Godhra questions

There are only questions, and no definitive answers, with regard to the facts of the Godhra killings.

A FORTNIGHT after the Sabarmati Express massacre, no one seems to be clear about just what happened at Godhra on February 27. As important, no one knows why it happened. And in some senses, both questions are pointless. The murder of 58 Vishwa Hindu Parishad activists, mostly women and children, on the Sabarmati Express was without dispute a terrible tragedy. But it was part of a far larger tragedy that has been played out in Godhra for over half a century: the tearing apart of a people by competing communal fascisms.

The basic facts with regard to the events that preceded the attack on the Sabarmati Express are clear. For days before the particular train pulled out of Faizabad on February 25, Muslim communities living along the railway line had been subjected to abuse and even beatings from VHP activists travelling to Ayodhya. Newspapers in Uttar Pradesh had reported ugly clashes on railway platforms, harassment of Muslim passengers on the train, and some retaliatory stoning of railway coaches carrying kar sevaks. Muslim women who caught the train to Ahmedabad that evening had been advised by relatives not to wear burkhas. By some accounts, VHP cadres had sexually harassed Muslim women, exposing themselves and shouting out insults. No great foresight was needed to imagine that someone might decide to respond to such behaviour with force.

Most accounts have suggested that the reaction was spontaneous, born out of events on the railway platform at Godhra. There was indeed an altercation with a tea stall owner on the platform, the consequence of some VHP activists in coaches S5 and S6 allegedly refusing to pay for what they bought. The altercation rapidly escalated into a small communal incident, as the VHP activists began to shout slogans. One witness present on the platform, 14-year-old Sophiya Sheikh, told investigators that some of the men attempted to pull her into the train. The claim ties in with accounts that a man was heard shouting that the kar sevaks had kidnapped two Muslim women. This, the story suggests, led to the pulling of emergency chains on the train. By the time it stopped, an angry mob had gathered at Singal Fadia, a short distance from the railway station.

But this account has several problems. According to railway records accessed by Frontline, the Sabarmati Express pulled into Godhra at 7-43 a.m. and left the station at 7-45 a.m. At 7-48 a.m., the chain was pulled three times, first from S10 and then twice from an unreserved compartment. This means that individuals on the railway platform would have had just over three minutes to inform the residents of Singal Fadia about the incident, and then to assemble a mob armed with stones, crowbars and petrol. In that time, people would also have had to organise the barricade that stopped the fire brigade from reaching the burning train until about 8-15 a.m. The mob, moreover, would have had to know that the train would indeed stop at Singal Fadia, and not at the station itself. To resolve this problem, other accounts have suggested that the mob was informed of similar incidents up the line at Dahod. Investigators, however, have traced all long-distance calls made to Godhra from the evening of February 25, and have discovered just two - and both were made to Hindu homes.

Sources in the know about the police investigation say that these facts suggest that plans had been made in advance to attack the train. The motive of the attack, they suggest, may have been political. The leaders of the mob may have wished to respond to anti-Muslim violence seen along the route over previous days, or to put an end to the mobilisation of kar sevaks. Mohammad Husain Kalota, the key suspect arrested on March 3, is not talking. All that Kalota has confirmed, the sources said, is that two other suspects who are still missing, Bilal Haji and Farooq Bhana, did have plans to attack the train. While Kalota is the president of the Godhra Municipal Corporation, Haji and Bhana, like two others of the 27 persons arrested so far, are its members. The issue has acquired some political significance since Kalota, although elected as an independent member, has for six years led the minorities cell of the district Congress (I). Congress (I) politicians have hit back, producing photographs that show that Kalota was close to the local leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party as well.

Godhra seems an unlikely birthplace for a plot to attack the Hindu Right, but the town has in the recent past seen aggressive mobilisation by Islamist groups. The reasons for these developments lie in post-independence history. Home to many refugees who came to India after Partition, its 150,000 residents, roughly divided in half between Hindus and Muslims, have a fraught history. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh found it only to persuade the refugees that Muslims were collectively responsible for their problems, and that they had no place in India. The town saw riots in 1947, 1952, 1959, 1961, 1965, 1967, 1972, 1974, 1980, 1983, 1989, 1990 and again in 1992, after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. In all these riots, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Muslim community was the larger victim of violence.

In December 2001, the town witnessed a new and significant kind of confrontation. The mainly centrist Muslim leadership in the town clashed with the ultra Right Tablighi Jamaat over the control of community mosques. Tablighi Jamaat preachers had been using several mosques to collect funds for their organisation and to preach their creed. Older Muslim leaders in Godhra owe allegiance to Ahl-e-Jamaat wal'Sunnat, an organisation born of the Hanafi-Barelvi school of theology which accepts syncretic practices such as the veneration of saints and worship at their shrines. The Tablighi Jamaat rejects these practices as apostasy, and is critical even of common Indian Muslim celebrations like Id Milad-un-Nabi, the birthday of Prophet Mohammad. In recent years, the Tablighi Jamaat had set up seminaries and other religious institutions throughout Gujarat, and was slowly outpacing the traditional leadership.

What the clashes of December 2001 showed was that there was a crucial shift under way in the structure of power among Muslims in Godhra, and Gujarat in general. In a sense this was a logical culmination of the forces that have been active since Partition. The Tablighi Jamaat was set up in the mid-1920s, a period which witnessed the growing politicisation of both Hindu and Muslim identities that eventually led to Partition. The Jamaat and Hindu organisations like the Arya Samaj were engaged in a fierce campaign of proselytisation among their respective constituencies. While the Jamaat, like the Arya Samaj, claimed to be apolitical, it is significant that the only pamphlet that its founder Mohammad Ilyas ever wrote was addressed to politicians on the eve of Independence. As the Hindu Right acquired a stranglehold in Gujarat, then, it was almost inevitable that the Islamic Right would find new adherents in direct proportion.

By the 1970s, backed by West Asian oil dollars, the Tablighi Jamaat acquired enormous influence. Its literature, the scholar Marc Gaborieau has pointed out, represented this expansion as "a planned conquest of the world in a wording and spirit reminiscent of the medieval holy war or jehad: Tablighi Jamaat is presented as a militant movement which organizes people quasi militarily". In Pakistan, its cadre came to support a welter of armed campaigns, including the Islamist Right in Afghanistan and Jammu and Kashmir. It also acquired support at the highest levels of the Pakistan military and political establishment. Pakistan's former President, Rafiq Tarar, was a Jamaat member. It also supported the Taliban. The United States national who was found working for the ultra Right group, John Walker Lindh, was for example recruited through a Tablighi Jamaat seminary. There were several Tablighi Jamaat members among Taliban soldiers arrested by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.

KALOTA and several other members of the Godhra Municipal Corporation had past Tablighi Jamaat links. This does not prove that any of them had anything to do with the attack on the Sabarmati Express, but does suggest that there could have been an ideological context to the event. Although there is nothing resembling evidence that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence had anything to do with the attack, it is possible that at least some of the young people who attended Tablighi Jamaat-run seminaries in Godhra had exposure to the organisation's wider agenda. The Harkat-ul-Jihad-i-Islami, now active in Jammu and Kashmir, was founded by the Tablighi Jamaat to support the Afghan Mujahideen. The organisation has not made any secret of the fact that it considers its campaign in Jammu and Kashmir to be part of a larger battle to free Muslims in India from what it believes to be tyrannical Hindu rule.

Just last month, the Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS) of the Gujarat Police obtained evidence of the Harkat's activities in the State. On February 15, the ATS arrested Asad Ahmad Munshi, a teacher at a Tablighi Jamaat-run seminary at Dabhel, near Surat, along with Inam-ul-Haq Banarasi and Husain Ahmad Maniar. The three were found to be in possession of 4.2 kg of explosives, nine 30mm pistols, ammunition and detonators. Investigators believe that the three men had no immediate plans to use the material, and that it may have been stored to be activated in retaliation for any atrocities by the Hindu Right. In March 2001, a Kalashnikov assault rifle and explosives had been recovered from a Pakistani gun-runner, Shah Nawaz Bhatti, while the Central Bureau of Investigation had found Research Department Explosive (RDX) in the course of investigations last year into kidnapping operations run by mobster-turned-terrorist Aftab Ansari.

It is clear that terrorists did not execute the Sabarmati Express attack - individuals armed with assault rifles will have no reason to use mere petrol and crowbars - but there is little doubt that the Islamic Right has gained considerable legitimacy from Gujarat's repeated pogroms. In the wake of the riots that followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Ahmedabad saw a series of grenade attacks in crowded public places. Many of these later turned out to have been executed by underworld elements, who found the enterprise to be a means to gain legitimacy for themselves as defenders and avengers of their community. Godhra, perhaps significantly, also has had a strong tradition of organised crime and is one of the major centres in western India for the sale of steel pipes and wire stolen from railway depots. It is possible that some people saw taking on the VHP as a means to widen their level of respectability within the community, and displace the traditional Muslim leadership.

No real answers can be expected until Bilal Haji is arrested, and until investigators are able to put together a coherent picture of just how the attack was organised. As things stand, however, a simple dictum seems to be playing itself out: communalism breeds communalism. Young Muslims throughout Gujarat feel increasingly fed up with a traditional, Congress(I)-affiliated leadership that seems to be unable to defend the community's religious interests, as symbolised by the demolition of the Babri Masjid, or its own physical safety. Former MP Iqbal Ehsan Jaffrey's desperate but futile telephone calls to top politicians and bureaucrats before he was killed and his house was ransacked, have signalled to many people that other means might be needed to protect ordinary Muslims. Almost all the officers within the intelligence establishment are certain that Gujarat may well see reprisal attacks in the weeks and months to come.

Hindu fascists came to power in Gujarat on the basis of defamation of Muslims, claiming that they were violent, hostile to Hinduism and disloyal to India. Now, tragically, they seem dangerously close to turning this ugly fantasy into fact. Most Muslims in Gujarat, like their counterparts elsewhere, unequivocally condemned the killings in Godhra. But at least some of them must be wondering what else they can possibly do in order to protect their own rights.