it was a Pakistani-Muslim conspiracy.

He called a statewide strike and had the burned bodies of the Hindutva activists paraded around Ahmedabad while he made a series of incendiary speeches.”

Actually, that’s less than half the truth. Due to limitations of space, I can only address one aspect of it here.

There were three major official investigations into the train fire. One commission of inquiry was called the Nanavati-Shah commission, and was set up by the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Gujarat in the immediate aftermath of the rioting. The second was the UC Banerjee commission, which was set up by the BJP’s rival parties after their United Progressive Alliance coalition came to power in India following general elections in 2004.

The first inquiry, which submitted its report in 2008, concluded that the wagon was burnt as the result of a conspiracy. It was condemned by many as lacking credibility and was seen as toeing Mr Modi’s line.

The second inquiry, though it was set up only in September 2004, more than two years after the incident, made quick work of the investigations. It came out with an interim finding in January 2005 which said that the fire was caused by an accident. This was also condemned by many as lacking credibility and was seen as toeing the United Progressive Alliance line.

After this, a third investigation, monitored by India’s Supreme Court, was carried out by a Special Investigation Team led by a former head of the country’s Central Bureau of Investigation. It concluded that the train had indeed been set on fire by a rampaging mob.

Mr Dalrymple has chosen to quote the second inquiry report without any mention of the other two. Moreover, he has made no effort at all to ascertain facts for himself.

For a historian, finding out the barest details of a major incident that occurred 12 years ago should not be too difficult. It should certainly merit the effort since that incident, and the subsequent riots, were defining events in the life of Mr Modi, his essay’s subject.

For starters, I would encourage Mr Dalrymple to go into the newspaper archives and pull out the Ahmedabad editions dated February 28, 2002. This is what he would see.

The Times of India ran the story of the train burning as its lead, under the following headline: “57 die in ghastly attack on train”. The strap below the headline says, “Mob targets Ram sevaks returning from Ayodhya, riots in Godhra”. The story carries the byline of Sajid Shaikh from Godhra.

The Indian Express said “58 killed in attack on train with kar sevaks”. Kar sevaks was the term for the Hindu pilgrims; the dead included 27 women and 10 children. The story quoted a commandant of the Railway Police Force saying his men had rushed to the spot after hearing the train was under attack from a mob, but by then it had already been set alight. This story was reported by Rohit Bhan from Godhra.

The Asian Age more excitedly led with “1500-strong mobs butchers 57 Ram Sevaks on Sabarmati Express”. This was reported by Hitarth Pandya from Godhra.

Since this was a huge story, it was reported by all newspapers, news agencies, and TV channels. The graphic footage and emotional coverage on local Gujarati TV channels certainly played a part in fanning anger and led to calls for retribution. Better management of the news media at the time could have helped contain the situation.

The New York Times was among newspapers that covered the story. “There was heavy stone pelting and a bogie was set on fire. The fire engulfed the whole bogie and spread so fast the people couldn’t come out of the compartment,” NYT’s Celia W Dugger (who later interviewed Mr Modi) quoted the then district superintendent of police Raju Bhargava as saying.

However, in Mr Dalrymple’s telling, there is no mob and no attack.

This is a classic example of how history is invented. People everywhere are now starting to believe one of the two contested and decidedly iffy versions. One set of people believe that there was indeed a conspiracy to burn the train, and that some Muslim inhabitants of Godhra did it at the behest of Pakistan to foment trouble in India.

Another set of people, including historians such as Mr Dalrymple (who has been resident in India on and off since 1989), have simply deleted the mob attack from memory. They only remember the horrors of the riots that followed.

The two opposing versions allow for nothing except unending holy wars.

The newspapers and magazines, in 2002, had not only reported that there was a mob attack. The circumstances that led to the mob attack were also reported extensively in news media at the time.

It started with an altercation between some rowdy young men among the Hindu pilgrims, and a tea seller, who happened to be Muslim, according to various reports from that period. The matter escalated as more people joined in, and became a fight between two groups. The train left the station and was stopped a short distance away by people pulling the emergency chain. It started again a short while later, but stopped a second time due to the vacuum brakes being activated. The second stop proved tragic; a coach was set on fire.

The stopping of the train may have been the result of a misunderstanding. It was reported then, and found mention in an investigative piece by journalist Ashish Khetan in Tehelka later, that there had been a rumour that a Muslim girl, Sofia Bano, had been dragged onto the train by the kar sevaks.

The girl was found, and testified before the Nanavati-Shah commission as witness, on request of the Jamiat-Ulema-i-Hind, an organization of Indian Muslims.

She stated in her deposition, which figures in the commission’s report, that some men wearing saffron headbands had beaten up a bearded man close to where she was sitting. Frightened by this, she had tried to move away from the place, but one of the men had tried to drag her into the train. He left her after she started screaming, she said. She had run away from the spot and hidden near the ticket window until the train left.

The Nanavati-Shah commission, amazingly, rejected her testimony. The grounds on which it did so were astonishing. It held that the attempted abduction was “not such as to create so much fear”. For good measure, it added that “It is difficult to believe that a Ramsevak attempted to abduct a Ghanchi Muslim girl from Godhra railway station and that too in the presence of so many persons”.

There is little doubt that a concerted effort was made by the Gujarat government, and its opponents, in the aftermath of the Godhra train fire and riots to rewrite facts to suit their respective prejudices and cover their sins.

What I find extremely troubling is the extent to which both sides have succeeded. If, despite so much printed evidence, photos, videos, the testimonies of those who were present and who are still alive, a story as big as the Godhra train fire can become a battle of competing mythologies merely 12 years later, what chance does history have?

Worse, if even historians of renown fall victim to such mythologies, choosing to let their prejudices colour their facts, what hope is there that ordinary citizens will do better?