The bigger the lie, the more people believe it.
Adolf Hitler

THERE WERE no ill portents as the Sabarmati Express drew into Godhra station at 7:43am on February 27, 2002, five hours behind schedule. The last of winter still hung in the air, and elsewhere in the country, people were busying themselves with an ordinary new day, getting to school or work or back to sleep, when the news began to break. A fire was raging through the crammed coach S-6 of the Sabarmati Express, stalled just outside Godhra station. Fifty-nine people had been burnt to death — some karsevaks returning from Ayodhya, some ordinary passengers on their way back to Gujarat from Sultanpur, Allahabad and Lucknow.

The country was horrified by the gruesome tragedy, but there was no immediate sense then that the incident at Godhra was to become one of the most corrosive ruptures in our nation’s recent history. As 24-hour news channels across the country played and replayed the gory and traumatic pictures, tension mounted. Angry — and valid — questions were asked. How did the fire start? Who were the perpetrators? Was it an accident or an act of arson? If arson, was it preplanned or spontaneous?

The horrific deaths at Godhra cried out for the truth. And justice. Gujarat, already fragmented, already simmering with latent communal hostility, now brimmed with a dangerous and restive anger. What people had needed then was justice, the uncompromised truth — and a healing touch from their government.

Instead, within a few hours, the incident at Godhra — heinous as it already was — began to be converted into a lethal communal hacksaw. The charred bodies were taken from hospitals and paraded in emotive processions across the state. The 59 dead were not allowed the dignity of individual identities, but morphed into one terrifying, unified, rage-inducing idea: Hindu
karsevaks murdered by Muslims. And in less than 12 hours — even before the first tentative facts could be established, even before the police had registered their first FIR, even while the post mortems of the dead were still on — Chief Minister Narendra Modi issued a press release declaring war: “The abominable event that has occurred at Godhra does not befit any civilized society,” he said. “This is not a mere communal event but a one-sided collective terrorist attack by one community.”

The first of the fires began to burn that night itself. Over the next three days, more than 2,000 Muslims were killed. Hacked, shot, burnt, raped. Thousands of Muslim houses were burned, dozens of mosques desecrated. The rhetoric of hate reached a fever pitch. They had it coming, Modi said.

The truth about Godhra underlies everything cataclysmic that happened afterwards. The truth about Godhra underlies one of the most dangerous and polarising faultlines in India. The truth about Godhra underlies the very way we see ourselves as a nation.

For five years, Modi — and the political spectrum he represents — has sought moral refuge in the claim that the genocide in Gujarat was a spontaneous reaction to a premeditated action. For five years, he and his government have claimed that the incident in Godhra was not a spontaneous burst of mob fury that got out of hand, but a conspiracy pre-planned by significant religious and political Muslim leaders. For five years, the Modi administration’s justification of the pogrom in Gujarat has largely hinged on the culpability of eight men: the president of the Godhra Municipal Council, Mohammad Hussain Kalota Shaikh; four Muslim corporators — Bilal Haji, Farooq Mohammad Bhana, Salim Shaikh and Abdul Rahman Dhantiya; two Muslim advocates — Rol Amin Hussain Hathila and Habib Karim Shaikh; and the local religious head, Maulvi Umarji.

For five years, the people, the courts, and the press have been told that they are the killers. It is the entire basis of Modi’s action-reaction theory. Subtract these eight religious and political figures from the list of 134 accused in the Sabarmati Express fire and what remains are sundry hawkers, labourers and truck drivers. Subtract the political and religious names from the list of Godhra accused and what remains is a criminal but spontaneous act of arson. Subtract the political and religious angle to the Godhra tragedy, and Modi’s diabolic action-reaction theory comes crashing down.

So were these eight men culpable?

Some political groups and some sections of civil society have claimed that Modi himself was behind the blaze in Godhra. They claim he got coach S-6 burned so that he could orchestrate a pogrom and reap its political dividends.

Is that the truth?

TEHELKA undertook a six-month long investigation to get at the truth of what really happened in Godhra. The painstaking investigation uncovered a web of lies entwined with truth, a mash of fact served up with fiction. Our quest shocked us: not because the truth was hard to find, but because it was in abundance, it was everywhere, in case papers, in statements of survivors, out in the streets. Our quest shocked us: not because the truth itself is shocking, but because the elaborate and malicious way in which it has been subverted is. What we found tears at the status quo and demands redressal. It proves everything Modi and his government have been claiming is a lie. Not just an ordinary lie, but a deliberate and manufactured one. Executed through bribery and coercion.

This is the story of what we found. As always, the truth is in the details.