WHY GUJARAT, 2002, STILL MATTERS

MODI WOULD NOT CONFRONT THE HINDU RIGHT IF DOING so threatened his own popularity. He calculated that he needed young, nationalist volunteers to help him to win elections, though he also hoped to appeal to mainstream voters. So, as one shrewd commentator put it in 2016, Modi routinely exploited “strategic ambiguity” in failing to confront or curb extremist supporters, even if he did not offer them outright, public support. The most shameful example of this came relatively early in his career, not long after he was first appointed as chief minister in Gujarat. At the time he was politically vulnerable. He faced an imminent election to retain his post. Relatively isolated and disliked, Modi was threatened by rival factions within his Bharatiya Janata Party who hoped he would fail in his first post. Naturally, opposition parties also hoped he would stumble. That isolation perhaps helped to explain—but could not justify—his actions and failures in February and March 2002.

Under his initially impassive gaze, and in the face of inaction or worse from many police, Hindu extremists clashed with Muslims and carried out massacres in his state. At least a thousand people were killed. By some estimates many more died, but police, some of whom were complicit, hid body parts and destroyed evidence. Most victims were in cities such as Ahmedabad, where communication was clear, police were available, and the political control of state apparatus should have functioned perfectly well. Victims were not, by and large, killed in remote villages or out of sight. Murders generally took place in public. Given the advent of rolling television news in India, a horrified country watched on. The pogroms of 2002—and Modi’s failures to stop them early, to explain in detail his role as they unfolded, or to express convincing regret for what happened—left many to conclude that, whatever his general virtues, he was a dangerously flawed man.

Not all Muslim Gujaratis disliked Modi. Some people wanted to focus on the years of stability that followed in his state, until his departure in 2014, and they pointed to violence and attacks that happened well before 2002, too. Others said what really mattered was his economic record, and fretting about political violence was a distraction. For example, a Muslim dealer in luxury cars who had long profited from close ties with Modi praised his leader’s “iron fist” and said that “Muslims in Gujarat are the best off in India.” (He was later rewarded for his loyalty with a government post at a university.) A few suggested that Modi, however culpable for 2002, had learned from the carnage and so would never let it happen again.

But many in Gujarat and beyond were not at ease. An outspoken Californian of Gujarati descent who had lived in Ahmedabad, the main city of Gujarat, for over a decade, said the events of 2002 proved Modi was a monster. Zahir Janmohamed had a goatee and a flop of lanky hair and spoke of his years of working in a Muslim ghetto of 400,000 people, Juhapura, within the city. We walked its streets and he described neglect and poverty, how small manufacturers struggled despite wealth elsewhere in the city, and how residents felt discriminated against. He suggested that “two thousand children in just my area” had no school to attend and told of officials who refused to issue building permits or failed to supply basic services like water or sewerage to Muslim areas. Some officials ordered structures demolished, then collected bribes to leave them standing, he said. Intense suspicion persisted between members of rival religions in a fractured city. Hindu taxi drivers would not enter this Muslim area.

Zahir happened to be living with a Hindu family in February 2002, when trouble erupted. Their biggest concern at first was being prevented from seeing a new Star Wars film at the cinema. But in Muslim areas, such as Juohapura, anguish was extreme from the start and continued for years. The killings were not spontaneous, or a “four-day orgy of violence, it was a project, part of a constant pattern of fear,” he said, suggesting that Gujarat’s government under Modi had continued “intimidating the Muslims and those who would dissent” for years after the pogrom. Though Gujarat had been calm for years after 2002, he refused to see that as progress: “If there is fear, is that peace?” Muslims were 5 million of the approximately 60 million people in the state, he said, and many felt vulnerable. “People fear it could happen again. So they make sure they live near fellow Muslims. This is not a climate where you can criticize.” As an activist, when he wrote about Muslim-Hindu relations, how the city was divided between religions, he said he got “death threats and crazy phone calls from Modi supporters.” “Good Muslims,” he said, were told to be subservient, to “move on” and forget the massacres: “A Muslim businessman would make sure to put up a picture of Modi in his office. Present himself as a ‘rational Muslim.’”

If you discussed what happened in 2002 with Modi and his backers, then, naturally, you heard a different view. They did not talk of organized pogroms or massacres, but implied the violence was on a relatively small scale, or was near spontaneous, or even-handed between religious groups. They alleged the existence of a campaign to vilify their leader. When I raised the issue of the killings with Modi, he said he must be judged “in toto” and not only by his response to the violence: “Then you will understand everything, but if you have any problem with 2002 then I am helpless, I can’t help you.” Yet he spoke about anything but those events. He said his electoral popularity made them irrelevant, as if elections magically wiped away stains of the past. “I always welcome criticism,” he said, but “this question has no use.… I have faced ten general elections in my state. The people always supported me. So I have completed this examination with distinction marks.”

The courts also found Modi guilty of nothing, but then it was extremely rare for judges in India to convict the most powerful of anything. His backers said that even worse bloodshed happened elsewhere and that no other politician had faced the same degree of scrutiny. In 1984, in Delhi and Punjab, mobs linked to the Indian National Congress had butchered several thousand Sikhs as police, under control of politicians, watched or guided the killers. That violence occurred after two Sikh bodyguards assassinated Indira Gandhi, India’s prime minister. Congress politicians, including some senior figures active in party politics three decades later, abetted the revenge murders—for example, by identifying Sikh homes from the voters’ roll. Only a few junior politicians were ever tried. Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded his mother as prime minister, sounded callous when asked about the murders, saying that “when a big tree falls, the earth shakes.”

Those killings did not make later events in Gujarat under Modi any less troubling, however. As for political parties, the context mattered. Congress was not a movement traditionally hostile to Sikhs or other minorities. By contrast the RSS and Hindu nationalists had long pushed anti-Muslim views—expressed since Savarkar or earlier. Modi as a young politician had helped to organize yatras (political pilgrimages) to sensitive locations, knowing that these would stir up tension between Hindus and Muslims. In 1990 he helped to arrange one to Ayodhya, a site in Uttar Pradesh, north India, where Hindus claimed that a five-hundred-year-old mosque was built on a ruined temple. Two years later Hindu fanatics demolished the mosque, provoking religious clashes that killed over two thousand people. That ugly period coincided with the BJP’s rise as a national force, as the party whipped up Hindu nationalist support. Vinod Jose, a journalist who studied Modi’s early career, argued that this context matters: Congress leaders “don’t come from an ideology built on hatred, whereas the civilizational goals of the RSS and Modi imagine an India of two thousand years ago,” he said.

No single violent religious clash is simple to explain. It typically involves political interests as much as religious ones, as those with power stoke up and exploit religious and social troubles. Such clashes, as happened in Gujarat, often take place just before an election. The goal might be to intimidate opponents, or to rally and unite kinsmen behind one’s party, perhaps in response to a provocation. The first victims in Gujarat in 2002 were Hindus, pilgrims—or yatris—who were returning by train after celebrating the tenth anniversary of the mosque’s destruction in Ayodhya. At a station in a town called Godhra, some of them reportedly behaved badly; some sources said they were harassing local people. But nothing could justify what followed. A mob from a Muslim area attacked the Sabarmati Express, pelting it with stones, smashing windows as it tried to pull away. A court later ruled that the attackers had thrown burning petrol-soaked rags on board and locked doors from the outside. By one estimate, they poured sixty liters of flammable liquid into the carriages. In the flames fifty-nine people, including children, were killed. The attack appeared to have been prepared in advance, given the availability of fuel. Nine years later, a court convicted thirty-one men for committing a “planned conspiracy” and sentenced eleven of them to hang.

Nothing, in turn, could justify the much larger retaliatory slaughter. Modi rushed to the railway station knowing that he faced a career-defining test of authority. He must have felt exposed, because many colleagues neither liked nor trusted him. A decade and more after the events, few high-ranking participants in this event were willing to discuss Modi’s role in detail. But one witness, Sanjiv Bhatt, a stocky man with muscled arms, spoke at length in his home in Ahmedabad. Over tea in a conservatory, an armed policeman at his front gate, he explained that he was the state intelligence officer who had “looked after internal security of Gujarat” before, during, and after the slaughter. “I saw Modi almost daily” at this time, he said, claiming to have “had a window into his mind.” He had since turned against his old boss, whom he called “paranoid, very insecure.”

Bhatt’s account was disputed, but it is worth sharing not least because of the prolonged efforts to shut him up and—since Modi came to national office—to punish him. (He filed an affidavit with India’s Supreme Court accusing Modi of wrongdoing that was rejected, and he was forced out of the police service in 2015.) Bhatt said that at the charred scene at the station in Godhra, members of a Hindu nationalist group allied to the RSS, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) formed a mob of their own. “Modi was physically beaten at the railway station,” claimed Bhatt, saying the chief minister had to be rushed to safety in the car of the health minister as the enraged crowd accused him of failing to crack down on Muslim attackers. “Shaken to the core, Modi thought that with so many Hindus killed on his watch, he’d lose his job,” said Bhatt. “He had to deflect their anger.”

Modi said publicly that the Godhra attack was an act of planned terrorism, and some newspapers spread false claims of rapes of Hindu women by Muslim attackers or fake stories of Muslims who supported terrorists from Pakistan. (A day after the attack, Modi on state television, exhausted, called those who burned the train “cannibals.”) On the night of the Godhra attack, Modi took two decisions that were almost certain to make the situation worse. The VHP had demanded a state-wide bandh—a strike-cum-protest—which the BJP supported. Modi should have blocked it to discourage more violence. India’s Supreme Court had previously ruled that such strikes were unconstitutional, and Modi’s responsibility as chief minister was to preserve order and safety. But Modi, evidently reluctant to confront Hindu extremists, let it proceed. He also agreed to let dozens of train victims’ burnt corpses be brought by road to Ahmedabad, in what amounted almost to a public procession.

Bhatt said he was at a meeting with Modi on the evening of the train attack and found him to be “disturbed” and “shaken.” (Those who dispute Bhatt’s account denied he was there; phone records that would have helped to prove it, mysteriously, disappeared.) Bhatt said he told the chief minister the bandh and transport of corpses would be “very likely to mean violence. I warned Modi at the meeting that the lumpen element would feel this was a government-sponsored bandh call. I also warned against bringing the bodies from Godhra to Ahmedabad. I told Modi it was a virtual tinder box. Modi heard us out. Then he said ‘there is so much anger in the people we will have to let them vent.’ He refused to withdraw the bandh, or reverse the bringing of bodies. I could foresee what would go on, then I left the meeting.”

Bhatt’s version was unproven. Modi denied saying that people must “vent,” as that would have implied giving permission for retaliatory violence. But what followed was devastating. Especially in mixed religious areas in Ahmedabad, victims were butchered in the street or their homes, attacked because they were Muslim. Bhatt described passing a broken-down car of four elderly Muslims on a flyover and returning to find them all killed soon afterward. He said he saved a Muslim policeman from a mob, as other policemen stood by, inactive. Some police were heroic, and perhaps 200 officers were among those killed. However in many cases police and politicians did nothing; some joined the killers. Over 1,000 people died, at least two-thirds of them Muslims. Around 18,000 homes were destroyed and nearly 170,000 people were displaced, mostly Muslims. Documentary video, recorded days after the killings, showed residents talking about carefully organized violence. One woman interviewed explained that “everyone had a sword in one hand and a mobile phone in the other”; she added that the attackers were members of the RSS, or from the wider Hindu nationalist Sangh movement, and “they wore bands, shorts, and had swords.”

The dismembering and murder of a Muslim ex-MP (among many others) at his home in a walled cluster of middle-class bungalows and apartments were especially shocking. Others had sheltered with him at a complex known as the Gulberg Society, hoping that his political status offered safety. A chanting mob surrounded them for hours as the MP desperately phoned fellow politicians around the country, begging them to ask Gujarat’s authorities to send protection. He reportedly phoned Modi himself. Modi certainly got calls and reports about the threats at the MP’s home. Bhatt said he personally told Modi about the situation and understood from his reply that the chief minister knew in detail what was happening. Yet Modi failed to get the police to help at the Gulberg Society, and he did not prevent the mass murder that followed as buildings were torched and people were chased and stabbed. At that site 69 people were killed. Another massacre, Naroda Patiya, took 96 victims, with some people chased into pits and burnt. Probably more were killed, but police dumped body parts.¹

Modi, as the man in charge, clearly had some responsibility. He did appear on television a day after the train burning to tell Gujaratis not to “take the law in their hands,” saying there was no place for retaliatory violence in civilized society, and that “venting anger is not the solution.” He said that the “need of the hour is to maintain peace and self-discipline,” to avoid violence, to have “a Gujarat whose future does not get lost, for a Gujarat that does not have to carry the burden of a black moment in its history,” and he told people to “maintain peace and harmony.” Any punishment must be “through the legal route,” he said. Eventually he called for help from the army.

Yet Modi acted late and did too little. He should have ordered an immediate curfew and prevented the bandh and the public movement of corpses that helped to enrage public opinion. He should have given the police sufficiently clear, early, public instructions to prevent violence. He should have faced down the Hindu nationalist groups, such as the VHP, despite their fury over the Godhra attacks. Human Rights Watch in April 2002 blamed officials under his direct control, saying they had “actively supported” massacres. India’s human-rights commission described a “comprehensive failure” of his government. Sonia Gandhi, Congress’s leader, accused Modi’s officials of “deliberate connivance” with the attackers. The national Supreme Court in 2004 said Gujarat’s rulers were “modern-day Neros” who let killings spread while “deliberating how the perpetrators of the crime can be protected.” In 2005 America’s government made clear that Modi could no longer travel there, saying he was responsible for the performance of state institutions in the pogroms; many European countries imposed a similar, but unofficial, boycott on Modi.

Shankersinh Vaghela, a bitter rival and a senior RSS figure who defected to the Indian National Congress, blamed Modi personally, calling him “arrogant, cruel, a criminal.” As a former chief minister himself, he said he knew Modi had sufficient means to prevent the massacres, or to cut them short once they began, but he did not use them decisively. “If you are chief minister, with all kinds of powers… you own the state, the machinery, the police department,” he said, in his home in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. He implied that Modi made a political calculation to let violence happen, because confronting the VHP, the RSS, and powerful Hindu nationalist extremists would have ended his political career. Victims, such as the wife of the murdered MP, listed thirty allegations, claiming that Modi told officials they should not stop mobs of Hindu extremists.

Judging only by what courts found later, in Gujarat and elsewhere, was problematic. In long-running cases in India, witnesses are often induced, coerced, or exhausted into giving up on a prosecution. Surabhi Chopra, a human-rights lawyer, and her colleagues have documented how states respond to investigations into mass violence, including in Gujarat after 2002.² They showed how badly courts function, and how police, governments, and others can scupper legal processes—police fail to record criminal charges, evidence is destroyed, prosecution teams are deliberately bad, witnesses are persuaded to change testimony, and the process becomes so slow that many participants give up. When police or other state officials are accused, unsurprisingly they are least likely to conduct a thorough investigation or prosecution.

Periods of disregard for the law in Gujarat, as elsewhere, were also well established. Those in power at times approved “encounter killings,” when police staged a shoot-out with suspected criminals and executed them rather than go through a tedious legal process. In Gujarat under Modi, high-profile police murders often targeted Muslims, including suspected gangsters. In 2004, for example, police killed four Muslims, including a nineteen-year-old woman, saying they were Pakistani-backed assassins plotting to kill Modi. Five years later, a court ruled that they had been illegally executed and found no evidence of planned terrorism. Modi made little effort to hide his views on such killings. A television journalist, Shekhar Gupta, once asked him about 183 murders by his police: over 100 of the victims were Muslim, a fact he airily dismissed. At a state election rally in 2007, noted Andrew Buncombe, India correspondent for Britain’s Independent newspaper, Modi bragged about the murders of suspected gangsters. “Does my government need to take permission from Sonia [Gandhi]?” he asked a crowd of BJP fans, apparently referring to the police killing of a Muslim gangster. Buncombe says they chanted in response, “kill, kill, kill.”

Modi’s supporters called such episodes old hat, no different from events in other states. Yet there was obvious reason for concern that India’s prime minister—in his own words—carried the “burden of a black moment in [his] history.” Modi also kept questionable company. His nearest ally was a fellow politician, Amit Shah, perhaps the only figure whom Modi really trusted. Yet Shah was one of the most notorious politicians in India. He was arrested in 2010 in connection with the police murder of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, a suspected extortionist. Gujarat’s police had detained Sheikh and his wife in 2005, then killed them both. A year later police killed a witness to their murders, Tulsiram Prajapati. It was Shah who ran the home ministry that controlled the police. He was charged with murder, extortion, and kidnapping and told by a court to leave Gujarat, to prevent intimidation of witnesses. Yet his political career did not suffer, thanks to Modi. A journalist friend in Surat, Gujarat, who knows Shah, calls him “Modi’s shield,” valued because he solved problems, protected his boss, and took control of a “vagabond law machinery in Gujarat.” Soon after Modi became prime minister in 2014, Shah was appointed as national president of the ruling BJP. It was the first time someone charged with murder had assumed such a senior post, an unedifying moment in Indian history. In 2016 his position was renewed for three more years.

Courts did eventually jail over one hundred people for murders in Gujarat in 2002, which counted as a high degree of accountability for political violence. In June 2016, for example, twenty-four people were convicted for the massacre at the Gulberg Society. The legal successes were partly thanks to efforts to gather evidence by an indomitable activist in Gujarat called Teesta Setalvad. She was later harassed and threatened with prosecution, over alleged irregularities in how her organization was funded, after Modi became prime minister. Ten years after the killings, a court in Ahmedabad had convicted thirty-two people for the murders at Naroda Patiya. The most prominent defendant was Mayaben Kodnani, a BJP lawmaker who had been seen distributing weapons, urging on killers, and firing a pistol. The trial judge called her a “kingpin of the entire communal riot” and jailed her for twenty-eight years. Kodnani’s crimes were extremely well known long before her arrest in 2009. However, a few years after the pogroms, Modi had appointed this “kingpin” as one of his ministers in Gujarat. As for serving her twenty-eight-year sentence, she spent little time behind bars. A couple of months after Modi became prime minister, in July 2014, Kodnani was released on “bail” from prison, on health grounds.

Modi was questioned but was found guilty of nothing. A Special Investigations Team of the Supreme Court cleared him of the thirty allegations leveled by the wife of the murdered ex-MP. Testimony by Bhatt was ruled unreliable. Potentially important phone records disappeared; many presumably had been destroyed by officials to muddy the legal investigation. A minister in Modi’s government, who disliked his boss and had been involved in the violence himself, had secretly told activists in May 2002 that Modi behaved just as Bhatt later claimed. But such hearsay carried no legal weight. Nor would the minister ever offer acceptable testimony: two unknown assailants shot him dead in Ahmedabad, one morning in 2003.

Modi became India’s prime minister without offering explicit regret or explaining his actions during the crucial days in 2002. Yet, judging by Modi’s behavior in the months and years after the killings, he could hardly say later that he lamented the bloodshed. Among the Hindu majority in Gujarat his popularity had soared after the massacres, so he called a state election as soon as possible. At a rally he appeared to mock Muslim victims, once asking his supporters sarcastically about displaced families and appearing to refer to the high birthrates of Muslims displaced by the violence: “Should we run relief camps? Should I start children-producing centers there?” he asked. Many Gujaratis would deny the seriousness of the violence. Footage from a rally in 2002 showed Modi talking of “sixty innocent Rambhakts [pilgrims] burnt alive in Godhra,” then asking the crowd, sarcastically, if anyone present had burnt shops in retaliation. “Did you stab or behead anyone?… Did you rape anyone?” he called out, earning cheers of “No… No.” He said those who spoke of violence in Gujarat were “defaming” the state, as “enemies of Gujarat go around saying that each village was in flames. In each village, people were being killed… their heads smashed. They have defamed Gujarat so much.”

Modi won an enormous victory in those state polls, not despite the killings but because of them. Zahir Janmohamed in Ahmedabad said “nobody here thinks Modi is innocent, they know what he did and they are okay with that.” Modi for a time paid a political price beyond Gujarat. Delhi-based television journalist Karan Thapar recalled interviewing Modi in 2007, a rare event, and focusing on the pogroms, saying he was called a “mass murderer” and accused of crude anti-Muslim prejudice—for example, as a “poster boy of hate.” Modi pulled off his microphone and stormed out mid-interview. Thapar later said “2002 was a searing experience for Modi, he became a pariah”—but only for a time. Modi learned to deflect questions about his ugly past and, by refusing to discuss the events, got others to focus their attention elsewhere.

When he ran for national office, Modi addressed the topic only briefly. Asked by Reuters if he had regrets over 2002, he spoke of a general, passive capacity for sorrow, comparing his reaction to the mass slaughter to feeling sad if a car ran over a dog. He said he had done “absolutely the right thing” as chief minister: “Any person if we are driving a car [or] someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind, even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will [it] be painful or not? Of course, it is. If I’m a chief minister or not, I’m a human being. If something bad happens anywhere, it is natural to be sad.” He had said to me that elections somehow had wiped his conscience clean. He implied that he could not be held responsible because voters liked him. It was a warped logic. Elected leaders are supposed to represent, and protect, all in their state—not just those who support them.

Nonetheless, other actors eventually adjusted to deal with Modi. America’s treatment of Modi went through great swings of change. Despite his various trips to America as a young politician, relations cooled after the pogroms of 2002. Diplomatic cables, published by WikiLeaks, revealed intense American hostility over the religious violence. For years, diplomats summed up Gujarat’s chief minister as a dangerous demagogue, calling him authoritarian, intolerant, and prone to exploiting hostility toward minority Muslims for political gain. America’s State Department scrapped his visa because he was a foreign government official held “responsible for particularly serious violations of others’ religious freedoms.” Administrators quoted an official Indian report on the pogroms, describing the “comprehensive failure” of his government in Gujarat. Modi called the ban “an insult” and “an attack on Indian sovereignty.” Diplomats quoted dissidents from Modi’s party who talked of his “dictatorial and arbitrary style of functioning” and called him a “religious bigot.” They quoted Indian newspapers calling Modi a “poster boy of hate.”

American repositioning toward Modi followed later, as diplomats saw Modi thrive. Early on in Gujarat he did well by stirring up the Hindu majority against the Muslim minority. In 2006 the American consul general in Mumbai said “Modi remains immensely popular among the state’s non-Muslim voters,” and Hindu voters in Gujarat liked that Modi had “put Muslims into their place.” Voters were also pleased by his “Hindutva agenda” and liked that Modi used “administrative tools to marginalize and ghettoize the Muslim minority.” The American diplomats accepted that “Modi can be charming and likable” in public, but said he “is an insular, distrustful person who rules with a small group of advisers.… He reigns more by fear and intimidation than by inclusiveness and consensus, and is rude, condescending, and often derogatory to even high-level party officials. He hoards power and often leaves his ministers in the cold when making decisions that affect their portfolios.” One cable added that Modi’s “abrasive” style left him isolated, inspired no loyalty, and provoked many opponents because “his friends are his enemies.”

Then as Gujarat got richer, and the politician matured and focused on economic growth, America’s diplomats warmed up. By 2009 they were asking if Modi would be India’s prime minister, calling him a “star campaigner” and “the best ‘brand manager’ India has seen.” The diplomats said “few politicians in India evoke the strength of feeling Modi does, and few exemplify the entwining of two major themes in modern India—communalism and economic development—as him.” Those two themes persisted when he was prime minister.

Before the 2014 election, America’s ambassador to India was given the task of visiting Modi, in February—an event at which flowers were exchanged and America, in effect, gave its blessing to him as a legitimate candidate to lead the country. That did not bring an end to uneasiness over his past, let alone an assumption that problems would not reemerge in the future. Obama warned him at the end of his 2015 trip to India, for example, saying Modi should do more to promote religious tolerance and respect for minorities.

One lesson for the nation stemming from Gujarat in 2002, from Modi’s behavior afterward, and from voters in 2014 was that being counted by many as responsible for political violence does not make one unelectable. Yet for the long-term stability of Indian society, there were concerns. Some, such as people who belonged to minority religions, worried about future instability. Modi and Shah had become the most powerful politicians in India, but they never felt they had to explain their roles in Gujarat, nor that they had fully to disavow what had happened. This circumstance did not guarantee that wider intolerance, or new violence, would rise again. But it raised serious doubts about Modi’s character and how he might behave if troubles did recur.