New Delhi: In the morning of February 28, 2002, a day after communal violence started in the state of Gujarat after a train coach along with its passengers, mainly Hindu worshippers, was burnt down at the Godhra railway station, a frenzied mob started gathering outside the Gulbarg Society, a cluster of 29 bungalows and 10 apartment buildings housing upper middle class families mostly belonging to the Muslim community, in Ahmedabad city’s Hindu-dominated Chamanpura area, and began shouting Hindu right-wing slogans.
The residents were scared and took refuge in the home of a former Congress MP in his 70s, Ehsan Jafri. According to eye-witnesses like Imtiyaz Pathan, the former MP kept on frantically calling the police and political leaders including Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi for help.
By noon, the mob had turned violent and it breached the boundary wall and started torching houses and attacking residents. In the next six hours, 69 people were dead including Ehasan Jafri who was hacked to death and burnt alive as were at least 35 other victims. Around 90 more people were seriously injured.
The Supreme Court, on March 26, 2008, ordered the Narendra Modi government to re-investigate 10 cases in the 2002 Gujarat riots, including the Gulbarg Society incident.
Zakiya Jafri, wife of Ehsan Jafri, had earlier lodged a complaint on June 8, 2006 alleging that the police had not registered the FIRs against Narendra Modi and 62 others including several ministers. She alleged that there was a well-planned conspiracy to allow the massacre of Muslims in which policemen and bureaucrats were ordered not to respond to pleas for help from the victims.
She approached the Gujarat High Court with her complaint, which on November 3, 2007, refused to entertain her plea, and instead asked her to present the case before magistrate’s court.
Subsequently, she approached the Supreme Court which on April 27, 2009 appointed a five-member Special Investigation Team (SIT), headed by former CBI head R K Raghavan, to probe these cases and asked the SIT to look into her complaint of collusion of the state machinery and the rioters.
In March 2009, Congress leader Meghsingh Chaudhary was held for active participation in the Gulbarg Society massacre. In March 2010, SIT summoned Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi to clarify things. Earlier, R B Sreekumar, who was additional DG Intelligence at the time, deposed before a commission that ministers and police were “deliberately inactive during the riots”.
Roopa Modi and Imtiyaz Pathan, both eye-witnesses, testified against Modi in the trial court. Imtiyaz identified 20 of the 100 accused persons arrested in the case.
Eyewitness who appeared before the SIT in December 2009, namely, Imtiyaz Pathan, Saeedkhan Pathan, Roopa Mody, Saira Sandhi and Rafiq Pathan named joint commissioner of police M K Tandon and Meghaninagar police inspector N D Parmar, Manish Patel alias Splendor, Mahendra Pukhraj, Jagroopsinh Rajput, Inio Harijan, Babu Marwadi and Rajesh Jinger, a constable residing in the same area, as accused.
In March 2010, Gulbarg Society case trial was stayed by the Supreme Court after the special public prosecutor R K Shah resigned after accusing the trial judge and SIT of being “soft on the accused”.
Activist Teesta Setalvad, in an affidavit filed before the Supreme court in April 2010, showed the phone record analysis which claimed that “Ahmedabad police commissioner P C Pande had spoken to joint commissioner of police M K Tandon six times during the period when the latter was present at Gulbarg Society and the mob was growing restive. Though Tandon was accompanied by striking force equipped to disperse a riotous mob, he left Gulbarg Society without taking any corrective action and his departure led to the massacre”.
In October 2007, a prominent Hindi news channel showed footage of a sting operation carried out by Tehelka wherein 14 VHP or Bajrang Dal activists, including Madan Chawal, a Gulbarg Society massacre accused, and a Bharatiya Janata Party MLA from Godhra, Haresh Bhatt who was national vice-president of Bajrang Dal at that time, were shown talking about the killings and the way the state machinery collaborated with them.
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