Truth Therapy

THE SURPRISING ASPECT of the report of the one-man UC Banerjee Committee’s report on the arson attack on coach S6 of Sabarmati Express that claimed 59 lives was not the clean chit it gave to the mob that targeted the train near the Godhra railway station. There was a political purpose to then Railway Minister Lalu Prasad, a mus­cular practitioner of ‘secular’ politics, setting up the panel soon after the United Progressive Alliance’s (UPA’s) shock win in the 2004 Lok Sabha election. Banerjee did not hesitate in stating in his interim report of January 2005 that there was no evidence of the coach being torched from the outside. In his final submis­sion in 2006, he said the blaze was accidental but did not offer any thoughts on the likely cause of the tragedy that triggered communal riots that caused, according to the UPA govern­ment’s submission to Parliament in 2005, the deaths of 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus.

Though the suggestion that no outside agency had a hand in setting the coach on fire contradicted accounts of violence at Signal Falia, where the train was attacked, including an on-the-spot report by the Railway Protection Force that fired to deter rioters, the Banerjee report did not shock. Its initial findings were timed ahead of the 2005 Bihar election and were grist for Lalu’s Rashtriya Janata Dal in a campaign that used Gujarat riot posters to woo Muslim votes. What was startling was the absence of any outrage over the sheer mendacity and the crude cover-up. Rather, the consensus in Delhi’s intellectual circles was clear: Any discussion on Gujarat riots must remain firmly focused on the violence of Hindu mobs despite evidence that the train attack was carefully scripted violence. The men, women and children who died in coach S9 stood erased from public memory, reduced to a politically convenient invisibility.

It was left to BJP to register its protest with party leader Arun Jaitley stating a committee appointed by the railway ministry has no authority to carry out a criminal investigation. He said the report is intended to help the accused in the Godhra incident and disregards evidence of a mob collecting at the spot, the stockpiling of petrol and bricks beforehand and the deliberate blocking of fire tenders after the coach was set afire. If it was indeed an accident, as Banerjee suggested, what prevented passengers from jumping out? “Did they collectively commit Sati?” Jaitley asked. It was not, however, a season for rational questions. The Congress-led UPA assumed office determined to ensure BJP and its associates remained in the dock and a powerful ideological narrative shamed anyone raising a query as a votary of Hindutva. Heartrending and disturbing as the rioting was, there was no effort to understand what happened at Godhra and its notorious reputation for communal violence. The apologies offered for the attack on Sabarmati Express included claims that kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya quarreled with Muslim vendors at Godhra station. Even if the scale of retribution beggars any likely justification, how could a large mob, dozens of cans of petrol and hundreds of bricks be organised in the short time it took for the train to reach Singal Falia? In actual fact, the train was deliberately halted, petrol poured into the ill-fated coach and set on fire and doors then locked from the outside.

It was not that acknowledging the fate of the occupants of coach S9 would diminish the calamity that befell Muslims caught in the rioting that followed. The fear and horror of murderous hordes was captured for posterity by the image of a tailor, Qutubuddin Ansari, begging for mercy with tears in his eyes. By 2012, Ansari was back in Gujarat after having lived for a while in Kolkata where the Left Front government had offered him safe haven. But that is another story. The important thing, according to UPA and its ideological backers, was there would be only one set of victims in Gujarat. In private conversations, Congress ministers were reminded by an influential cabal of activists and NGOs that they played no small role in the party’s win having widely publicised the alleged culpability of the Sangh Parivar in the riots. At the dead centre of their crosshairs was then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who had assumed office shortly before the 2002 violence. The UPA tenure saw several attempts to move the Supreme Court with petitions seeking to prosecute the chief minister. Though not directly related to the riots, cases were pursued against Modi ally and current Home Minister Amit Shah—then a state min­ister—for alleged complicity in the encounter death of arms smuggler Sohrabuddin Sheikh. In an unusual hearing at the residence of a Supreme Court judge, the court upheld his bail in the case but ordered him to leave Gujarat. At one point, a senior Congress minister argued in a closed-door meeting ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha election that chargesheets be filed against Modi and Shah. His contention? Even if the judiciary were to reject such a move, UPA would have proved its ‘credentials’ in trying to stall Modi’s anticipated candidature as BJP’s prime ministerial nominee.

As it turned out, the Supreme Court-appointed special investigation team (SIT) in December 2010 absolved Modi of failing to discharge his constitutional duty to stop the communal violence and concluded there was no substantial incriminating evidence against him. The SIT was set up following a slew of petitions by organisations and individuals alleging state complicity in the riots. The conclusion of the SIT, however, did not sit well with the liti­gants and activists who moved the Supreme Court again. The apex court dismissed the challenges in June 2022. The release of the film The Sabarmati Report in theatres on November 15 is remarkable not just for telling the Godhra story but because it marks how much the wheel has turned. Not too long ago, hard­ly any filmmaker would have touched the subject, let alone a mainstream studio like the one that produced The Sabarmati Report. The shackles began to break after Modi won the 2014 election but it was not before 2022 that The Kashmir Files, a chill­ing account of the exodus and killings of Kashmiri Pandits from Kashmir, was released. For many, the film was revelatory: They were largely ignorant of what had happened when Islamist militancy swept the Kashmir Valley in the 1990s.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s remark on The Sabarmati Report that “it is good that this truth is coming out, and that too in a way that common people can see it. A fake narrative can persist only for a limited period of time. Eventually, the facts always come out”, sums it up. The whitewashing of a criminal act is peeling off, revealing a truth that can no longer be obscured. The Sabarmati Report sets the record straight and doing so might help Gujarat, and all the victims of 2002. Wounds need to be treated, only then do the scars heal.

cinemaGodhra riotspoliticsQutubuddin AnsariSabarmati ReportSignal Falia