A massacre is only worth remembering 16 years later, if it still lurks in the present like a dense fog. Invisible to the eye, but lethal as methane in the way it turns us all toxic on the inside. Even after the Gujarat High Court pronounced its verdict on Friday; the Naroda Patiya massacre that took place on 28 February 2002 in a congested Muslim colony in Ahmedabad has, and will, continue to shape who we are, whether we look at it or turn our eyes away.
It was a day on which the VHP or Vishwa Hindu Parishad declared a bandh after 59 Hindus – all VHP volunteers – were killed in a train in the city of Godhra in Gujarat the day before. Hindus across Gujarat were fed with news that the train bogey had been set on fire by Muslims and it was time for revenge.
That Day in Naroda Patiya
Between 9 and 10 in the morning, a mob had started to gather around the Noorani Masjid in the vicinity. Things got tense and stones were pelted at Muslims across the street, and they, in turn, picked up stones and threw them back at the mob.
Many witnesses told the police and the trial court over the years that the Hindu mob would not have grown exponentially, if it wasn’t for the encouragement and support it got when the BJP representative from the area, Maya Kodnani allegedly turned up in a white Maruti.
Many said it was after her arrival that the mob grew from a few hundred to a few thousand people. The mass swarmed into the gullies of Naroda Patiya, blocking it from all sides. At the end of the day, 97 people were dead. Dismembered bodies of little children were found scattered and burnt, by the Teesra Kuan or the well in the colony.
Some witnesses described how a group from the mob, led by a member of the militant wing of the Hindu right – the Bajrang Dal – a man called Babu Bajrangi; and others like Suresh Richard Jadeja from affiliate groups, unleashed horror. They circled a pregnant woman who could not run and hide because she was full term. They ripped the foetus out of her, killed it, and then murdered her. They raped many women and children. Many got away and lived to tell the tale. The sick, infirm and physically challenged were easy targets because they could not run fast enough.
Did the State Do Enough?
Over the years, witnesses have asked many questions on the way the massacre was handled by the government of Gujarat – the police and the administration taken together. They asked why the police did not write down the name of Maya Kodnani in their case files, despite so many of them mentioning her explicitly. They asked where the police had disappeared to all day, as their homes and bodies were set on fire. A special investigation team was eventually asked to be set up on the orders of the Supreme court, five years after the massacre, in 2007.
Charges were framed against Maya Kodnani in 2009. By this time, she had won elections twice over and been made the Minister of State for Women and Child Development. She resigned and was arrested; and later given bail. In 2012, the trial court convicted her for life, saying she was the kingpin of the massacre. The conviction was set aside on 20 April 2018, when the high court acquitted her of all charges.
Her lawyers said the witnesses contradicted each other, and it wasn’t possible to establish that Maya Kodnani was even at Naroda Patiya on the day of the mass-murders.
Post Acquittal Politics
Later that day, BJP and RSS spokespersons did the usual rounds of television studios, saying how the dots didn’t join back to the BJP leader, how trial court verdicts are often overturned. But by this time, all that counted was the politics of the massacre, and what it has done to Muslims across Gujarat over time.
This politics of silence unfolded when Muslims needed the state to reassure them that their lives would not continue to be shattered, that they would not have to live in the constant fear of being lynched by other Hindu mobs, or the fear of not being able to count on the police.
The politics that told Muslims what the mob wanted conveyed through the massacre. That they must continue to live as if it was still 2002. The politics where people made choices after reading and watching the massacre play out on their television screens; to vote for a party with a strong and muscular Hindu presence in order to emasculate Muslims.
Assurance Beyond Legality
If the BJP wanted the politics of the massacre not to live on, then Narendra Modi should have made Muslims feel they had nothing to worry about on his watch. The BJP is well within its rights to push the legalistic point, that Maya Kodnani is not guilty because the court didn’t find enough evidence against her.
Historically, it has been true in almost all cases of mass violence in the country that there is never enough evidence for courts to join the dots to people in power.
But if the party was really looking, it would have seen the light go out from the eyes of a little boy who saw his aunt being killed that day in 2002. Eyes that have gone dead with fear and yellow around the edges from substance abuse. If they have done nothing to make him feel safe; if they have instead, encouraged the politics of amnesia, then it is because they have possibly sensed that it is what voters want. It is precisely why the shadow of the Naroda Patiya case hangs over us all.
Sixteen years later, when the court acquits more than half of the accused – 17 of 29; it isn’t the literal letter of the law that matters. It’s what use it is put to outside the court that counts, where perceptions are built and fear rules. Where conversations around the verdict will decide what we really are as a people. Conversations that call us out on our blindness or hypocrisy. As we feel our stomachs churn over the story of the eight-year-old girl from Kathua because she was killed for her religion, aren’t we looking away from the politics that has fed on precisely that communal hate, going back to 28 February 2002? Here, we do not need a judge to join the dots. We’ve got a lot of work to do or undo, on our own.
(Revati Laul is an independent journalist, working on a book on the Gujarat riots of 2002, due to be published in September. She lives and works in New Delhi and tweets @revatilaul. The views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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