The Fire That Won't Stay Settled: Sonia Gandhi's Memoir, and the Officer Who Says She's Wrong

More than two decades after the Sabarmati Express burned at Godhra, a single sentence in a memoir has reopened the argument over what happened that morning.

In Belonging: A Journey of Love, Sonia Gandhi writes that the riots were triggered when four coaches of the Sabarmati Express were set on fire and 59 pilgrims died, adding that the cause of the fire remains disputed, though the turmoil that followed spread across much of the state. The passage is short. It is part of her account of the 2002 Gujarat violence rather than a detailed treatment of the Godhra investigation.

Asthana’s response

Rakesh Asthana is a former CBI Special Director who headed the Gujarat Police’s Special Investigation Team probing the incident. He answered in an interview with ANI, rejecting the line outright. He said the claim is completely wrong, that the investigation is authentic and has been proved in a court of law, and that anyone creating doubt now is doing so for political reasons.

Asked whether a “vote bank” lay behind the doubt, he said everyone who died at Godhra was Hindu, but that murder is murder whoever the victim, and that investigators treated it as a criminal act. He maintained that forensic evidence had established the cause of the fire.

Asthana went further than the memoir passage. He alleged that calls came from Pakistan and that Hizbul visits preceded the fire, and he also challenged Lalu Prasad Yadav. He alleged that an attempt was made to implicate him through a committee set up while Lalu was railway minister. The reports I could access summarize these claims only briefly, so I can’t say what evidence he offered for them. They are his allegations, not established findings.

Why “disputed” has a history

The word has a basis, which is why the exchange is more than a one-sided correction. The Banerjee committee attributed the blaze to a stove allegedly carried inside the coach, while the Justice Nanavati Commission also examined the incident and the violence that followed. From my background knowledge, rather than the reports above, the Banerjee committee was set up in 2004 and concluded the fire was accidental. The Gujarat High Court later held its constitution illegal. The Nanavati-Shah Commission concluded the fire was a planned conspiracy.

On the legal side, critics of the memoir note that 31 people were convicted in the case, with the convictions upheld by the Gujarat High Court. That is the strongest basis for Asthana’s position, since courts have accepted the arson-conspiracy account. The memoir’s defenders could say that a contested inquiry history is what “disputed” refers to. Her critics would answer that, whatever the history, the judicial question is now settled.

The wider row

The line lands in a book that was already controversial. Penguin Random House India said it remained keen to publish the memoir but that it is a publisher’s responsibility to fact-check. Congress leaders alleged the publisher had sought removal of passages related to Narendra Modi, the RSS, and China. The BJP, for its part, has asked whether the book is memoir or fiction. Right-leaning outlets such as OpIndia and Organiser have since pointed to the Godhra line as proof that fact-checking was needed. They are partisan sources making a political argument, and I haven’t seen a response from Gandhi or Congress specifically on Asthana’s remarks.

Asthana’s core claim is that courts have convicted people in the case, so calling the cause “disputed” is wrong. The courts have indeed upheld convictions, but earlier official inquiries did disagree. The claims about Pakistan calls and the Lalu-era committee are his own allegations that I couldn’t verify from what’s available.