This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting
My name is Alishan Jafri.
I am a journalist reporting on hate crimes
and the rise of extreme politics.
India is a state where calls for genocide against Muslims
are on the rise.
There is a very direct call to violence
to make India a Hindu nation.
The Prime Minister of this country should have spoken against it,
but he does not speak up.
CROWD CHANTS
The man of the moment...
..Prime Minister of India.
He is the leader of the world's biggest democracy.
Narendra Damodardas Modi.
He came to power promising a new age of prosperity...
..but his rule has been marred by religious turmoil.
ARCHIVE: There have been violent protests in opposition
to a new citizenship law which many see as discriminating
against the nation's Muslim minority.
Many in India see this law as anti-Muslim.
Massive pelting, massive pelting as of now is going on.
This series tells the story
of Narendra Modi's troubled relationship with India's Muslims.
As a young child, Mr Modi joined an organisation
which believes that this is a country of the Hindus.
Could he have done more to prevent violence
that killed hundreds of Muslims?
We were hearing that those orders to let all this happen
were coming from the top.
It is obviously a stain on his reputation.
There's no way out of that.
I'm not agreeing with your analysis.
I'm not agreeing with your information.
From where you have picked up this type of garbage, I do not know.
He was cleared of criminal conspiracy -
a finding upheld by India's highest court...
Agenda was to destroy Narendra Modi politically.
The agenda was explicitly political.
..but concerns will not go away.
Questions remained over Mr Modi's head for a long time,
and they remain over him now.
Narendra Modi has promised to build a new India,
but what does that mean for the millions of people
who belong to its largest minority?
This regime wants to disenfranchise the Muslims
and make India a "Hindu nation".
My name is Imran Dawood.
I live in Yorkshire.
My grandparents are from India. So is my father.
It was very exciting hearing the stories from family members
of what India was about,
so it was a great opportunity to do a trip at the age of 18.
With me was my two uncles, Shakil and Saeed Dawood,
and my next-door neighbour, Mohammed Aswat.
We were on our way back from the Taj Mahal.
It was a long journey.
When we actually entered the state,
I remember the driver saying, literally,
"We're home now, boys. We're home."
And then we get to a roadblock.
There was cars being stopped by people chanting Hindu chants.
They were, like, vetting them.
It was very common for people to decorate their cars' windscreens
with Arabic literature,
so straight away they'd see the owner is a Muslim.
The car in front gets through and then it's our turn.
The mob surrounded us, waving their weapons.
Suddenly, we have an attack.
We're just literally getting out of the car and running for our lives.
The first person that the mob attacked and tortured
was the driver.
Then I see Mohammed Aswat getting blows to his head.
One of the people in the mob - having a knife in his hand -
is saying to us, "Pull your pants down.
"We want to see if you've been circumcised,"
and literally feeling...
..feeling...
..feeling, "Am I going to live?"
I got stabbed, and then a police vehicle pulls up.
And then as I get in, I remember Mohammed...unconscious.
And this was before me blacking out.
This is... That's the last thing I see.
I do not know what happened to my uncles.
It's...fresh in my mind, like it happened yesterday.
But, sadly, 20 years on and nothing's happened.
There's evidence out there of what has happened
and, clearly, these people are walking free.
It feels like there's no justice there.
ARCHIVE: 57 people have died after a train carrying Hindu activists
was set alight by a group of Muslims.
The train was carrying thousands of Hindus who had visited...
The wreckage is horrific,
all the worse for being man-made and deliberate -
one of the worst acts of religious hatred India's ever seen.
In some areas, the grief and anger here
have already erupted into violence.
That's alarming news in a state where racial hatred
is deeply ingrained.
Jill McGivering, BBC News, Godhra, Gujarat.
People were saying there had been a group of people inside -
they were Hindu pilgrims, including women and children.
Somebody had either locked them in or kept them inside,
poured petrol in and set fire to them,
and a lot of people had died.
It was horrific.
People were outraged.
The perception all over Gujarat - and, in fact, all over India -
was that these Hindu pilgrims
had been targeted by the Muslim community.
The final death toll was 59.
The cause of the fire was disputed,
but at the time, Muslims were blamed.
This is in a state which has a particular history of tensions
between the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority community.
There have been a history of communal riots
and of very nasty violence between the communities.
And the concern was, something like this happens,
members of the Hindu community feel angered
that their people have been targeted,
there might be a big reaction to that.
The Chief Minister of Gujarat was Narendra Modi.
He was seen as a rising star, quite visionary -
a man who got things done,
somebody who was very pro-Hindu, a very powerful, influential figure.
I got a call from a foreign diplomat.
She was a diplomat of one of the foreign Western nations.
So she asked me, "Have you heard what had happened in Godhra?
"Do you think that this is going to escalate?"
I just used one word. I said, "Hugely."
My producer started to get information
that something was happening nearby in Ahmedabad.
It was clear from our arrival that something was very, very wrong.
As we were driving in, we were seeing plumes of thick black smoke
ahead of us in the centre of town.
There were no emergency services there. There were no police.
My memories, then, are going into the centre of Ahmedabad.
There's a quite well-known square -
there's a big area, there's an arch - and it was...
It was mostly on fire.
I remember a man who was a Hindu with his hands to his face,
watching his business - it was a travel agent's - burning.
There were also other people informing me sometimes
that the areas that were being targeted belonged to Muslims.
JILL, ARCHIVE: This is exactly what the authorities hoped
would never happen - the streets have become a battleground.
The grief and anger at yesterday's murders
has boiled over into violence, looting and religious hatred.
JILL: There was this sense of absolute lawlessness.
It was a free-for-all.
I remember seeing the police here and there, very, very disengaged.
I didn't see anybody, from what I remember,
trying to stop the setting fire to things and the looting.
JILL, ARCHIVE: On the worst day of the violence,
when murder and looting were taking place all across the city,
we saw policemen just standing by, watching what was happening
but doing nothing to try to stop it.
JILL: One of my colleagues in the team
was having quite regular phone calls with a contact of his.
It was someone, I understand, who was high up in the police force,
and they were giving information to my colleague
that they'd been told, "Let it happen.
"There will be a reaction to what happened in Godhra. Let it happen."
And we were hearing that those orders to let all this happen
were coming from the top.
Did Mr Modi do enough to stop the violence?
I think that that's something he has to answer for.
Depending on how you look at it,
he oversaw mass violence or was not able to stop it.
Questions remained over Mr Modi's head for a long time,
and they remain over him now.
REPORTER: Did the police under your command do enough to stop the riots?
Not only enough, but excellent work they have done.
Excellent work? Excellent work they have done.
Within 72 hours, we were able to control such violence.
More than 500 people dead, most of them innocent civilians,
and you're calling this "excellent work"?
I'm not happy at what happened.
But what we have done, I'm happy.
Everyone we've spoken to have said that the police
did absolutely nothing.
This is absolutely false propaganda. This is not the truth.
As questions grew around Mr Modi's actions,
attention turned to his past.
DRUMS PLAY
RSS stands for Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh -
"the Association of Indian Volunteers".
The RSS is a political organisation.
It believes that this is a country of the Hindus.
ARCHIVE: The RSS was formed in 1925 to unite Hindu society
and spread Hindu culture.
But the Boy Scout image is deceptive.
Based on principles of discipline, patriotism
and unquestioning obedience, the RSS seeks to establish
the superiority of Hindus over all other races in India.
RSS took shape in the 1920s, when, in Europe, we saw a movement
that will result in fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany.
They liked the idea of the supremacy of the race theory,
which was created by the European fascists,
and also the idea of creating a common enemy.
For the RSS, the enemy were the Muslims.
Today, RSS is not anti-Muslim, but definitely pro-Hindu.
And they believe in the glorious past of this country
and they believe in the idea of national reconstruction.
The very core cultural values of this country,
now they are being called Hindu value system.
People can have any way of worship,
but if they believe in that value system,
they are very much part of India.
RSS always recruits children, very young boys,
because they want to tell them who they are
when they are still malleable.
To reshape the psyche of the youth is very important.
So Narendra Modi joined when he was very young.
After school, he would participate in the activities
of the young wing of the RSS. That is how he got attracted.
Gradually, he has climbed all the ladder of all the posts
of responsibility - and at a very young age.
Modi is a product of the RSS.
He has learned its politics, its lifestyle.
He made a mark for himself,
and so he was deputed to the Bharatiya Janata Party -
or the BJP - which is a political affiliated organisation of the RSS.
As the violence subsided, stories began to emerge
about what had happened to some of the victims.
In this largely Muslim neighbourhood, more than 100 people
had sought shelter in a house to escape a Hindu mob.
Imtiyaz Pathan and his family were among them.
The house belonged to a Muslim former Congress Party MP -
Ehsan Jafri.
A judge later ruled that Mr Jafri had provoked the mob
by firing his gun at it.
Imtiyaz survived by hiding upstairs.
The violence only stopped when the police eventually arrived.
When a senior police officer arrived at the house that evening,
the victims' corpses were still smouldering.
REPORTER: There are allegations that police could have done more
in Ahmedabad today.
There's always scope for improvement, I concede.
There's always scope for improvement.
I'm sure...
..we could have done better.
I think I would take it as my inadequacy, if that is to be said.
The killings would trigger a long legal battle
that made serious allegations about the police response
and Mr Modi's role in the violence.
In 2009, Imtiyaz gave evidence in court
about the alleged phone call between Mr Modi and Mr Jafri.
Mr Modi denied receiving the call
and an inquiry said there was no evidence it was made.
Imtiyaz later stood for election against Mr Modi's political party.
In Britain, the government was alarmed
by what had happened in Gujarat.
I was very worried about it.
I was taking a great deal of personal interest
because India is a really important country with whom we have relations.
We had to handle it very carefully.
What we did was to establish an inquiry
and have a team go to the Gujarat
and find out for themselves what had happened.
And they produced a very thorough report.
The report, sent as a diplomatic cable and marked "restricted",
has never been published before.
FEMALE VOICE: "Extent of violence much greater than reported."
"Widespread and systematic rape of Muslim women."
"Violence", "politically motivated."
"Aim was to purge Muslims from Hindu areas."
"Their systematic campaign of violence
"has all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing."
This former senior diplomat was one of the investigators.
He's speaking publicly for the first time
about what the British inquiry found.
He's asked to remain anonymous.
At least 2,000 people were murdered during the violence.
The vast majority were Muslim.
We described it as a pogrom,
a deliberate and politically driven effort
targeted at the Muslim community.
The violence was widely reported to have been organised
by an extremist Hindu nationalist group - the VHP -
who have a relationship with the RSS.
"The VHP and its allies could not have inflicted so much damage
"without the climate of impunity created by the state Government."
"Narendra Modi is directly responsible."
The report contained an extraordinary claim.
"Reliable contacts have told us
"Narendra Modi met senior police officers on the 27th of February
"and ordered them not to intervene in the rioting.
"Police contacts deny this meeting happened."
There were pretty credible reports
he had specifically instructed the police not to intervene.
The police contact who we talked to consistently denied that,
so we did have conflicting reports on what his direct role had been,
but we did feel it was clear there was a culture of impunity
that created the environment for the violence to take place.
That undoubtedly came from Modi.
"While Modi remains in power, reconciliation will be impossible."
It was very shocking.
These were very serious claims that Chief Minister Modi
had played a pretty active part in pulling back the police
and in tacitly encouraging the Hindu extremists.
That was a particularly egregious example of political involvement,
really, to prevent the police from doing their job,
which was to protect both communities -
the Hindu and the Muslims.
The options open to us were fairly limited.
We were never going to break diplomatic relations with India,
but it is obviously a stain on his reputation.
There's no way out of that.
CHANTING
The European Union carried out an investigation
at around the same time.
It reportedly found that ministers took active part in the violence
and senior police officers were instructed
not to intervene in the rioting.
They looked upon this in terms of the...the suffering,
which had happened to the Muslim community,
and if you look at it in that way, you're certainly bound to come
to this conclusion that there was... It was completely one-sided,
and that there was nothing done on the part of the administration
to seriously check this, that it was a deliberate,
pre-planned, motivated assault on Muslims by mobs who were not
restrained is, to my mind, an exaggeration.
It was unstoppable for anyone.
And as a chief minister,
Modi did all the effort.
And after three days, he was able to stop with the help of police.
Modi definitely shows contrition.
He even puts in his resignation to the BJP,
but the BJP reject it.
It was quite a smart thing to do because, politically, if you offer
the resignation at that particular juncture and it is turned down,
that's the end of your resignation drama.
My name is Cedric Prakash.
I'm a Jesuit priest.
My background has been on human rights, justice and peace.
In Gujarat, human rights workers set up a citizens' tribunal,
headed by three retired judges, to investigate the violence.
Father Cedric helped them.
We wanted people from the government, officials,
to come and depose before the citizens' tribunal.
It was not easy. They were frightened.
Their careers were at stake.
On a flight to Delhi,
I happened to be seated next to a minister
of the Gujarat government.
He belonged to the BJP.
Haren Pandya was responsible for the home affairs
of the state for several years.
He just very recently relinquished office when Modi took
over as Chief Minister of the state.
He was telling me, "I know everything what was happening."
Then I said, "We have the citizens' tribunal - would you...?"
He said, "Of course I'll be willing."
He swore us to secrecy.
We tried to do everything possible in order to protect his identity
because he was big catch.
The tribunal was examining Mr Modi's role -
including the directions he had given to the police.
I think Haren Pandya wanted to explain what had transpired
on the 27th of February,
so he came to my office.
Mr Pandya told the tribunal he had attended a late night
meeting with Mr Modi and senior officials, and he claimed Mr Modi
said the police should not interfere with the Hindu reaction
to what happened at Godhra.
Mr Pandya was very clearly blaming Modi for the violence.
He felt he was responsible and he should be brought to book.
That was clear.
This was the real first indication from within the government
that there was actually a decision taken.
He is indicating that the chief minister of the state was party to
a decision where the law and agencies do not do their work,
let Muslims be attacked.
Mr Pandya wanted to remain anonymous, but news about his
evidence leaked out, and he resigned from Mr Modi's government.
Narendra Modi has said he gave categorical and clear-cut
instructions to maintain peace and communal harmony at any cost.
So was Haren Pandya lying?
Frankly, I don't know. I wasn't at the meeting,
so I don't know exactly what it is.
But a chief minister of a state cannot give a blank cheque
to people to run riot.
Last year, India's Supreme Court said Mr Pandya's claim was false.
Its findings were based on an official inquiry
which found Mr Pandya was not at the meeting.
The inquiry heard that others who were there disputed his presence
and records showed his government mobile was several miles away
at the time.
But some questioned the inquiry's credibility and thoroughness.
For most politicians, allegations like this would be devastating.
But in the midst of all the criticism,
Narendra Modi did something unexpected -
he called an election in Gujarat.
NEWS CORRESPONDENT: This election is all about one man - Narendra Modi.
To his supporters, he preaches an extreme form of Hindu nationalism,
offering hope and security against Muslim extremists.
We're just after the events of 9/11, which, in many ways,
has legitimised actions against Muslims across the globe.
This, at the very least, emboldens what the BJP are doing in Gujarat.
Mr Modi realised that there was a very strong sentiment of Hindu
victimhood, and he decided to harness that electorally.
The violence against Muslims became part of the messaging
that Narendra Modi used in the election campaign.
It is the violence and how he reacted to it that has constructed
the persona of Narendra Modi.
UNTRANSLATED
Narendra Modi doesn't tend to be very media friendly.
You follow what I say? A little bit, yes.
So for him to agree to do a sit-down interview with us
felt like a bit of a scoop.
HE CHUCKLES
He struck me as a very charismatic,
very powerful,
quite menacing figure.
So you're now coming up to elections.
This seems to me to be a state in turmoil.
We're seeing repeated violence.
We're seeing people living in fear.
What has gone wrong with this breakdown in law and order here?
I think you have to correct your information first.
The state is very, very peaceful.
So, the Muslims who would say that they are still terrified,
they are still frightened to go back to their homes... I am not...
..they still fear that the people who murdered their relatives
have not been brought to justice. What would you say to them?
I'm not agreeing with your analysis.
I'm not agreeing with your information.
This absolutely misguided information to you.
From where you have picked up this type of garbage, I do not know.
Some people have been accusing your government of not doing enough
to stop this, of not protecting Muslims even now.
These are also false propaganda made by our opponents.
And you are also a captive of this false propaganda.
Can you explain more? Who is perpetuating this false propaganda?
The information I am reporting is taken from what I have seen
with my own eyes, both at the times of the riot and now.
Those who are our opponents.
And the independent reports that have already
been published into what has happened?
They have no right to talk about the internal matter
of any government.
I'm very, very clear in my mind.
If they have done, they have done wrong.
Some would say it is a human right.
There is a general international interest.
Please don't try to preach us the human rights.
We know what the human rights are.
You British should not preach us human rights.
When you look back over the last month, you've been the leader
of this state through a very difficult period.
Do you think there's anything that you should have done differently?
Yes.
One area where I was very, very big.
And that was how to handle the media.
SHOUTING AND CHANTING
NEWSREEL: Ecstatic crowds of BJP supporters started to celebrate
the election win before it was official.
The architect of victory, Narendra Modi,
the controversial Chief Minister of Gujarat.
The more Mr Modi was attacked, the stronger he became by simply
saying that he was being targeted only because he was standing
up for the rights of Hindus.
A new repertoire had taken shape.
You polarise your vote, and you get the majority supporting you.
I just entered a taxi and suddenly I got a call
from a journalist friend of mine
and she said, "Do you know what has happened to Haren Pandya?"
She told me that he was... he was killed.
He's found dead in a car under very suspicious circumstances.
The entry point of the bullet wound is at the groin.
There is no blood lying there where there should have been blood.
There is no way from the position he was in that he could
have been killed sitting in the car.
Evidence suggests he was killed elsewhere,
his body put in the car and placed there.
The death of Haren Pandya is a mystery -
a well-kept mystery, probably.
There is, to my knowledge, no serious investigation.
The murder of Haren Pandya remains one of the big
mysteries, even today.
Mr Pandya was killed in a murder which has really not
been answered yet.
12 men were jailed in connection with his murder,
but this verdict was overturned -
the court blaming a botched investigation.
NEWSREEL: All accused in the Haren Pandya murder case
have been acquitted.
Haren Pandya was the former home minister, you might remember,
of Gujarat...
In 2019, India's Supreme Court upheld the original verdict,
but even some in Mr Modi's own party have doubts
about the investigation into Mr Pandya's death.
I knew him personally.
I think the killing of Mr Pandya was tragic and suspicious,
and the circumstances explained to me
don't make me believe in it.
I'd like to know who organised it so well.
It is not some, just a stray, say, killer or somebody taking revenge...
..but it is well-organised.
I don't think it has been properly investigated.
He was killed by terrorists who wanted to kill him
so that the blame could be apportioned to Narendra Modi.
The investigation was thorough.
It went into every stage of the Indian judicial process
and culminated in a Supreme Court judgment.
I think we should leave it at that.
In Yorkshire, the Dawood family were losing faith that the police
in Gujarat would catch the men who killed
Saeed, Shakil and Mohammed.
There were some serious doubts arising in terms of what the Indian
police were doing, because on the one hand they were saying
that they were doing everything.
On the other hand, we were seeing no results whatsoever.
In respect to the investigation,
we had no confidence in the Indian police.
It turned out that the police hadn't even done basic investigations.
They hadn't gone to the scene of the crime.
Family members went to the crime scene themselves and made
a terrible discovery.
They found burnt remains, including bone fragments, bits of teeth.
It seemed from what everybody was indicating that those remains
were Saeed and Shakil's.
The police seemed to be putting up a wall and were completely
disinterested in helping us get to the truth.
Then there was an unexpected development.
NEWSREEL: The controversial chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi,
has arrived in London on a short visit.
He presides over the state where as many as 2,000 people
were killed in communal rioting...
I thought this was a great opportunity for the family
and for the victims for him to be arrested here in the UK.
The idea was that the family would go to court and seek
to prosecute Narendra Modi.
We had pages - hundreds of pages - of reports.
All of them were clear that this was a massacre.
Most importantly, that there was state collusion.
And so the chain of command went all the way to the Chief Minister.
Although the offence took place in India, it could be prosecuted
in this country.
An Indian diplomat said when news of the plan leaked, there was panic.
Mr Modi was reportedly urged to leave Britain on the next plane.
I argued in front of the judge for Narendra Modi's arrest.
The judge said, "I can see all the things that you've put
"before me, Mr Kahn, but really
"what I need is the witness statements."
The evidence that we would need to prosecute it
would have been somebody somewhere along the chain of command
saying, "Yes, there was an order
"not to take any action, allowing this to happen."
Mr Khan says that the evidence that has emerged since then -
even though it is fiercely contested - has made him
more convinced of the merits of his case.
Knowing what we now know, and the information that we now have,
if we had had that at that time, I'm pretty sure that a summons
would have been issued for Modi's arrest.
We were bitterly disappointed the judge didn't issue the warrant,
but we understood this was going to be a quite a long campaign
in terms of getting answers and getting justice and holding
people to account.
Western governments began to take action against Narendra Modi
over the Gujarat violence.
The UK imposed a diplomatic boycott and de facto travel ban.
There was essentially a travel ban imposed on Modi.
I would like to have seen much stronger action, but I think
we probably did end up doing as much as we could.
In 2005, the US government formally revoked a visa for Mr Modi
under a law that targets government officials responsible for severe
violations of religious freedom.
The US are saying this is not acceptable.
Mr Modi? Would you like to speak to the BBC, Mr Modi?
Barred from entering the United States,
barred from entering the United Kingdom.
On the international stage, it makes him somewhat of a pariah.
In 2007, a reporter went undercover in Gujarat to investigate
what had happened during the violence.
Posing as a Hindu extremist,
he secretly filmed one of the killers boasting about the role
he had played.
Babu Bajrangi was accused of leading a mob that killed around 100 people.
Mr Bajrangi made an extraordinary claim about Narendra Modi.
He said that when he was arrested for murder, several months
after the massacre, Mr Modi helped him get bail by changing the judge.
Mr Bajrangi later claimed he was reading from a script given
to him by the reporter.
Though a judge ruled the veracity of the sting was not in dispute.
In 2012, Mr Bajrangi was jailed for murder.
And he wasn't the only one who made damaging claims about Mr Modi.
Haresh Bhatt, a local BJP politician,
said he was at a political meeting addressed by Mr Modi
shortly after the train burning.
Mr Bhatt later said he told the reporter an imaginary story.
Mr Modi has said allegations against him in the recordings
are false and incorrect.
You often find that activists at the lower level...
..make claims...
..which are, in hindsight, quite preposterous.
They exaggerate their own importance.
But pressure was now building for a new investigation
into the violence.
By the beginning of 2011, Narendra Modi had run Gujarat
for nearly a decade.
Despite the controversies, some were now tipping him
for an even bigger job -
India's next Prime Minister.
Modi started to think about national politics
very early on, projecting himself as a national leader
It was already clear that he was headed
on a course which would lead him to the national state.
But Mr Modi had a problem.
SHOUTING
India's Supreme Court had ordered a wide-ranging investigation
into the Gujarat violence.
A special investigation team - or SIT - was examining the Dawood
family murders and allegations made by Ehsan Jafri's
widow that Mr Modi was part of a criminal conspiracy that led
to the disorder and killings across the state.
NEWSREEL: Modi seems to be unstoppable.
But the ghosts of the past don't leave him alone.
Grilled for nine hours on the case in 2010, the stain
on his image remains.
The mandate was to look into the possibility
that there was a criminal conspiracy by the government
led by Narendra Modi.
But the criminal conspiracy is a particular term in law
which requires a very strong standard of evidence.
For the first time in the history of independent India, a sitting
chief minister, Narendra Modi, has been questioned on the role
of his government in mass murders in connection with the post-Godhra
riots in Gujarat.
I think Mr Modi definitely was very worried.
The special investigation team was definitely a very serious
threat to Mr Modi's political career.
An important witness was the former head of police intelligence
in Gujarat, RB Sreekumar, who'd made a string of claims about police
and government failures.
He claimed that, on the night of the Gujarat train burning,
Mr Modi instructed officials to allow Hindus
to give vent to their anger.
He claimed Gujarat's police chief had told him this -
though the chief denied it.
Without Sreekumar, the case against the Narendra Modi
government would be much weaker
simply because there would have been no information
from inside the government which would tell you what was happening.
In that sense, he was a central figure in this investigation.
Another senior police officer, Sanjiv Bhatt, gave evidence.
NEWSREEL: The ghost of the Godhra riots back to haunt Narendra Modi.
This time it's senior police officer Sanjiv Bhatt who alleges
that Modi was complicit in the Godhra riots.
In an affidavit filed in the Supreme Court, Bhatt says that he was
present at the crucial law and order meeting chaired by Modi.
I know my truth.
I've stated my truth and I have sent there a note in an affidavit
submitted to the highest court of the land.
When he started reporting before the SIT inquiry,
my father stated that the control room contacted him,
saying that an unofficial meeting has been called
at the Chief Minister's residence and that his presence was required.
He said that Narendra Modi ended up saying that the emotions
were running very high in the Hindus and it was imperative
that the Hindus be allowed to vent their anger.
He said that Narendra Modi had directed the police force
to step down, look the other way.
Mr Modi and other officials at the meeting said Mr Bhatt did not
attend, but an independent adviser to the Supreme Court said
there was enough evidence to consider prosecuting Mr Modi.
This is a prominent legal person who has reached his own conclusions
about what is there and I think some of those conclusions needed
to be taken note of.
In major relief for Narendra Modi,
the Supreme Court-appointed rights panel has found no evidence
against the Gujarat Chief Minister.
The complainant, Zakia Jafri, had accused Modi of ordering
officials to give rioters a free hand -
the only complaint that named him.
After three years, the SIT ruled that Mr Modi would face no charges.
It said RB Sreekumar's account was hearsay, and Sanjiv Bhatt's
account could not be relied on.
It said claims about the instructions Mr Modi
had given were not established.
NEWSREEL: So, what next for Modi?
Legal experts say he has not got a clean chit in the rights -
just that there is no evidence.
But it could...
The ruling did not stop the debate over what had happened.
The special investigation team could not succeed, for many,
many different reasons.
The investigation team had to rely somewhat on the Gujarat police.
Much of the investigation on the ground is done by police officers,
and among the people who stand indicted
are the Gujarat police force itself.
The SIT report is really very superficial.
It doesn't explain how this pogrom could take place.
So, of course, it underestimates - I mean, it minimises the roles
of the top leaders, the chain of command.
To establish criminal conspiracy in law is often very difficult.
Just because they have arrived at the conclusion there was no
criminal conspiracy is not the same as saying the conduct
is above question, that there were not serious lapses.
That in no way takes away all the important questions
that still stand on the 2002 violence.
Yes, there were some people who said they were at a particular meeting
when others said they were not.
Agenda was to destroy Narendra Modi politically.
The agenda was explicitly political.
I don't think they were concerned about Muslim victims,
and these included a section of the media, these included
journalists, these included NGOs.
I think ultimately at the end of the day, the SIT findings
didn't implicate Mr Modi.
The SIT gave a clean chit to Narendra Modi.
We have to have faith on our institution and we have to put
a full stop on something and we have to move forward.
CROWD CHEERING
The verdict cleared the way for Mr Modi to run
for prime minister.
The travel bans were lifted.
Diplomatic relations with the West were restored.
I don't think that I had any doubt that Mr Modi
is going to be the next prime minister.
NEWSREEL: Narendra Modi, India's next Prime Minister,
riding into Delhi in triumph,
after he won an election landslide with his promise that good days
are coming for India.
Sanjiv Bhatt was jailed for life in 2019
over a death-in-custody case dating back 30 years.
His family insists he's innocent, and many say his trial was unfair.
The government will try to do whatever they can to ensure
that my father's voice is not heard.
He is the sole surviving witness who can tie Narendra Modi
to the carnage of 2002.
No-one has ever been convicted for the Dawood family murders.
Still feeling very angry, very frustrated.
It feels like there's no justice there.
Ehsan Jafri's widow challenged the findings of the SIT in court.
In June 2022, India's Supreme Court upheld the findings,
saying there was no larger conspiracy.
It ruled the testimonies of Sanjiv Bhatt and RB Sreekumar
were replete with falsehood and said those involved in abuse of process
need to be in the dock.
Shortly after, Mr Modi's closest political ally
spoke out about the case.
The police arrested Mr Sreekumar and a high-profile human-rights worker
who helped Mrs Jafri bring the case.
Sanjiv Bhatt, already in prison, was named in the police complaint, too.
All three are accused of fabricating evidence.
20 years on, the Gujarat violence remains controversial.
None of the people arrested were sources for our report
and the findings of our investigation still stand.
2,000 people were murdered in Gujarat in 2002
in a campaign of violence that was clearly well organised.
That remains a fact.
Now Mr Modi is in power,
it seems to me that history is being rewritten.
The Supreme Court gave a judgment which actually brought the whole
matter to a closure.
The closure was necessary.