Gujarat 2002: The Full Story of Godhra, the Killings That Followed and 24 Years in Court

Wednesday, 27 February 2002. The Sabarmati Express pulled into Godhra, a small railway town in eastern Gujarat, almost four hours late. Its sleeper coaches were packed with kar sevaks, volunteers coming home from a Vishwa Hindu Parishad programme in Ayodhya, and with ordinary passengers, women and children among them.

The train had barely left the platform when someone pulled the emergency chain. It stopped near Signal Falia, a poor Muslim neighbourhood beside the tracks. Stones began to fly. At about 7:43 am, coach S-6 caught fire.

Fifty-nine people burned to death inside it, 27 of them women and 10 of them children. Most were kar sevaks and their families.

Within a day, Gujarat was burning too. By the official count, 1,044 more people were killed in the weeks that followed, most of them Muslims. Twenty-four years on, India still argues over almost every part of what happened: how the coach caught fire, who let the killing spread, and whether the courts have finished the job. This is the whole story, told from every side.

To understand why that train mattered, go back to 6 December 1992. In Ayodhya, a huge crowd of Hindu activists tore down the Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque on a site many Hindus revere as the birthplace of Ram. Riots followed in several cities. The Liberhan Commission later blamed leaders of the BJP, RSS and VHP; in 2020 a special court acquitted all 32 accused, saying the demolition was not planned.

Ten years on, the VHP was pressing to start building a Ram temple on the disputed site, and kar sevaks from across India were travelling to Ayodhya for its programme there. Gujarat sent many. Some of them were in coach S-6 on the way home.

Gujarat itself had a long record of communal riots, in 1969, 1985 and 1992 among other years. Narendra Modi, a lifelong RSS worker, had replaced Keshubhai Patel as Chief Minister in October 2001, less than five months earlier. He had won his first Assembly election, a by-poll in Rajkot, just three days before the fire.

Nobody disputes that 59 people died in S-6. Almost everything else about those twenty minutes has been fought over.

The prosecution’s case, accepted by the Nanavati Commission and the trial court, was that a mob from Signal Falia stoned the train after the chain was pulled, and that men poured petrol into S-6 and set it alight. The commission said the plot was hatched the night before at the Aman Guest House near the station. Gujarat’s forensic laboratory concluded that a flammable liquid had been poured into the coach.

Justice Nanavati was no stranger to such work: he also led the inquiry into the November 1984 killings of Sikhs. The Banerjee inquiry saw Godhra differently. It found the fire had started inside the coach and called it an accident. Its critics pointed out that it was ordered by a political opponent of the BJP, years after the event, while the Nanavati Commission was still at work. The rights groups’ Concerned Citizens Tribunal had also called the fire accidental in 2003.

The courts have sided with the conspiracy finding. On 22 February 2011 a special court sitting inside Sabarmati jail convicted 31 men. It acquitted 63 others, among them Maulana Umarji, a Godhra cleric the investigators had named as the main conspirator. On 9 October 2017 the Gujarat High Court upheld every conviction but spared the 11 men on death row. It also found that the state and the Railways had failed to keep order, and ordered them to pay Rs 10 lakh to each victim’s family.

The Gujarat government told the Supreme Court in 2023 that it would press for the death penalty. Final hearings began in May 2025. We found no judgment by October 2026.

The VHP called a statewide bandh for the next day, and the state BJP backed it. That morning, crowds gathered in Ahmedabad armed with swords, iron rods, gas cylinders and kerosene.

At Naroda Patiya, a working-class Muslim neighbourhood on the city’s eastern edge, 97 people were killed in a single day, many of them women and children. It was the worst massacre of 2002. Survivors told Human Rights Watch that the police did little to stop it, and some accused officers of joining in.

A few kilometres away stood Gulbarg Society, a gated colony of mostly Muslim families in Chamanpura. Ehsan Jafri, a former Congress MP in his seventies, lived there, and frightened neighbours crowded into his house, trusting that an MP’s home would be safe. According to survivors and his widow’s later complaint, he spent hours phoning police and politicians for help. By evening, 69 people were dead, Jafri among them.

When a special court ruled on Gulbarg in June 2016, it convicted 24 men, 11 of them of murder, and acquitted 36. Judge P.B. Desai found no conspiracy. He also said the mob had turned murderous after Jafri fired a licensed gun at it. The victims’ lawyers said he fired in self-defence, after hours of attack. Zakia Jafri was not satisfied.

This is incomplete justice and I will fight till the end.Zakia Jafri, after the Gulbarg verdict, June 2016

Survivors across Ahmedabad remembered one phrase from the police they begged for help. Human Rights Watch used it as the title of its April 2002 report.

We have no orders to save you.Police words reported by survivors to Human Rights Watch, 2002

1 March, Vadodara. A mob surrounded the Best Bakery in Hanuman Tekri and set it on fire. Fourteen people died over a long night: eleven Muslims of the owner’s family and household, and three Hindu men who worked there. A teenage girl, Zahira Sheikh, watched her family die and became the main witness.

The same night, in Bhavnagar on the coast, a crowd surrounded a madrassa where more than 400 Muslim boys boarded. The district’s police chief, Rahul Sharma, ordered his men to fire. When they hesitated, he later said, he fired first himself. The mob broke up, and the boys were driven out through burning tyres to a mosque across town.

Sensing that my men were hesitating, I got out and fired the first round.Rahul Sharma, SP Bhavnagar, as quoted by the Concerned Citizens Tribunal

Soon afterwards he was moved to a desk job in Ahmedabad’s police control room; the tribunal said he had refused pressure from local politicians. He later gave the Nanavati Commission records of phone calls made during the riots.

3 March, Dahod district. Bilkis Bano, 21 and five months pregnant, was fleeing her village of Randhikpur with her family when a mob caught them in a field. She was gang-raped and left for dead. Prosecutors said 14 of her family were killed, among them her three-year-old daughter, Saleha. She survived, and her case would take 22 years to run its course.

On 11 May 2005, the Union Home Ministry gave Parliament the figures Gujarat had supplied: 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus killed, 223 people missing and about 2,500 injured. The Hindu toll included people shot by the police, who also fired on many Muslims.

Other counts are higher. The Concerned Citizens Tribunal, headed by retired Supreme Court judge V.R. Krishna Iyer, estimated that as many as 1,926 people may have died, and some estimates run past 2,000. The political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot counted 241 mosques, 273 dargahs, 19 temples and 3 churches destroyed or damaged.

The figures say something both sides often leave out. Most of the dead were Muslims, killed in their homes and lanes. But Hindus died too: 59 on the train, and 254 afterwards by the state’s count, some of them killed in attacks by Muslim crowds in parts of Ahmedabad and elsewhere. Press reports at the time put the number of Hindus driven from their homes at more than 10,000.

This is the heart of the argument, and the record pulls in different directions.

The Army. Lt Gen Zameer Uddin Shah, who commanded the troops, wrote in his 2018 memoir The Sarkari Mussalman that about 3,000 soldiers had landed at Ahmedabad airfield by 7 am on 1 March, but waited there for more than a day for the trucks the state had promised. He said he could not accuse anyone of intent and called it an administrative failure.

These were crucial hours lost.Lt Gen Zameer Uddin Shah, The Sarkari Mussalman (2018)

The Supreme Court’s Special Investigation Team, relying on the state home department, found no delay in asking for the Army or deploying it, and said deployment began at 11 am on 1 March. General Shah called that finding a lie and said the team never questioned him.

The words. On 1 March, Modi gave a television interview in which, the Editors Guild later reported, he spoke of a chain of action and reaction. Modi told the SIT he had never justified any reaction against innocent people, and the SIT found no offence. A police officer, Sanjiv Bhatt, claimed Modi told officials at a meeting on the night of 27 February to let Hindus vent their anger. The SIT found Bhatt was not at that meeting; the court’s own adviser, Raju Ramachandran, said his claim should have been tested at a trial.

The verdicts on the state. On 4 April 2002, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, of Modi’s own party, stood beside him in Ahmedabad and said a ruler must follow raj dharma, the duty to treat all subjects alike. He added that he believed Modi was doing just that. Modi offered to resign at a party meeting that month; the BJP refused. In December 2002 Gujarat’s voters returned him with 127 of 182 seats. In 2019 the final Nanavati report found no evidence that any minister had inspired or instigated the attacks, and said police were ineffective in places because they were outnumbered or badly armed.

Modi has always said the courts cleared him. In March 2025 he told the podcaster Lex Fridman that his political opponents had wanted to see him punished.

The courts investigated the matter thoroughly and found us completely innocent.Narendra Modi, on Lex Fridman’s podcast, March 2025

By April 2002, more than 150,000 people were living in over 100 relief camps, in mosques, dargahs, schools and open grounds. Human Rights Watch found the overwhelming majority were Muslim. Many camps were run by Muslim community groups and volunteers of every faith, and camp organisers complained that state help was slow and thin.

Some families never went home. Many Muslims who could leave mixed neighbourhoods moved to Muslim-majority areas such as Juhapura, and others were resettled in colonies built for riot victims on the city’s edges. The violence redrew Ahmedabad’s map.

Gujarat 2002 also has its heroes, and they came from every community.

In Sandesha, a village in Anand district, a mob of about 2,000 came for two Muslim traders, Mustafabhai and Mohammadbhai Vora. Their Hindu neighbours Motibhai and Sonubhai hid them. When the crowd demanded Mustafabhai, Sonubhai’s family refused, even as a shed outside was set on fire, and said they would leave the village with him. Hours later, Sonubhai drove him to safety in his own car.

In Vadodara, Professor J.S. Bandukwala, a Muslim physicist, and his daughter Umaima hid with Hindu neighbours when a mob attacked their home. The next day a bigger mob burned the house, and the neighbours who had helped them had to go into hiding themselves.

In the old Vadodara mohalla around the Rifaiya dargah, about 75 Hindu families lived among some 2,000 mostly Muslim ones. Their Muslim neighbours brought them groceries and ran errands while the city burned, and the trouble never entered the lanes. In Ahmedabad’s Juhapura, a doctor named Amit Mehta was attacked in his clinic; the journalist Nalin Mehta reported that local Muslim residents saved his life.

These stories are gathered in The Peacemakers, edited by Ghazala Wahab, and in reports from 2002. Human Rights Watch noted that it had left out many accounts of police officers, and of Hindu and Muslim civilians, who risked their lives to shelter one another.

Best Bakery became a test of whether Gujarat’s courts could do justice at all. In June 2003 a Vadodara court acquitted all 21 accused after 37 of 73 witnesses turned hostile, Zahira Sheikh among them. Weeks later she said publicly that she had lied in court because she was threatened.

On 12 April 2004 the Supreme Court ordered a fresh trial outside Gujarat, in Mumbai. Months later Zahira changed her story again, this time accusing Teesta Setalvad’s group of pressuring her, which it denied. In March 2006 the Supreme Court found her guilty of contempt for her shifting testimony and sentenced her to a year in jail and a fine of Rs 50,000. Her lawyers said she had been only 16 on the night of the fire, and had been pulled between two camps ever since.

The retrial went on without her. In February 2006 the Mumbai court convicted nine men of murder and gave them life. In July 2012 the Bombay High Court upheld four of those convictions and acquitted five.

In August 2012 Judge Jyotsna Yagnik of a special court convicted 32 people for Naroda Patiya. Among them were Maya Kodnani, the BJP MLA for Naroda who had served as a minister in Modi’s government, and Babu Bajrangi, a Bajrang Dal leader. The judge called Kodnani the kingpin of the riots and gave her 28 years; Bajrangi got life until death.

On 20 April 2018 the Gujarat High Court acquitted Kodnani, finding the evidence of her presence at the scene was not enough. Amit Shah, by then the BJP’s president, had testified for her defence in 2017, saying he saw her in the Assembly that morning. The court upheld Bajrangi’s conviction, including for conspiracy, but cut his sentence to 21 years without remission. In March 2019 the Supreme Court granted him bail on medical grounds; Gujarat did not oppose it.

Naroda Gam, nearby, where 11 Muslims were killed on the same day, ended differently. On 20 April 2023 a special court acquitted all 67 surviving accused, Kodnani and Bajrangi included. The victims’ lawyer said they would appeal.

Bilkis Bano would not let her case die. When the Gujarat police closed it, the Supreme Court handed it to the CBI and then moved the trial to Mumbai. On 21 January 2008 a special court there convicted 11 men of gang rape and murder and sentenced them to life.

In May 2017 the Bombay High Court upheld those sentences and went further: it convicted five policemen and two doctors, acquitted at the trial, of failing in their duty and tampering with evidence. In April 2019 the Supreme Court ordered Gujarat to give her Rs 50 lakh, a job and a house.

Then, on 15 August 2022, India’s Independence Day, Gujarat set all 11 men free under a 1992 remission policy, saying they had served 14 years and behaved well. Gujarat told the court the Union Home Ministry had approved it. Videos showed the men being garlanded. A BJP MLA on the panel that recommended release, C.K. Raulji, said they were Brahmins with good sanskar; he later said he had been quoted out of context.

On 8 January 2024, Justices B.V. Nagarathna and Ujjal Bhuyan struck down the release. Gujarat had no power to grant it, they ruled, because the trial was held in Maharashtra, and the order that let Gujarat decide had been obtained by suppressing facts. The 11 men surrendered at Godhra sub-jail on 21 January.

I have wept tears of relief.Bilkis Bano, statement through her lawyer, January 2024

Zakia Jafri spent the rest of her life on one question: did the people running Gujarat let the killing happen? In June 2006 she filed a complaint naming Modi and dozens of politicians and officials. The police would not register it.

In March 2008 the Supreme Court appointed a Special Investigation Team under R.K. Raghavan, a former CBI director, to reinvestigate nine of the worst cases, including Godhra, Naroda Patiya and Gulbarg. In 2009 it asked the team to examine her complaint too.

On 8 February 2012 the SIT filed its closure report: no prosecutable evidence against Modi or the others. A magistrate accepted it in December 2013, the Gujarat High Court agreed in 2017, and on 24 June 2022 a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, led by Justice A.M. Khanwilkar, called her appeal devoid of merit.

The court went further. It criticised those who, it said, had tried to keep the pot boiling, and said people who abused the process should be in the dock. The next day Gujarat police arrested Teesta Setalvad, the activist who had backed Zakia’s case, and former police chief R.B. Sreekumar, accusing them of fabricating evidence. They deny it, and both were later given bail. Zakia Jafri died in Ahmedabad on 1 February 2025, aged 86, and was buried beside her husband.

In March 2005 the United States revoked Modi’s visa under a 1998 religious-freedom law that bars foreign officials responsible for severe violations of religious freedom. By 2014 he was, scholars noted, the only person ever refused under that clause. The US ambassador, David Mulford, explained the reasoning.

He was responsible for the performance of state institutions at that time.US Ambassador David Mulford, March 2005

India’s Congress-led government protested, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh criticised the decision in Parliament. Britain and the European Union ended their own boycotts of Modi in 2012 and 2013. After he won the 2014 election, President Barack Obama invited him to Washington, and the ban was over.

In January 2023 the BBC aired India: The Modi Question. It revealed a previously unpublished British Foreign Office inquiry from 2002 which, the film said, held Modi directly responsible for a climate of impunity. India’s foreign ministry called the film a ‘propaganda piece designed to push a particular discredited narrative’. Within days, the government used emergency powers under the 2021 IT Rules to have links to it blocked on YouTube and Twitter. In February, income-tax officials spent three days at the BBC’s Delhi and Mumbai offices; the government said it was a tax matter.

Gujarat 2002 is two crimes, and a country that wants the truth has to hold both in its head at once. Fifty-nine people, women and children among them, burned to death in a train coach, and the courts have found it was planned. Then more than a thousand people, most of them Muslims who had nothing to do with Godhra, were killed by mobs while, survivors say, the police too often looked away.

Crimes are committed by people, not by faiths. The men who set S-6 alight did not speak for India’s Muslims, and the men convicted at Naroda Patiya did not speak for its Hindus. The Hindu family in Sandesha that refused to hand over its neighbour, the Muslim lanes of Vadodara that fed their Hindu families, and the police chief in Bhavnagar who fired the first round himself are as much a part of this story as the killers. So is Bilkis Bano, who waited 22 years and would not give up.

The cases are not all over. The Godhra appeals are still before the Supreme Court, and the questions about the state’s role divide India still. The least we owe the dead of 2002, all of them, is to tell every part of it.