Jaipur, November 15, 2024.
On February 27, 2002, several coaches of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra station caught fire, causing the deaths of 59 people, many of them women and children. The train from Ayodhya, bound for Ahmedabad, was full of ‘karsevaks’ returning after a ceremony held under the aegis of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP). Flames could be seen in four coaches, according to reports, but the worst hit was Coach 6, where the deaths took place.
The horrific incident was followed by three days of rioting in Gujarat: according to several accounts, the number of the dead was well over 2000. The Nanavati-Mehta commission, appointed by the state government, concluded that the fire was the result of a pre-planned arson by a large Muslim mob; the one-member Banerjee commission instituted in 2004 by the government at the Centre declared that it was an accident.
Between these two conclusions lies a vast chasm, and what you believe depends on which side of the divide you are on. Because if there’s one thing that’s for certain in the swirl of communal conspiracy theories is that the riots, amongst the worst the country has witnessed, put into motion cataclysmic changes in the country’s social and political fabric.
Vikrant Massey plays a ‘Hindi reporter’ Samar Kumar who accompanies his ‘English-speaking’ colleague Manika Rajpurohit (Riddhi Dogra) to ‘Ground Zero’ in Godhra. In a flash, without any discernible investigation, both conclude that it was not an accident: ‘aag lagi nahi, lagwaai gayi thi’. It’s never made clear just how the two reach that conclusion, but the film rolls on from there, the former sticking to his stand, the latter abandoning it, because, duh, political pressure.
The truth has been massacred, yells Samar, and everyone has forgotten those who perished in the fire. For the rest of the film, he devotes his energies, helped by newbie reporter Amrita Gill (Raashii Khanna), to get to the bottom of ‘what really happened’. Manika’s declaration that she was going for ‘context and balance’ is seen as a bad thing, the thing that suppresses ‘sacchaii’: the irony of a reporter parachuting onsite, and claiming his conviction as the only truth is steamrolled in over-long exploration-and-exposition, in which radicals controlled by the ‘bagal wala mulk’ are shown as the real culprit.
After jumping down the throat of those who speak for balance, the film tries hard at doing a balancing act. How’s that for more irony? A Muslim locality in Ahmedabad is shown rejoicing over India winning an Indo-Pak cricket match. A character declares ‘imandaar log dono taraf hotey hain’ (there are honest people on ‘both’ sides), but makes it clear that the ‘dono’ are Hindus and Muslims. And never takes its eyes off the fact that Bharat-that-was-India is where truth resides, in which those condescending English-speakers have been shown their place.
