The 2002 Gujarat Violence and the Godhra Fire That Preceded It

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A fire aboard a train at Godhra station in Gujarat on 27 February 2002 killed fifty eight Hindu pilgrims and volunteers who were returning from Ayodhya. A government appointed commission later concluded that local Muslims had deliberately set the fire, a finding other investigations disputed, and Hindu nationalist organizations invoked the deaths the following day to help mobilize what became weeks of anti-Muslim mob violence across the state, concentrated in the first three weeks after the fire but continuing into early April.

Human rights investigations, Human Rights Watch among them, documented organized attack patterns rather than spontaneous rioting: mobs used voter rolls and property records to identify Muslim owned homes and businesses, and the killing that followed was overwhelmingly of Muslim residents of Ahmedabad and other Gujarat cities and towns. Well over one hundred thousand people, the great majority of them Muslim, were displaced into relief camps by violence that human rights organizations have since characterized as a pogrom rather than an unplanned communal riot.