The Sabarmati Report 2024
A Hindi reporter struggles with a deadly fact when a train full of Karsewaks is set ablaze in Godhra. Years later, he is asked to help expose the Sabarmati Incident backed by a buried report.
Review
A few weeks ago, when Vikrant Massey was giving interviews for the upcoming movie The Sabarmati Report, someone on Twitter cautioned that take the concept of the movie with a pinch of salt. Most probably they will show a good Muslim coming to everybody’s rescue and the movie in the end concluding that there are good and bad people in all the communities.
Exactly this happens in the movie. Anyway,
On 27 February 2002, a Muslim mob set fire to 2 bogeys of the Sabarmati Express near the Godhra railway station in Gujarat. 59 Hindu pilgrims were burnt to death. They were returning from Ayodhya after performing rituals and karseva.
In the wake of this ghastly incident, the infamous Gujarat 2002 riots happened during which around 700 Muslims and 250 Hindus died.
The leftist and Muslim activists call it an anti-Muslim pogrom, but it was not a pogrom. It was a riot between two communities and just like any other riot, people from both the communities died. The pogrom happened in 1984 when only Sikhs died and not a single Hindu was killed.
But the movie The Sabarmati Report is not about the Gujarat 2002 riots. It is about the burning of the bogeys of the train and the 59 victims, mostly women and children.
Because so much attention was focused on the riots and Modi, people paid little attention to the victims of the Sabarmati Express fire. The only reason why they talked about the fire was to say that the burning of the train was used to instigate Hindus against Muslims when they paraded the dead bodies on the streets.
The investigations were half-hearted and politically biased. A major fact-finding team headed by Lalu stupidly claimed the fire began because people were cooking inside the train bogey. Others suggested it was someone from inside who set the bogeys on fire. The Nanavati Commission, which seems to be the basis for the movie, reported that the burning of the Sabarmati Express coaches wasn’t an accident. It was a planned crime.
The movie begins with the protagonist, a Hindi medium journalist, being questioned in a court. He is being accused of raking up an old issue and trying to provoke Hindus and Muslims. The protagonist, Samar Kumar, played by Vikrant Massey, then begins to tell the story and the flashback begins.
