At ground zero in Godhra

If you walk to the edge of Godhra railway station towards the ‘A’ Cabin, a little before the outer signal where the Sabarmati Express mishap occurred on February 27, the maze of railtracks disappear behind a stationary bogey or two in the distance. The picture frame resembles the last scene in a Bollywood movie where the hero gives chase.

Godhra, 120 km from Ahmedabad, is the district headquarters for Panchmahals which has a population of 20 lakh, of whom 20 per cent are Muslims. It has a population of two lakh, half of them Muslim. An invisible line divides it into two communal zones. Tauntingly, some, only some, members from the more prosperous side of the dividing line describe the others as “Pakistanis”.

Godhra municipality has 36 members, 15 of them Muslim. The BJP has nine, Congress five, the remainder are independents. The BJP’s Raju Darji became mayor with support from the Congress and some independents. Some months ago Muslim councillors led by Mohammad Kolota withdrew support to Darji. Kolota became mayor leading a coalition including the Congress. A “Pakistani” had come on top in a town so precariously poised between two communities. Kolota is among those arrested after the train disaster.

Contrary to popular expectations in the context of the current chaos, there are some very nice people in Godhra. Jayanti Ravi, for instance, the elegant 1991 batch IAS officer, collector of Godhra. The three of us who drove from Ahmedabad have been seated in a narrow, neglected sitting room adjacent to her office, decorated with a 60-million-year-old dinosaur egg. After an hour’s wait, a peon escorts us to her room. She cannot talk about the inquiry into the train incident as it is being handled by Vijay Vipul, DIG, anti-terrorist squad. “But why the anti-terrorist squad?” I ask. She smiles.

Where was the routine police bandobast? After all, the demoralised, angry Ram Sevaks had been travelling between Ayodhya and Ahmedabad by the Sabarmati Express for the past few days. Well, there was bandobast when they travelled to Ayodhya. Their return was only expected around March 10-15. This information was given by the inspector general of police from Ayodhya.

If by some miracle the Ram Sevaks and their leaders had written the script, the March 15 ceremonies at Ayodhya would have climaxed electoral victories in UP, Uttaranchal and three assembly segments in Gujarat. A victorious BJP would have handled Ayodhya like a party of governance. The poll reversal announced on February 24 caused the Sevaks to go berserk with anger. The political citadels of the BJP panicked. Next year elections are due in Gujarat. The Centre has to weigh Narendra Modi’s future with that perspective. And municipal polls are due next month.

Since February 24, returning Ram Sevaks had been misbehaving with passengers, hawkers, teasing women in burqas, asking them to say “Jai Sri Ram”. This behaviour pattern continued throughout the journey, at various stations including Danol, one before Godhra. It’s common knowledge that on February 27, as the train pulled out of Godhra, a Muslim hawker chased Ram Sevaks who ran into bogey S-6 without paying him. Someone pulled the chain. The hawker’s daughter pleaded with the Sevaks. She was dragged in. His beard was pulled. He was abused. “Say Jai Sri Ram.”

Jai Singh Katija, station superintendent, points to his assistant outside. “He told me the train had been stopped for the second time at 7.55 am at the outer signal.” Remarkably, it was a mob consisting mostly of Muslim women pelting stones at S-6 and S-5. By the time Katija reached the bogey with police help it was 8.30 am. To escape the missiles passengers had shut the windows. Some smoke was coming out of S-6. “We banged on the windows, shouted from outside. There was no reply. Nothing moved. It appears someone had used the vestibule linking S-5 and S-6 to move in and set fire to something in the compartment.” How can someone from a group of rioting women (some men) calmly walk amid hostile passengers in S-5, walk into S-6 through the vestibule and set fire to the bogey from within?

By the time the collector reached the spot bogey S-6 was gutted. Inside, she saw a horrible scene: “There was nobody at the two ends of the compartment, the spaces closest to the door. In the middle, in one big gory pile were bodies of women and children.” Were they trying to escape some kind of gas or smoke from burning rexine?

Most Ram Sevaks had escaped. The 58 killed were mostly women and children? Yes, the Muslims in Godhra are a group called ghachis, low in education, high on crime. Power cable theft in the district was once the highest in the country. The women are not veiled and in every sense as tough as the men, adept at felling trees and removing railway tracks for profit. The official description makes them sound like the denotified tribes of yore.

But who set fire to S-6? How has the organised economic pogrom and genocide of Gujarat been explained as a retaliation to a gory episode still shrouded in mystery? There are passengers who escaped from S-5 and even from S-6 whose names are on the railway reservation list. They are all easily accessible eye witnesses.

Earlier Columns