Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee paid a symbolic visit to Godhra, the epicentre of the cycle of violence enveloping Gujarat, on Thursday and surveyed the charred S-6 coach of the Sabarmati Express. Half a dozen Union ministers and leaders accompanied Vajpayee besides Chief Minister Narendra Modi on the trip which came 37 days after the train attack and was over in 50 minutes. Modi hardly looked the chief minister of a state where nearly 800 lives have been lost, including half-a-dozen on Wednesday. Union Ministers Arun Jaitley, C.P. Thakur, Harin Pathak, Vallabh Kathiria, Kashiram Rana and Uma Bharati, and Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi landed along with the Prime Minister in three Indian Air Force helicopters at the SRP Parade ground. Vajpayee drove straight to Godhra railway station and visited the coach kept near an abandoned building in the railway yard. Only Vajpayee and Modi entered the coach which still carries tell-tale signs of the massacre that claimed 59 lives. The Prime Minister came out shortly and met railway officials, including the station master who was in-charge of Godhra station, just outside. The cavalcade then drove back to the helipad where Vajpayee accepted memoranda from both the communities. Vajpayee gave the two delegations, which were accusing each other of fomenting trouble, a few minutes and left for Ahmedabad. A heavy security cover had been spread in the town which has a communal history at least seven decades old. More than two dozen people had been picked up on Wednesday night as part of preventive measures to avoid trouble during the Prime Minister’s visit. If Vajpayee were to actually glance through the memoranda he would know how mutual distrust runs deep within the two communities, which have almost equal number of people here. One memorandum gave a history of violence in Godhra since 1928, describing ‘‘how the Muslims were responsible for starting riots and how many Hindus had fallen victims’’. It claimed that Signal Falia — the place where the train was attacked — had been under curfew for a year, and blamed the violence that followed after February 27 on the electronic media. ‘‘The persons killed in the coach were all Hindus and innocent passengers, including women and children,’’ the memorandum said, alleging that the attack was pre-planned and the ‘‘role of Muslim employees in the Railways questionable’’. Another memorandum, by the Sarvajanik Shikshan Mandal, too blamed the communal riots in Godhra on the minority community and said that the train attack was pre-planned. Alleging their links with Pakistan, the memorandum asked, ‘‘How come Pakistan Radio comes to know of events in Godhra in half-an-hour when even the city’s residents were in the dark.’’ A memorandum submitted by Moulana Hussen Umarji, president of the Relief Committee, alleged that 241 Muslims were killed in the Panchmahals and that the train incident was not pre-planned. The memorandum carried excerpts from the national and international media to indicate that the attack could be spontaneous and caused by the ‘‘provocative behaviour of kar sevaks’’.
