ABSTRACT
The Sabarmati Express from Ayodhya carrying 1,700 Kar Sevaks (volunteer cadres of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), a Hindu nationalist organization) was due at 2:55 am on the morning of February 27, 2002 at Godhra station in Gujarat. This small town in Uttar Pradesh had been the center of fi erce controversy over the previous decade about a mosque constructed in the sixteenth century, allegedly over a destroyed Ram temple. The journey of the Sabarmati Express from Ahmedabad to Ayodhya and back to Ahmedabad had been marked by incidents between Hindus and Muslims traveling on the train and on platforms where the train had stopped en route. On the morning of February 27, an altercation took place between a Muslim tea vendor and the Kar Sevaks over the price of tea and harassment of two young Muslim women, the details of which have remained obscured by confl icting reports.1 The quarrel led to someone pulling the emergency chain just as the train left the station. Both sides of the train tracks near the Godhra station are populated by the Muslim Ghanchi community which has a history of participation in previous Hindu-Muslim riots. While tensions escalated, a Muslim mob of 2,000 quickly gathered with homemade weapons – pickaxes, kerosenesoaked rags – to confront the Kar Sevaks. The mobs attacked the train and set fi re to two compartments in which 59 Kar Sevaks including women and children perished.2 The events that followed have been a subject of extensive reporting but briefl y, the carnage at Godhra led to the most widespread retaliation and brutal killings of hundreds of innocent Muslims all over Gujarat, and particularly in the city of Ahmedabad.3 When the violence ended, the offi cial fi gures of the dead in Gujarat exceeded 1,000, nearly all Muslims, and estimates of the number of Muslims displaced from their homes and forced into relief camps went up from 50,000 to 100,000 within a few weeks.4 The Gujarat riots were the worst incidence of communal violence since the partition of India in 1947.
