Godhra,
Where the Fall of
The
burning train on
This week
is the 20th anniversary of the single most fateful event
in the
history of Independent India.
Had
carriage S-6 of the Sabarmati Express not burnt down outside
Godhra
station in the early morning of
59
persons, the
Modi
would not have been the prime minister of
Had that
tragic event not taken place the Bharatiya Janata Party
could
easily have lost the assembly election that was originally
scheduled
for April 2003 but brought ahead to December 2002
at Modi’s
urging to capitalise on the religious polarisation the
violence
had caused. The BJP had lost the gram panchayat
elections
in 2001 and three assembly by-elections the same
year, and
was badly rattled. This was what had led to the
replacement
of chief minister Keshubhai Patel, whose health
had
allegedly begun to fail, with Modi in October 2001.
Modi
faced the daunting task of shoring up the BJP’s support
base in
came as
an answer to the party’s prayers.The train was carrying a
large
number of kar sevaks who had forcibly boarded the train at
Ayodhya.
When it
arrived at Godhra,therefore, it was carrying 2,000 or more passengers against a
capacity of 1,100.
When
coach S-6 caught
fire, it
was jam packed with some of these kar sevaks.
The
presence of the kar sevaks, the fact that some of these had
misbehaved
with Muslim vendors on the platform at Godhra both
while on
their way to Ayodhya and on their way back, and that
an ugly
spat had broken out on the platform minutes before the
train
left Godhra on that fateful morning, made just about everyone in
train and
set fire to the carriage, as an act of revenge.
By the
afternoon of February 27, local Gujarati newspapers had
universally
ascribed the act to Ghanchi Muslims of a nearby shanty
colony,
who had been waiting with stones and rags dipped in
kerosene
to seek revenge.
According
to those news reports, no
sooner did the train stop did they smash the
windows and t
hrow
flaming kerosene-soaked rags into the bogey and set them
on fire.
These
reports formed the basis of the first police chargesheet
in the case, with manufactured eyewitnesses,
all from the
Vishwa
Hindu Parishad, who presented identical statements
about kerosene
being thrown into the coach from outside.
The
pogrom that followed is now history. But, in another of history’s fateful
ironies, this initial claim by the police about the train fire was completely
unfounded and had to eventually be abandoned in favour of a supposedly more
plausible but equally unbelievable theory. Having declared from day one that
the fire had been a deeply planned (Muslim) conspiracy, all the facts had to be
tailor made to sustain this claim.
The
lengths to which the Modi-led state government went to reinforce and sustain a
falsehood in the face of the anomalies that it could not explain, was not
accidental. On the contrary, it was sanctioned and sustained by Modi himself,
with the express purpose of creating a wave of Islamophobia that would sweep the BJP back to power in
In 2005,
the railway minister in the then UPA government, Lalu Prasad Yadav, appointed a
retired
The
Bannerjee commission appointed a five-man team of experts to re-examine the
evidence. After a three-year lapse, the expert committee was left with only one
way to do this: look at other carriages that had caught fire and compare the burn
and smoke patterns in them to the one in S-6.
There
were five burnt carriages preserved in the railway yards after earlier forensic
examinations. In one of these, the burn and smoke pattern was almost identical
to that found in S-6. The cause of that fire was known and not in doubt: it had
begun in the centre of the carriage, possibly when someone knocked over a
lighted cooking stove on which food was being warmed or tea made.
The
flames had remained restricted to that area but the smoke the fire created had
spread to the rest of the carriage, through the gaps
between
the upper and lower berths, and along the underside of
the
ceiling.
As in S-6,
the majority of deaths had resulted from
asphyxiation.
This
explanation gained credibility because the railways
were not
using flame-retardant materials in second-class compartments then. So even a
lighted match could start a fire and create large
volumes
of toxic smoke.
What is
more, cooking or warming one’s
own food
on long train journeys was, and may still be, a common
practice
among orthodox Hindus.
The BJP
vociferously rejected the Banerjee commission’s report.
The party’s
then spokesman, Arun Jaitley, raised procedural objections, saying that the
railway ministry, even while belonging to the Union government, had no right to
conduct such an inquiry.
“If it
was an accident, what prevented passengers from jumping out?”
he asked,
rhetorically.
Following
a strategy with which we have now become familiar, the state government got one
of the Hindus who had been injured in the fracas
on the
Godhra platform in 2002 to challenge Justice Banerjee’s report
in the
The
presiding judge then declared the
formation
of the Banerjee Committee “unconstitutional, illegal and
null and
void”, and called it a “colourable exercise of power with mala fide intentions”.
He went
on to berate the railway ministry for daring
to set up
the committee when the state government had already
appointed
the Shah commission, later joined by retired Supreme
Court
justice G.T. Nanavati, on March 8, immediately after the riots.
He also
dismissed the right of the railways to set up a high-level
committee
to ascertain how a fire had started on its own property,
in order
to make sure that it did not happen again.
This
judgment was extraordinary, to say the least, but one does not have to rely on
the Banerjee commission’s report alone to question the official account of how
the fire started.The report prepared by teams of experts from the Gujarat
government’s own Forensic Science Laboratory in Ahmedabad after a site visit on
May 3, 2002, formally debunked the police’s earlier explanation and concluded
that the fire was consistent with what might happened if “60 litres of flammable liquid had been
poured using an unusually wide-mouthed container like a bucket” on to the floor
of the coach and set alight.
Why did
the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) so comprehensively
debunk
the claims made in the police’s chargesheet?
The
answer could be that Modi had learned
through the intelligence department that the Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal (CCT),
headed
by former
Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer, was planning to visit Godhra
in the
beginning of May.
The
Ghanchi Muslim revenge plot
explanation
was therefore about to come apart.
This is
what the CCT concluded after its own visit:
“On
Again, if
one takes into account the height of the bund and the height of the train, and
if fire-balls were to be thrown at the train, the outside of the coach should
have shown signs of being charred. But we found that there were no such marks
below the windows; the charred marks were to be seen only around the windows
and above that height. This is a clear indication that the fire started inside
the coach and the flames leaping out of the windows singed the outside of the
compartment, above window level (emphasis added). Therefore, even to the naked
eye, it was clear that the fire was from within and not from outside.”
But if
the fire started within, who could have possibly lit it? The
The
absurdities in this theory have been pointed out many times in the last two
decades. First, since buckets would have had to be carried by hand, and very
few buckets have a capacity of more than 20 litres, a minimum of three buckets would have had to be carried on
to the train. Would a train jam-packed with hyped-up kar sewaks spoiling for a
fight have allowed three persons carrying buckets of a fluid whose smell is
easily recognisable to board the train at a place where a large crowd of
hostile Muslims had already collected? Clearly not, which is why the police
could not find a single passenger to corroborate this absurd claim.
Curiously,
the FSL’s ‘experts’ based their 60 litres calculation upon how far the liquid
would travel in an empty carriage, not one that was jampacked with people whose
shoes, and luggage, would have come in the way. For, as the tally of the dead
and injured showed, there were at least 108 persons in the carriage when the
fire broke out, not counting those who escaped before the rush of panic-stricken
passengers to the doorways began. It is inconceivable that forensic experts
could have made such an elementary mistake. So the only explanation is that
they were commanded to find another explanation that would continue to point
the finger of blame at the Muslim community. And they obliged.
In
Ahmedabad, on
The
railway booking chart for the carriage at
The first
to die would have been the weakest among them, the women and the children. The
forensic examination of the dead, carried out three days later, confirmed this
for it showed that whereas 20 of the dead were men, 26 were women, and 12 were
children. In all, 38 of the 58 dead were of the wrong sex and age to have been
kar sevaks. Even among the male casualties, a large number, probably the
majority, would have died because they stayed with their families, trying to
get out till the smoke overwhelmed them.
The
number of kar sevaks killed may have been even smaller for, as the Concerned
Citizens’ Tribunal headed by Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer pointed out, all but a
fraction of these were physically fit young men who, having muscled their way
on to the train, were more likely to be at the ends of the carriage than the
middle, and would have been able to muscle their way out of the burning
carriage with relative ease. That many did indeed do so is suggested by the
fact that of the 43 persons who are known to have managed to escape from the
carriage, only five needed to be hospitalised. Taking all this into account, it
is unlikely that even a dozen of those killed were kar sevaks.
Looking
back at the events of
Prem
Shankar Jha is a senior journalist and former editor. He is the author of Dawn
of the Solar Age: an End to Global Warming and Fear (Sage 2017) and is
currently a visiting fellow at the Centre for Environment Studies, School of
Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.
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