If Zaheera Sheikh and her mother Sehrunissa were Godhra victims, their story would have been different. Very different, for if you compare the way the Narendra Modi Government has gone about getting justice for the Godhra attack, it would seem the Best Bakery carnage happened on another planet altogether. The discrepancy is most evident in one, the recording of witness statements and two, protection of witnesses. It was because the police did not do their job in these two areas that the Best Bakery case collapsed leading to all the 21 accused being set free. More evidence of police inaction came last week when widow of the bakery owner Sehrunissa Sheikh told The Sunday Express that she lied in court ‘‘trembling with fear’’ when she retracted her accusatory statements. The very next day, her daughter, another key witness, surfaced in Mumbai to say the same thing—both demanded a re-trial. This Hindu woman has a baby from Zaheera’s brother. She has a story to tell but no one’s listening. Bhupinder Rana For, she is a Hindu. She lives with Zaheera Sheikh’s brother Nafitullah alias Guddu and from whom she has a baby boy who was born just a fortnight before the massacre. It was a relationship disapproved of by the Sheikhs, with Nafitullah’s mother Sehrunissa disowning him as a ‘‘nikamma’’ (good-for-nothing). His sister Saahira, who now lives in Ekta Nagar, says their father had even sent Nafitullah to their UP village for six months to end the relationship, but in vain. Orphaned when young, she ended her first marriage and was staying alone when her affair with Nafitullah — married and with a child — began. Neither the neighbours nor the Sheikh family were in favour of this relationship that led to the birth of a son. They named the boy Chand, ignoring the taunts of neighbours. ‘‘I always lived separately, for Zaheera and Sehrunissa never allowed me to enter the bakery,’’ says Kailashben who has given herself a second name, Heena. She has a one-room house, about 100 metres from the bakery. ‘‘I saw everything from my house, how they were made to climb down the ladder,’’ she describes how the mob asked those on the terrace to come down, separated men and women, tied the men’s hands, attacked them and ‘‘misbehaved’’ with the women. ‘‘Sabko berahmi se mar diya, apne teen Hindu ko bhi mar diya,’’ (they killed them mercilessly, three Hindus were also killed). ‘‘If the police had not arrived, they would have killed the rest also,’’ she says. Her version matches that of Zaheera’s. ‘‘No one came to me when I was in Dabhoi,’’ she says. ‘‘I would have told the police everything.’’ She describes how men from the neighbourhood ran and hid in the fields when police arrived about 10:30 am on March 2. They later fled to Dabhoi, she said. ‘‘The police were busy looking at the bodies when the culprits fled in front of their eyes,’’ she said. She also alleged that people in Hanuman Tekri, where the bakery stood, had whisked her away the day after the massacre so that she wouldn’t tell the police anything. She said Nafitullah had taken a severe blow to his head but survived the mob. Members of the Sheikh family say he lost his ‘‘mental balance’’ after the massacre. ‘‘Guddu often loses his temper now and threatens to assault people in the neighbourhood,’’ Kailashben says. Since Sehrunissa and Zaheera’s statement that they had lied in court because they were afraid, Guddu hasn’t come back to Heena. He’s said to be in Mumbai, where the Sheikh family has taken refuge.‘‘I am sure he must be with Zaheera and her mother,’’ Kailashbehn said. In the Muslim neighbourhood of Mehboobpura, near Navapura in Vadodara, she is now Heena, concealing her Hindu identity. She and Nafitullah, who used to work in the bakery but is unemployed now, have been living here for the past one month and a half. She had lived in her Dabhoi with her sister for a year. Then, asked to fend for herself, she returned to Hanuman Tekri. Three months back, she was driven out of her home: women in the area kept taunting her and said she was responsible for the accused in the massacre case being in jail. The logic was the Sheikh family was attacked because the elder son had an affair with a Hindu girl. She has nowhere to go. Nafitullah’s sister Saahira says: ‘‘We won’t let her stay with us. If Nafitullah comes back alone we may accept him, but if he comes back with Kailashben, we will turn him away.’’ Disowned by the Sheikhs and her Hindu neighbours, Kailashbehn is unsure about the future but certain that she has to go back to Hanuman Tekri.
