Gujarat HC rejects Zakia Jafri’s plea against Narendra Modi in 2002 riots case

Ahmedabad: The Gujarat high court on Thursday rejected a petition filed by Zakia Jafri that challenged a clean chit given by the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT) to then-chief minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi and other top politicians and bureaucrats. Jafri, whose husband, a former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri, was among 69 people who got killed in the Gulbarg massacre in 2002, had alleged that there was a larger conspiracy in the riots that took place in the state then. On 27 February 2002, a train coach was set on fire at Godhra in Gujarat, killing 57 Hindu pilgrims who were returning from Ayodhya. The train fire triggered one of the country’s worst communal riots in the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was then chief minister of Gujarat. The court while rejecting Jafri’s allegation of a larger conspiracy, however, allowed her to challenge the lower court’s decision that said it had no power to direct the SIT to further probe the matter. Jafri and activist Teesta Setalvad’s NGO Citizen for Justice and Peace blamed Modi and 57 others for their inaction to contain post-Godhra riots. Jafri had earlier approached the Supreme Court which told SIT, led by former CBI chief R.K. Raghvan, to re-investigate riot-related cases in Gujarat, including Gulbarg massacre case. The Supreme Court had in September 2011 referred the matter to a local court in Ahmedabad. The SIT, in its closure report in February 2012, had given a clean chit to Modi and others. In December the following year, the metropolitan magistrate’s court in Ahmedabad rejected Jafri’s petition challenging the SIT report. Following this, she moved the high court in 2014. The court had upheld SIT’s report which said that no offence had been established against any of the 58 people listed in Jafri’s complaint. Meanwhile a special court in June 2016 found 24 people guilty in connection with the 2002 Gulbarg Society massacre case. While 11 were convicted for murder, 13 were found guilty of lesser offences, including rioting, but not murder. The court also acquitted 36 people, including a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) councillor and a police inspector while holding that the Gulbarg massacre “was not a pre-planned conspiracy”. The SIT had, during the course of a trial that had begun in 2009 after the team was constituted, submitted that the massacre would have been a pre-planned conspiracy as the rioters had targeted the minority-dominated housing colony in the area. The defence, however, had refuted the conspiracy theory and claimed that the mob had resorted to violence only after Jafri fired at the crowd from his weapon.