Raja.Pakistani
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- Feb 27, 2011
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The long-awaited judgment of the Ahmedabad Special Court on the Godhra train burning was delivered on February 22, nearly nine years after the ghastly incident in which 59 Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya in the Sabarmati Express were burnt at the Godhra Railway Station. The court acquitted 63 of the persons accused of the conspiracy to burn the compartment carrying those pilgrims, including one of the main accused, Maulvi Omerjee. It upheld the charge of criminal conspiracy against the other 31 accused persons.
The judgment of the Ahmedabad Special Court is unlikely to lay the controversy about the Godhra tragedy to rest and the judgment will almost certainly be appealed. The judgment goes against the findings of an earlier enquiry commission headed by a former Supreme Court Justice, Mr. U.C. Bannerjee who, in 2005 who reported that the burning of the train was an accident. Mr Bannerjee stands by his findings despite the special court verdict and has said, "I stand by my report 200 per cent that it was an accidental fire in a coach of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra station on February 27, 2002, and I will not deviate from that,"
The Godhra incident is important not only because it caused the tragic death of 59 people but also because it unleashed a communal fury of horrible retaliation in Ahmedabad and elsewhere in Gujarat resulting in the death of 1200 innocent people, mostly Muslims. It is therefore important to understand the real reasons what happened at the Godhra Railway Station on that fateful day in February 2002 and why?
To genesis of the Godhra tragedy lies in the traumatic incident that shook the Indian nation and its communal peace on 6th December, 1992. On that black day in the Indian and Hindu history, a mob of frenzied Hindus illegally tore down the famous Babri Masjid at Ayodhya while the police looked on as spectators. The Masjid was the subject of a long-standing legal dispute, dating back to the British period, over the ownership of the title to the land on which the Masjid was built. The Hindus claimed that the masjid was built during Babars rule on the place of birth of the Hindu Lord Ram by demolishing a temple dedicated to him. The demolition of Babri masjid led to spontaneous protests and rioting in Bombay and shattered the communal peace in India.
After the demolition of Babri Masjid, militant Hindu groups started work on the construction of a Ram Mandir at Ayodhya. The task of pre-fabricating material for construction of the mandir was undertaken by Hindu volunteers from other parts of India. These volunteers, called Karsevaks, came by trains and returned after spending short periods of doing volunteer work. Among the train carrying frequent groups of karsevaks was the Sabarmati Express train from Gujarat, which made a stop at Godhra. It was alleged that the karsevaks were quite noisy and had a practice of raising provocative slogans against Muslims when the trains stopped at the Godhra station.
When the train compartment carrying karsevaks was burnt, the initial media reports suggested provocative actions of the karsevaks as the cause of the burning. In particular, it was reported that some of the karsevaks harassed an old Muslim tea-seller on the platform and teased his young daughter. The reports did not have Muslims denying that they burnt the train but claimed that they were provoked into this act by the harassment of the karsevaks. The police registered a case of conspiracy against 94 Muslims of Godhra and it is that case whose verdict was announced on February 22.
The enquiry into the case took a political turn when a new government was elected in 2004. In one of his first acts after assuming office, the new Railway Minister, Lalu Prasad, ordered a panel to enquire into the train burning incident and appointed a retired supreme court judge, U.C. Bannerjee, to head the commission. From the very beginning the appointment, the panel was mired in controversy and was widely seen as a politically driven move by Lalu Prasad to help him with the Muslim vote in the forthcoming elections in his home state of Bihar. The panel was declared illegal by the Gujarat High Court, which itself was not viewed beyond suspicion. The Bannerjee Panel took only a few weeks to confirm Lalu Prasads speculation that the burning of the compartment was the result of an accident caused by the karsevaks themselves. The report was timed to be released before the Bihar elections and was indeed used by Lalu who said that he would rake up the report on the Godhra train burning incident during the elections to expose the "fascist agenda" of the BJP-RSS. The report was widely criticized and people quickly found holes in it such as if it was an accident why did the people not rush out of the compartment instead of getting burnt.
In conclusion, it seems that while the courts verdict of a conspiracy to burn the train is correct, the real blame for the tragic incident lies with the railway police which took no action against the karsevaks repeated provocations against Muslims and resulted in them taking the law into their own hands. It would also seem that the wounds caused by the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the Godhra incident and its aftermath in Gujarat are finally beginning to heal. The judgments on both the Ayodhya land dispute and the Godhra incident have been received with calm by both the media and the various communal groups.
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