Editor’s Note: The 2002 Gujarat Riots cannot be deleted from Indian political history nor the names of Zakia Ehsan and Ehsan Jafri. A heart ranching piece penned by Revati Laul, a journalist, activist, and author titled “Khuda Hafiz Zakia Behn, Nobody Spells Justice Like You” published by the Quint reminds us of one of the bravest women of the contemporary era who did not leave courage till her death. The article is reproduced hereunder with the permission of the publisher
“Khuda Hafiz Zakia Behn, Nobody Spells Justice Like You”
What is the real test of one’s principles?
Can they hold good when one watches a loved one cut into pieces by a mob, their body parts allegedly fed to them while they were still partially alive, their limbs torn apart and thrown, bit by bit, into a fire?
That is what happened to Zakia Jafri, who watched her husband call the police repeatedly but in vain before being attacked and killed by the mob. The cops never arrived to save him or the others who died in the mob attack that fateful day in 2002 when Gujarat was burning.
If this was to happen to you, what would you do? Would your ideals and belief in the legal justice system still hold?
Would you describe what you saw with painstaking detail, again and again, first to the police, then to a special investigations team, then to one court after the other, for the next 20 years of your life?
What kind of animal courage would you need to face the mob, each time you describe to one judge, then another, what transpired?
We tell each other stories of how some person persevered in the courts and in the end, got justice. We say this to each other as a way of reinforcing our belief that the justice system works. The truth, however, is that justice is as capricious and cruel as life at times.
Zakia’s Grim Truth
In a case that was widely known as the Gulberg Society massacre, 24 accused were eventually convicted by the Supreme Court of India, for the killing of 69 people, including Zakia’s husband Ehsan Jafri.
However, for Zakia, those convicted were only the visible faces of the mob. In her reckoning, they derived courage from the fact that the police did not turn up, which could only happen if the government of the day turned a blind eye to the mob, perhaps with an eye on politics.
For Zakia, justice would have meant convicting all the persons she held responsible for the massacres that took place in the 2002 riots, including then Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi.
Despite 20 years Zakia and other activists spent trying to put pressure on courts to investigate the political dispensation’s role in the violence, the Supreme Court said in 2022 that there was no evidence linking Modi to the case.
On 1 February 2025, after failing to get what she deemed the proper kind of justice, Zakia passed away. But her conviction is the biggest keeper of the scales of justice. The conviction that one must power on whether or not there is hope of deliverance.
In her death, Zakia has come to embody the side of the scale of justice that we never want to look at. The failure to get what one wants is precisely what holds up the scale.
It is what justice inherently means. The principle of justice is held together by the frightening, brutal reality that in any given scenario if you go to a court of law, you only ever have a fifty percent chance of success. Either side, theoretically speaking, has the chance to win or lose.
Zakia, more than anyone else in India’s recent history, lived this grim truth. She embodied the most difficult end of this principle. If we only hold out because we’re winning, then there is a thin line between us and the mob.
Who Were Zakia and Ehsan Jafri?
Zakia lived in a middle-class colony in the city of Ahmedabad. Her set of flats was called the Gulberg Society. She lived with her husband Ehsan and two children – a son and a daughter.
Ehsan Jafri was a standout politician in a state like Gujarat. He stood for a parliamentary election in 1977, after then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi broke all the rules of justice and democracy and plunged India into a two-year dictatorship. She declared the Emergency, suspending the fundamental rights of citizens and their access to the rule of law.
In the election that took place in 1977, after Emergency rule was withdrawn, Indira Gandhi and the Congress party lost half its seats and the opposition Janata Party won a landslide victory for the first time in independent India’s history. In such a decisively anti-Congress atmosphere, Ehsan Jafri, a Muslim trade unionist and lawyer, contested the election from Ahmedabad and won.
For the rest of his life, Ehsan campaigned volubly and incessantly against the rising tide of communalism, and against the right-wing RSS, the ideological force behind the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), or the Janata Party in a new avatar.
2002 Gujarat Riots
On the 27 February 2002, the S6 coach of the Sabarmati Express train caught fire. It was on its way back to Gujarat from Uttar Pradesh, from the city of Ayodhya. On board the S6 coach of the train were many kar sevaks – Hindus carrying bricks from their villages, to erect a temple in Ayodhya.
It wasn’t clear what happened, but someone pulled the chain, causing the train to stop in the town of Godhra. A skirmish started between some of the kar sevaks and people at the railway station.
The incident soon took a violent turn, and the bogey caught fire. At least 59 kar sevaks were burnt to death, and a story spread that they were killed by Muslims at the Godhra station. If Muslims killed Hindus, then Hindus must retaliate, was the mob justice invoked in two-thirds of the state?
From the next day, 28 February, onwards, Hindu mobs, hungry for revenge, descended on Muslim neighborhoods. In Ahmedabad, about 128 kilometers from where the S6 coach had been burnt, Ehsan Jafri saw a mob approaching his set of flats.
Gulberg Society Massacre
The mob was getting larger and closer to the Gulberg Society, so Ehsan rang the police. Eyewitnesses, including his wife, later reported that the police did not arrive.
Ehsan was then reported to have fired a shot from his own personal gun into the air, hoping to scare away the mob. Instead, what Zakia saw and testified to was that the mob, perhaps incensed by the firing, encircled the Gulberg Society, and eventually got to Ehsan. They dragged him from his home and then used the swords and knives they had on them to cut him to pieces.
The next day, after witnessing the dismemberment of her husband, Zakia Jafri filed a police report. She also went to the media and repeated what she saw to every television channel. She did this year after year, repeating the story of what she saw to the courts, and then to a special investigative team.
On 18 June 2016, 14 years after the massacre, the Supreme Court convicted 24 people, 11 for life, in the Gulberg Society case. However, Zakia’s allegations of the complicity of PM Modi were dismissed. Zakia appealed to the Supreme Court but that too was dismissed in 2022.
The (Un)even Scale of Justice
What was it like, to freeze-frame the butchering of your husband and have to continually replay the moment, for the rest of your life? From preposterous fact, the only way forward with this question, is in the realm of the imagination.
What must it have been like to wake up each day as Zakia? For anyone trying to grapple with the concept of justice, this is a seminal question.
What emotional landscape does one navigate, when anger, trauma, and despair fail to deliver a catharsis? Did Zakia Jafri water the plants in the backyard, did she look at flowers? Did Zakia laugh? Did she buy a new sari? What was it like to open the photograph album on the anniversary of the massacre and to visit the site, year upon year?
These are the parts of the story of justice we hardly ever stop to think about. The hideously mundane chore of living past the butchering. Carrying the pieces of the story to serve up when needed, as accurately as when it first happened in 2002.
What will Zakia’s story finally be, now that she lies buried alongside her husband? Will those who light incense sticks and say a silent prayer, think about the choice each of us must make to keep from turning into the mob?
The choice to report atrocities to the police and repeat the feat forever in one court after another, whether or not we succeed, because that is what justice demands?
The choice to deaden one’s nerves and tell oneself – I will still persevere, if I do not, I am no different from the mob. That punishing life sentence was Zakia’s choice – justice.
