When Vadodara witnessed Best Bakery

While the fast track court in Vadodara acquitted the accused after the witnesses turned hostile, the trial court in Mumbai sentenced them to imprisonment.

Having lived in constant media glare, chief protagonist Zaheera Sheikh is now in jail, for having lied to the court. Her mother, younger brother, sister and brother-in-law are on the run.

In tribal-dominated Pawned and Kant areas of Vadodara district, unprecedented violence took place but there were not many deaths. Jayanti Rathwa, of Bodeli, who had led a mob during the riots went on to become a BJP leader later in the area.

The situation was no better in Central Gujarat, also known as Charotar region, which witnessed village-wise loots and attacks on Muslim houses. In the Ode case, 16-year-old Rehana Vohra is the key witness. While it is one of the major cases the proceedings of which were stayed by the Supreme Court in Gujarat, it took the lives of 28 people, including young ones, all burnt and buried in a debris of a building that was set afire.

Some of the accused have since made their way to foreign shores. The region also saw one of the rare convictions in riot cases — in Ghodasar incident, where 15 were sentenced to imprisonment for the massacre of 14 people, though 48 were set free. But what is worse, even five years after the riots, there runs a sense of mistrust among people, and some victims are still afraid of going back to their native homes. One such village is Mogri on the outskirts of Anand.

There was, though, an exception. In Pundori village in Petlad taluka of Anand district, affected Muslims did not have any problem in returning to the damaged homes.

And this happened with the efforts of a retired schoolteacher Vasudev Gaur, who went to the refugee camp in the Petlad town, assuring the affected of their security and bringing them back within three days in the first week of March, 2002.

The act earned him a letter of praise from the President.