Gujarat 2002: the mass killings that launched Modi's rise

Hindu nationalist "rioters" in Gujarat, 2002

Twenty years ago, from the end of February 2002, the Indian state of Gujarat saw horrific, arguably genocidal, violence against Muslims, with its government implicated in the pogroms. Gujarat’s chief minister then was Narendra Modi, now the prime minister of India.

The 2002 events were linked to a chain of sectarian conflicts in the state, involving Hindu-chauvinist attacks on Muslims, going back to the late 60s. These outbreaks were exploited by the organised Hindu right and far right to feed their rise.

The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party, BJP) took control of the state’s most populous city, Ahmedabad, where its Muslim population is disproportionately concentrated, in 1987, when it was still weak nationally. It took control of the state in 1995. This was a kind of laboratory for Modi’s post-2014 regime, both its neo-liberal “development” policies and its vicious Hindu sectarianism; and an important platform for the election of the first national BJP-led government, in power when the Gujarat massacres took place (1998-2004).

These massacres were on a bigger scale than previous sectarian attacks, more brutally violent and this time carried out with effective state support.

2002

Until 2001 Narendra Modi was not a public politician but a BJP organiser; before that he was a full-timer for the far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Organisation, RSS) paramilitary organisation, of which he is in 2022 still a member. After the BJP/RSS promoted him to Gujarat’s chief minister, he had to stand in a by-election for the state assembly.

Five months after Modi took office, on 27 February 2002, a train carrying right-wing Hindu “pilgrims” returned from Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh – long a rallying point for anti-Muslim activism. After heckling between some of the passengers and Muslim vendors in Godhra station, the train somehow caught fire, and 59 people inside, including nine children, died.

What exactly happened has been widely disputed. Commissions appointed by Modi's Gujarat government and the post-2004 national Congress-led government produced radically different conclusions. Evidence cited by Human Rights Watch suggests the dispute was very much two-sided, that there was nothing like a pre-planned attack on the train and that the fire started by accident.

Within hours Hindu nationalist organisers and BJP politicians were spreading conspiracy theories about a mass Muslim assault on the train organised by Pakistan. The state government issued a release quoting Modi describing Godhra as a “preplanned inhuman collective violent act of terrorism”. Sensationalist, evidence-free newspaper coverage also fuelled the fire.

Organisers of the right-wing religious organisation Vishva Hindu Parishad (Universal Hindu Council, VHP) were allowed to take the bodies off the train and parade them through Ahmedabad. With support from BJP leaders, the VHP called a bandh – a “strike” that was actually a street mobilisation of Hindu-chauvinist mobs.

During the next few days many hundreds were murdered. Official state figures say that by the end months later 790 Muslims and 250 Hindus had been killed; other sources have the count above 2,000, and more heavily Muslim. (Muslims are less than 10% of Gujarat’s population.) Rapes took place on a large scale, in many cases followed by killing. Many witnesses described horrifying atrocities against Muslims including the slicing open of pregnant women’s bellies and a boy made to drink petrol and then swallow a lighted match.

Compared to previous pogroms the anti-Muslim assault was much more general: for the first time upper-class Muslims suffered significantly. Ehsan Jafri, an elderly former Congress member of parliament, was paraded naked and then hacked to death and burnt. His widow Zakia Jafri continues to pursue Modi for justice till this day.

150,000, overwhelmingly Muslim, were displaced; 230 mosques and 274 Muslim shrines destroyed or damaged. There were also Hindus killed by Muslims.

Human Rights Watch points out the “exceptional bravery” shown by some Hindus to try to protect Muslims from the pogromists.

Not a "riot"

Much of the killings was carefully orchestrated by VHP and RSS teams armed with clubs, guns and swords – but also voter rolls and other official documents to identify where Muslims lived.

In a few areas where the police did seriously intervene, the violence was quickly stopped. But for the most part they did not. Evidence would emerge of senior police officers having refused to direct their forces into action; many of Gujarat’s police were Hindu nationalists. In some cases police shot Muslims and others trying to resist the pogromists.

In one of the worst massacres, carried out by the VHP’s youth wing in the working-class district of Naroda Patiya, a hundred Muslims, including 35 children, were killed in an orgy of rape, torture and extreme violence. It took place next to a police encampment.

The state government held up national army troops though various means and they were not able to move into action until 2 March.

The former Indian Supreme Court justice who chaired a “Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal” to investigate described the massacres as “organised crime perpetrated by the chief minister and his government”.

Local and state politicians participated in the mobs. Investigative journalists – notably Rana Ayyub, today being persecuted by the Modi regime and Hindu nationalists – exposed active planning and participation by leaders of the VHP and RSS, and the BJP. So prominent was the role of one Gujarat assembly member and soon-to-be minister in Modi’s state government, Maya Kodnani, that she was eventually jailed for 28 years and at one point faced the death penalty. (Once Modi became Indian prime minister the courts overturned her conviction.)

Modi is guilty

Modi himself, after making statements inciting violence, seems to have disappeared during the crucial days.

So obvious was his role that for more than a decade afterwards the US and UK governments banned him from entering their countries. (The Tories lifted the ban in 2012, smoothing the path for the US to do the same in 2014.)

After the massacres Modi publicly disparaged the victims. He opposed state aid for the displaced, calling refugee camps “baby-producing centres” (the Hindu right is obsessed with Muslims reproducing too fast). In 2013, asked if he felt guilty, he replied: “If we are driving a car… if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not? Of course, it is… If something bad happens anywhere, it is natural to be sad” (the Hindi he used for “puppy” can also be a term of abuse, roughly “son of a bitch”).

Modi’s supporters claim he was given a “clean chit” exonerating him on the grounds that a “Special Investigation Team” appointed by the Supreme Court declared there was no basis for legal proceedings (2012), and this was affirmed by the Gujarat high court (2017). That is not the same as saying he was innocent or not politically responsible; and the proceedings seem to have blatantly discounted extensive evidence.

Gujarat’s home minister in 2002, Haren Pandya, though a BJPer, was alarmed by the actions of Modi’s government. He is said to have testified to the Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal that Modi told a meeting of senior police officers they should not get in the way of any “Hindu backlash” against Muslims. Resigning from his post in August 2002, Pandya was assassinated the next year.

Senior police officer Sanjiv Bhatt claimed that the Modi government – specifically Amit Shah, now India’s home minister – had ordered him to destroy evidence in the Pandya murder case. In 2011 he testified to the Special Investigations Team that he had been present at the same meeting as Pandya, and that Modi had told officers that Hindus should be allowed to “vent their anger”.

In 2012 the Gujarat government switched its stance on a 1990 death-in-custody case; in 2019 Bhatt was sentenced to life for murder.

Burgeoning injustice

There have now been some convictions for the 2002 violence, but only in the low hundreds. These are basically foot soldiers, not those responsible more widely. Many Muslims were wrongly convicted for the Godhra train incident and eventually released, but only after their lives had been ruined.

Not only the BJP-led national government in power till 2004, but the Congress-led governments that followed did little to bring those responsible to justice. Congress had (and has) no desire to challenge Hindu chauvinism vocally. There were allegations that Congress organisers in Gujarat took part in the 2002 violence. For sure the party has its own record of persecuting minorities, notably the horrendous massacres of Sikhs that followed Indira Gandhi’s murder in 1984.

Many who later sought to return to their homes or areas faced further violence or social boycotts.

The ethnic geography of Ahmedabad and other towns in Gujarat was transformed, with communities increasingly segregated and most Muslims crowded into slums. In this context right-wing political Islam has gained strength.

In the December 2002 state assembly elections, the BJP jumped to almost 50% and won a landslide. Immediately, however, this did not benefit the party nationally. Expected to win the 2004 general election, it lost to Congress’ United Progressive Alliance. Outgoing BJP prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a right-wing bigot but more measured than Modi, blamed Gujarat for the defeat. The BJP lost in 2009 too, by a bigger margin.

But: with a confident and radicalised base in Gujarat, and solid support from big business due to his aggressive neo-liberalism, Modi and his RSS comrades were able to take over the ailing national party, turn it even further rightwards and – as dissatisfaction with the corrupt and self-serving Congress elite mounted – bring it back to power in 2014. As Modi approached power, willingness to challenge him over 2002 faded rapidly.

The BJP leaders have worked hard to downplay what happened and draw a veil over their complicity. As the Indian left struggles to push back the Hindu right in the aftermath of last year’s farmers’ revolt, and with Muslims increasingly under attack across India, we must help keep the memory of the Gujarat massacres alive.