By T N Ashok
MUMBAI: Two decades on, the burning of coach S-6 of the Sabarmati Express remains one of the most fiercely contested mornings in independent India’s history. The Sabarmati Report, the 2024 Hindi thriller starring Vikrant Massey, Raashii Khanna and Riddhi Dogra, tries to dramatize that morning and its long, bitter aftermath through the eyes of a fictional television newsroom. It is a film built on real bones with invented flesh — and separating the two is essential to understanding both the movie and the history it borrows from.
What actually happened on February 27, 2002: At around 7:40 a.m., the Sabarmati Express pulled into Godhra station carrying karsevaks returning from Ayodhya. Within minutes, a mob variously estimated at 1,000 to 2,000 people had gathered around coach S-6, pelting stones and pulling the emergency chain. The coach was set ablaze. Fifty-nine passengers — men, women and children — burned to death. The images of the gutted carriage became, almost instantly, one of the defining photographs of modern India.
What followed was among the largest and most consequential criminal investigations in the country’s history. A special court convicted 31 people in 2011, holding that the fire was the result of a deliberate conspiracy; several accused were sentenced to death, others to life imprisonment. The Gujarat High Court later upheld the conspiracy finding but commuted the death sentences to life terms and acquitted a number of the accused for insufficient evidence. As of mid-2026, appeals against those convictions were still being heard by the Supreme Court.
The Gujarat government’s own Nanavati-Mehta Commission of Inquiry — set up within days of the fire and eventually running to more than 2,500 pages — reached the same broad conclusion in its 2008 interim report: that the burning of S-6 was a premeditated conspiracy, not an accident, involving the pouring of petrol into the coach through a cut vestibule.
Crucially, when the Commission’s final report on the riots themselves was tabled in the Gujarat Assembly in 2019, it went further and gave the state government a clean chit, finding no evidence that the subsequent violence had been planned, encouraged or permitted by then Chief Minister Narendra Modi or his ministers.
It also indicted a handful of IPS officers, including Sanjiv Bhatt and R.B. Sreekumar, for what it called false claims. That finding — a state-appointed commission investigating a state government and clearing it — has itself remained a point of dispute among critics who argue the process could not be seen as independent, even as the courts declined to disturb it.
The riots, the SIT, and the Supreme Courts; The Godhra fire triggered weeks of communal violence across Gujarat that killed more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslim, and displaced thousands more. It became the defining crisis of Modi’s early tenure as Chief Minister. Allegations that the state administration had allowed, or even facilitated, the violence led to a wave of litigation, most prominently from Zakia Jafri, widow of former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri, who was among those killed at Gulberg Society in Ahmedabad.
In 2008, the Supreme Court appointed a Special Investigation Team to reinvestigate the major riot cases, including the allegations against Modi personally. After examining thousands of documents and witness statements, the SIT found no prosecutable evidence of a conspiracy by Modi or senior officials.
A magistrate accepted its closure report; Jafri challenged that decision for years. In 2022, the Supreme Court finally dismissed her appeal, ending the litigation. The judgment did not certify that the state’s response had been faultless — only that the evidence did not support criminal prosecution on the conspiracy charge. That distinction is often lost in both celebratory and condemnatory retellings of the verdict.
The international fallout was separate and administrative rather than judicial: in 2005, the U.S. State Department, acting under a routine visa-law provision on religious freedom rather than any directive from President George W. Bush, revoked Modi’s existing visa and denied him a diplomatic one. It was President Barack Obama who effectively ended that isolation in 2014, inviting Modi to Washington after his election as Prime Minister — a reversal, not an exoneration, since the earlier decision had never been a judicial finding of guilt.
Where the film takes its liberties; The Sabarmati Report invents almost everything at the human level. Its television network, EBT News, does not exist; the filmmakers have never confirmed it as a stand-in for any real broadcaster, despite persistent speculation online. The protagonist, cameraman-turned-reporter Samar Kumar (Vikrant Massey), is a fictional entertainment journalist unexpectedly thrown onto the Godhra story alongside a senior anchor, Manika Rajpurohit (Riddhi Dogra). In the film’s telling, Samar gathers survivor testimony that contradicts the network’s preferred narrative, has it suppressed by his own management, is professionally destroyed and turns to drink.
Years later, a young colleague, Amrita Gill (Raashii Khanna), reopens the story, travels to Godhra to record fresh testimony, is shut down by a furious anchor on air, and Samar himself is prosecuted after a mob seizes his evidence — a sequence with no real-world counterpart. None of these characters, their newsroom battles or their personal arcs are drawn from identifiable people or documented events; they are composites built to dramatize debates about editorial courage and media capture rather than to reconstruct anything that happened.
What the film keeps largely intact is the skeleton: the date, the station, the coach number, the death toll, the karsevaks returning from Ayodhya, and the broad claim — aligned with the trial court, the High Court and the Nanavati-Mehta Commission’s Godhra findings — that the fire was set deliberately rather than caused by accident.
Where it departs from the historical record is in suggesting, through its newsroom drama, that the “truth” of a premeditated attack was suppressed by the media and had to be excavated years later by crusading outsiders.
In reality, the conspiracy finding was never buried; it was the position taken by the Gujarat Police, the special court, the Nanavati-Mehta Commission and, on appeal, the Gujarat High Court, all within the ordinary and heavily reported course of a two-decade legal process — even as independent researchers and human rights groups have continued to question aspects of that finding.
That gap between a genuinely disputed history and a film that dramatizes its own private mythology of concealment is, ultimately, the most important thing to understand before watching The Sabarmati Report — or writing about it. (IPA Service)
