AS you enter Godhra, the polluted air from the dusty stone quarries on either side of the road sticks to you until you reach Signal Falia, the neighbourhood from where most of those accused for the attack on the Sabarmati Express on February 27, 2002, were arrested. Coach, S-6, was set on fire killing 59 passengers, mainly kar sewaks returning from Ayodhya — that spark set off riots across the state in which over 1,200 people, mainly Muslim, were killed.
The railway platform is deserted but for a woman who sits on a flattened cardboard box with her bags; a couple of youths loitering with backpacks; a few men in the ticket reservation queue. The lockdown’s been lifted but on Platform 1, the colourful vendor cabins are shut, a construction crew works on the foundation for a foot overbridge.
On tracks covered with overgrown foliage, far away from the platform, stands the burnt S-6 coach, and the adjacent S-5, a barbed wire mesh restricting entry. Twenty years later, the floor of the coach has disintegrated, only the skeletal frames of the berths remain.
A woman washes clothes on the plinth meant for two security personnel guarding the coaches. She says she’s been coming here for 20 years, there’s a water shortage in her area and a running tap here. Ask her about that day and she says she was at a wedding when the “incident” happened.
Not just her water supply, on the ground, little has changed visibly by way of infrastructure. Roads are still barely motorable. Bilal Hayat, a welder who lives in Signal Falia, says the railway underpass “has not been repaired for the last 30 years”. One thing that’s come up is a high wall between the railway station and Signal Falia.
Ask local leaders why vikas has eluded the town and they all point to the Shri Govind Guru University (SGGU) set up in 2015.
Pankti Soni, 27, a gold medalist in LLB from SGGU, says she had to go to Ahmedabad for an undergraduate education (she holds a BBA degree) as “there are no English-medium colleges in Godhra”.
The university has 96 affiliated colleges. Pankti was in Class 1 when the Sabarmati Express was attacked. Her only memory is they were sent home from school as curfew was imposed. “It happened on that (Muslim) side…Today whenever someone hears I am from Godhra, the reaction is “woh riotwala? (Where the riots happened)… if you want to do a job, Godhra is not the place,” she says.
Mahejbin Shekh, 22, a class topper, has enrolled for a PhD at SGGU. Living in Vejalpur, on Godhra’s outskirts, she is the only one in her family of a brother and three sisters to have studied this far. “When I was doing B.Com, there was not a single Muslim student in my class,” she says.
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Mahejbin has a vague memory of attending her aunt’s engagement when riots broke out on February 28, 2002 and “we stayed back at Nana’s (grandfather’s) place in Kalol instead of returning home”, she says. “Do hazaar do (2002)” is how people refer to the incident, she says, adding that it has had little impact on their lives. “I have Hindu friends”, she says.
As the young look ahead, history weighs on others. At Signal Falia, where only one side of the road is carpeted, several shops, mostly of mechanics, stand cheek by jowl on the uncarpeted side. Shopkeepers avoid references to the train attack.
Says an elderly man who identifies himself as Husain: “Now Godhra is peaceful as the communities stay separately. The H (for Hindus) stay in another area”. As for the “incident,” he says, it turned Signal Falia “into an allergy.”
The wheels of justice have moved — slowly. The special court designated for speedy trial of the case handed death sentences to 11 of the 31 convicted, and acquitted 61 accused in 2011. The Gujarat High Court commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment in 2017.
Of the convicted, Bilal Ismail Abdul Majid, alias Haji Bilal, 61, who was corporator in the Godhra municipality in 2002, died of illness last year.
Currently, 33 are in jail, after the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT) arrested three more. The SIT has challenged the acquittals and sought enhancement of sentence before the Supreme Court, which is pending.
Bilal was among the five councillors of the Godhra municipality arrested in the train-burning case. The others, Mohammad Husain Kalota, the then president of the municipality who was acquitted, died in 2018; Salim Shaikh, who was also acquitted, is with the Nationalist Congress Party; Abdul Rehman Dhantiya and Faroukh Bhana are serving their sentence in jail.
Life for Razzak Dungaria, 70, who was among those acquitted, is almost back to what it was “before the 2002 incident”. He says, “I own a quarry and have resumed business, there is no problem”.
In Ahmedabad, for Janak Panchal, 54, one of the passengers in S-6, the sorrow of losing his 21-year-old cousin Shailesh Panchal in the fire, he says, is tempered with “the happiness (of the temple construction having begun)”.
“The scenes of the burnt bodies…still haunt,” says Panchal. “When the temple is built, we know that in its bricks will reside the souls of those who died.”
Vilasrao Jadhav, 48, who works in a private firm in Ahmedabad, lost his father Sadashiv in the S-6 fire. He says his father simply joined the “frenzied group that was headed to Ayodhya”. He got a compensation of Rs 5 lakh and says: “We feel sad but also proud that the temple is finally being built”.
Of the 59 who died, 26 were from Ahmedabad.
Both Panchal and Jadhav, who are members of the VHP, regret that Covid restrictions didn’t let them join the event when Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation of the temple at Ayodhya.
Some scars are visible. The 24-year-old salesperson in a private telecom firm, who does not wish to be named, cannot forget how his father, a prominent citizen of Godhra, was picked up by the police when he was in Class 9, and after spending some nine years in jail, was acquitted and is now dead. “As long as we (Muslims) do not enter politics, we are safe”, he says.
What politics doesn’t, the humdrum of daily life does. Sanjay Soni, president of the Godhra municipality, admits he became president of the municipality in 2021 “with the support of 21 Muslim corporators.” They included seven from the All-India Majlis e Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), a party that won for the first time, and one Congress councillor Naseem Bano, wife of Abid Shaikh who was acquitted in the train-burning case.
Shaikh, a lawyer in the district court, says, “Nobody can rule the municipality without support of Muslims”. The BJP has 16 seats in the 44-member municipality.
Soni, who won as an Independent, joined the BJP four months ago. “We run the board with everyone’s support and co-operation”, he says, adding that his jewellery business is finally picking up after the Covid restrictions were lifted.
“Godhra is divided into two parts, Hindu and Muslim. But both communities do business together”, says Soni.
Says another BJP leader who has been running businesses with two Muslim partners since 1999: “The transport business is dominated by Muslims. There is no way you can do business without using transport”.
Railway officials say they occasionally get “visitors” who want to see the burnt coach. As every year, the VHP has planned a puja at the site on Sunday for he kar sewaks. Local BJP leaders are busy mobilizing members to gather at shakti kendras to listen to Mann ki Baat by Prime Minister Narendra Modi Sunday.