India election 2014: The woman calling for Narendra Modi to take responsibility for mass murder

Politician's wife calls for Narenda Modi, the front runner to be the next prime minister, to be convicted for abetting mass murder whilst serving as chief minister during 2002 Gujarat riots

Zakia Jafri, wife of the late veteran Muslim politician Ehsan Jafri 

Minutes before he was hacked to death by a Hindu mob, veteran Muslim politician Ehsan Jafri dialed one last number to stop the carnage. According to survivors he called Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat and the man many believe will soon be India’s prime minister.

 By the time Mr Jafri put down the phone, he knew that and dozens of neighbours cowering in his home were doomed. Mr Modi had taunted him, expressed surprise that he was still alive, and offered no hope of rescue, he told those around him in his final moments. “No help will come,” he said.

 Shortly after he was disconnected, Mr Jafri’s wife, Zakia, watched in horror from a balcony as rioters marched her husband naked from their home and chopped off his fingers, hands, arms and head.

 Twelve years after the 2002 Gujarat riots which left more than 700 Muslims dead, including Mrs Jafri’s husband and 68 neighbours, Mr Modi is expected to become prime minister in next month’s elections.

Pedestrians walk past a billboard for the Bharatiya Janta Party, picturing its candidate Narenda Modi as the third phase of voting for national elections commences 

Mrs Jafri, however, wants him jailed for abetting mass murder.

 Now 75 and crippled with diabetes, she seems a feeble opponent to the seemingly unstoppable Narendra Modi as his campaign to become leader of the world’s largest democracy gathers momentum and foreign leaders who once boycotted him now embrace him for trade.

 He might, however, be unwise to underestimate her. On Friday she won another round in her fight to reopen a judicial inquiry his supporters say exonerated him of any responsibility for the riots and now she is stepping up her own campaign for him to be prosecuted. She will continue her quest for justice until her dying breath, she said.

 She and her former neighbours met last week in the charred ruins of their abandoned homes in Ahmedabad’s walled and gated Gulbarg Housing Society to plan their campaign and remember the 28th February 2002 when sword-wielding rioters murdered their friends and families in revenge for the deaths of 58 Hindu pilgrims in a train fire at Godra the previous day.

 As news spread of the Godra incident and Hindu extremists announced a strike for February 28th, Ehsan Jafri, a lawyer and former Congress MP close to the party’s top leaders, warned his neighbours in Gulbarg’s 19 bougainvillea-clad bungalows and apartments they should stay in their homes for safety. He had called senior police chiefs on the eve of the strike to ask for extra security.

 But when the violence broke out the following morning, the ferocity of it took the Gulbarg residents by surprise. At around 10am Rupaben Mody, a 48-year-old mother of two, was on the balcony of her tiny top floor flat hanging out washing when she saw ten men approach a Muslim on the main road outside and stab him in the stomach as three policemen watched.

 The city’s police commissioner arrived soon after to speak to Mr Jafri on the main road below and left after promising to send reinforcements.

 Within minutes of him driving away, Mrs Mody said, thousands of Hindu protestors spilled onto the road from a nearby slum, set cars and shops on fire and scaled a roof overlooking Gulbarg to throw stones, Molotov cocktails, and tiny chemical ’nail polish bottle bombs’ down on the residents inside.

 She screamed out to her children to come home and gather their valuables.

 “My 12 year old son Azhar said: ’Now is not the time, we must save our lives,’” she said. As they fled to the Jafris’ house, where the entire community had taken refuge, the mob used gas canisters to blast through the society’s high boundary walls.

 By lunchtime the mob had grown to several thousand men and was looting the other bungalows and flats. Around 100 Gulbarg residents were packed into Mr Jafri’s house as he frantically pleaded with police chiefs and political leaders, including some from his own Congress Party, to save them. He was well-connected and close to Ahmed Patel, Congress leader Sonia Gandhi’s powerful political secretary.

 In Mr Jafri's ground floor study, Sairaben Sandhi, a 53-year-old housewife, read phone numbers to him as he worked through his contacts book for someone who might help. He was trying to stay calm, but was panicking as the mob’s assault on the house intensified, she said.

 At around 3.30pm the mob finally broke in through the steel door. “There was a disabled tailor, Anwar, who had only one leg, and he was killed as they entered. He was hacked by swords,” she said. “Three girls, aged 17, 18 and 20, were stripped and raped and then killed. When one of their brothers tried to help he was killed by sword,” she added.

 One of the rioters said he recognized her and helped her to escape, but as she left she saw her son, Mohammad Hussain, a 24-year-old law student, dead on the ground. “His neck had been cut,” she said.

 As thick smoke filled the downstairs rooms after the rioters set fire to the kitchen, Rupaben Mody, her daughter and son gripped each other’s hands and tried to flee. In the chaos and terror, her daughter fell over and dropped her brother’s hand. “That was when I lost my son,” she said. His body was never found.

 From her upstairs room, Zakia Jafri could hear the sound of slaughter below, looked out from her balcony and saw her husband being led away, naked.

 "The mob was goading him and trying to force him to say ’Jai Shri Ram’ - hail Lord Ram, the Hindu God. When he resisted “they beat him with swords. It lasted half an hour. They chopped his hands and arms bit by bit....I left all hope there,” she said.

 Her claim that Mr Modi should be held to account for the massacres is based on conversations with police officers who told her they had been ordered to stay at home during the rioting, and later revelations that transcripts of police wireless communications from that day had been lost.

 Zafar Sareshwala, a Muslim businessman who also lost everything in the riots, told The Telegraph that Mrs Jafri and her supporters are wrong about Narendra Modi and that they should “move on.”

A Hindu mob waving swords at an opposing Muslim mob during communal riots in Ahmedabad, former capital of the Indian state of Gujarat 

The riots were “horrendous” but he had been persuaded that Mr Modi was not responsible for them. He had met him at London’s St James Court Hotel in 2003 and has questioned the BJP leader in more than a hundred meetings since, he said.

 Mr Modi had, effectively, been in power only a few days when the riots broke out, and had yet to have a firm grip on the levers of government.

 “He said this was the most important position he had held in his life, why would he allow this to happen on his second day?” he said.

 He had denied speaking on the telephone to Mr Jafri, but had “real anguish and was very apologetic about what happened,” he said.

 His only public statement of regret offended many when he compared it to how he might feel about a puppy run over by a car. If “someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind, even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not? Of course it is. If I’m a chief minister or not, I’m a human being. If something bad happens anywhere, it is natural to be sad,” he said.

 He has not publicly apologised for failing to save Muslims in the riots or visited the survivors for fear opponents would make political capital of it. The Gulbarg survivors said his decision to visit the scene of the Godra incident and to remember only Hindu victims still rankled with them.

 “I lost everything, my son, my house. It’s been 12 years and he has not come here or met any of the survivors,” said Rupaben Mody. “I don’t want him to be prime minister and all I can do is appeal to the people of India to support a mother’s struggle.”

 Kasimbhai Allanur Mansouri, a 70-year-old retired driver, who lost 19 family members, including his wife, mother and two of his children, asked how Mr Modi could protect India “if he could not save a small locality of 100 people?”

 To date 117 rioters have been jailed for life for the killings, including Maya Kodnani, his former women and child development minister, who was convicted of orchestrating the massacre of more than 90 Muslims.

 But for Zakia Jafri the ultimate responsibility lies with Narendra Modi and she told The Telegraph she would continue to challenge him for as long as she has the strength.

 “Why does an old lady still want to fight against this powerful man? Because I’m on the path of truth, I know he is responsible for the killings, I will fight for justice, and I will win,” she said.