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 almost four hours late. Godhra is a small railway town in eastern Gujarat. The sleeper coaches were packed. Many on board were kar sevaks, volunteers coming home from a Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) programme in Ayodhya. There were ordinary passengers too, 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. Then stones began to fly. At about 7:43 am, coach S-6 caught fire.

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

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

To see why that train mattered, go back to 6 December 1992. In Ayodhya that day, a huge crowd of Hindu activists tore down the Babri Masjid. It was 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 later, the VHP was pushing to start building a Ram temple on the disputed site. 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 had its own long record of communal riots, fights between religious communities, in 1969, 1985 and 1992 among other years. Narendra Modi, a lifelong RSS worker, had replaced Keshubhai Patel as Chief Minister in October 2001. That was less than five months before the fire. Just three days before it, Modi had won his first Assembly election, a by-poll in Rajkot.

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

The prosecution told one story, and the Nanavati Commission and the trial court accepted it. In that account, a mob from Signal Falia stoned the train after the chain was pulled. Then 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 knew this kind of work. He also led the inquiry into the November 1984 killings of Sikhs. The Banerjee inquiry saw Godhra differently. It found that the fire had started inside the coach, and called it an accident. Its critics pointed out three things. It was ordered by a political opponent of the BJP. It came years after the event. And 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 was Maulana Umarji, a Godhra cleric whom the investigators had named as the main conspirator. On 9 October 2017 the Gujarat High Court upheld every conviction. But it spared the 11 men on death row. It also found that the state and the Railways had failed to keep order. It ordered them to pay Rs 10 lakh to each victim’s family.

In 2023 the Gujarat government told the Supreme Court it would press for the death penalty. Final hearings began in May 2025. By October 2026, we had found no judgment.

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

Naroda Patiya is a working-class Muslim neighbourhood on Ahmedabad’s eastern edge. There, 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. Some accused officers of joining in.

A few kilometres away stood Gulbarg Society, a gated colony of mostly Muslim families in Chamanpura. Ehsan Jafri lived there. He was a former Congress MP, in his seventies. Frightened neighbours crowded into his house. They trusted 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 was among them.

In June 2016 a special court ruled on Gulbarg. 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, his widow, was not satisfied.

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

All across Ahmedabad, survivors remembered one sentence from the police they begged for help. Human Rights Watch made it 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 were Muslims of the owner’s family and household. Three were Hindu men who worked there. A teenage girl, Zahira Sheikh, watched her family die. She became the main witness.

The same night, in Bhavnagar on the coast, a crowd surrounded a madrassa, a religious school. More than 400 Muslim boys boarded there. 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. 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. Later, he gave the Nanavati Commission records of phone calls made during the riots.

3 March, Dahod district. Bilkis Bano was 21 and five months pregnant. She was fleeing her village, 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 was her three-year-old daughter, Saleha. Bilkis survived. 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. They said 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were killed, 223 people were missing and about 2,500 were injured. The Hindu toll included people shot by the police. The police also fired on many Muslims.

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

The figures show 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 were 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.

First, the Army. Lt Gen Zameer Uddin Shah commanded the troops. In his 2018 memoir, The Sarkari Mussalman, he wrote that about 3,000 soldiers had landed at Ahmedabad airfield by 7 am on 1 March. Then, he wrote, they waited there for more than a day for the trucks the state had promised. He said he could not accuse anyone of intent. He 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, the SIT, relied on the state home department. It found no delay in asking for the Army or in deploying it. It said deployment began at 11 am on 1 March. General Shah called that finding a lie. He said the team never questioned him.

Then, the words. On 1 March, Modi gave a television interview. In it, 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, made a claim about a meeting on the night of 27 February. He claimed Modi told officials there to let Hindus vent their anger. The SIT found Bhatt was not at that meeting. The court’s own adviser, Raju Ramachandran, said Bhatt’s claim should have been tested at a trial.

Last, the verdicts on the state. On 4 April 2002, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, of Modi’s own party, stood beside him in Ahmedabad. He said a ruler must follow raj dharma, the duty to treat all subjects alike. He added that he believed Modi was doing just that. That month, Modi offered to resign at a party meeting. 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. It said police were ineffective in places because they were outnumbered or badly armed.

Modi has always said that 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. The camps were in mosques, dargahs, schools and open grounds. Human Rights Watch found that the overwhelming majority were Muslim. Muslim community groups and volunteers of every faith ran many of the camps. 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. Others were resettled in colonies built for riot victims on the city’s edges. The violence redrew the map of Ahmedabad.

Gujarat 2002 also has its heroes. They came from every community.

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

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

In the old Vadodara mohalla, or neighbourhood, around the Rifaiya dargah, about 75 Hindu families lived among some 2,000 mostly Muslim ones. While the city burned, their Muslim neighbours brought them groceries and ran their errands. The trouble never entered those lanes. In Juhapura in Ahmedabad, 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 collected in The Peacemakers, edited by Ghazala Wahab, and in reports from 2002. Human Rights Watch noted that it had left out many more such accounts. They told 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. By then 37 of the 73 witnesses had turned hostile, going back on what they had told police. Zahira Sheikh was one of them. Weeks later she said in public 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 she accused Teesta Setalvad’s group of pressuring her, which the group denied. In March 2006 the Supreme Court found her guilty of contempt for her shifting testimony. It 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. Ever since, they said, she had been pulled between two camps.

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 a special court ruled on Naroda Patiya. Judge Jyotsna Yagnik convicted 32 people. Among them were Maya Kodnani and Babu Bajrangi. Kodnani was the BJP MLA for Naroda, and had served as a minister in Modi’s government. Bajrangi was 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. It found the evidence of her presence at the scene was not enough. In 2017 Amit Shah, by then the BJP’s president, had testified for her defence. He said he saw her in the Assembly that morning. The court upheld Bajrangi’s conviction, including for conspiracy. But it cut his sentence to 21 years without remission, which meant no early release. In March 2019 the Supreme Court granted him bail on medical grounds. Gujarat did not oppose it.

Naroda Gam, nearby, ended differently. There, 11 Muslims were killed on the same day. 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, the Central Bureau of Investigation. Then it moved the trial to Mumbai. On 21 January 2008 a special court there convicted 11 men of gang rape and murder. It sentenced them to life.

In May 2017 the Bombay High Court upheld those sentences and went further. Five policemen and two doctors had been acquitted at the trial. The High Court convicted them 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 came 15 August 2022, India’s Independence Day. Gujarat set all 11 men free under a 1992 remission policy. It said they had served 14 years and behaved well. Gujarat told the court that the Union Home Ministry had approved it. Videos showed the men being garlanded. C.K. Raulji, a BJP MLA on the panel that recommended release, said they were Brahmins with good sanskar, a word for upbringing and values. He later said he had been quoted out of context.

On 8 January 2024, two Supreme Court judges, 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. On 21 January the 11 men surrendered at Godhra sub-jail.

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 head of the CBI. Its job was to reinvestigate nine of the worst cases, including Godhra, Naroda Patiya and Gulbarg. In 2009 the court asked the team to examine her complaint too.

On 8 February 2012 the SIT filed its closure report. It found no prosecutable evidence, nothing strong enough to take to trial, against Modi or the others. A magistrate accepted it in December 2013, and the Gujarat High Court agreed in 2017. On 24 June 2022 three judges 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. People who abused the process, it said, should be in the dock. The next day Gujarat police arrested Teesta Setalvad, the activist who had backed Zakia’s case. They also arrested a former police chief, R.B. Sreekumar. Police accused the two of fabricating evidence. They deny it, and both were later given bail. Zakia Jafri died in Ahmedabad on 1 February 2025, aged 86. She was buried beside her husband.

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

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. Then he won the 2014 election. President Barack Obama invited him to Washington, and the ban was over.

In January 2023 the BBC aired a documentary, India: The Modi Question. It revealed a British Foreign Office inquiry from 2002 that had not been published before. The film said that inquiry 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 offices in Delhi and Mumbai. The government said it was a tax matter.

Gujarat 2002 is two crimes. 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 were killed by mobs. Most were Muslims who had nothing to do with Godhra. And, 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. The men convicted at Naroda Patiya did not speak for its Hindus. Remember the Hindu family in Sandesha that refused to hand over its neighbour. Remember the Muslim lanes of Vadodara that fed their Hindu families, and the police chief in Bhavnagar who fired the first round himself. They 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. The questions about the state’s role still divide India. The least we owe the dead of 2002, all of them, is to tell every part of it.