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They crammed into a tiny room, mob locked it and set it on fire by Parimal Dabhi

Sardarpura, 50 km from Mehsana town and not far from Vadnagar, home of Chief Minister Narendra Modi, had been declared a Samras village, part of one of the first schemes launched by Modi after he took charge in 2001.

Under the scheme, a village could appoint its sarpanch unanimously without an election. In Sardarpura, sarpanch Kachra Tribhovan Patel and former sarpanch Kanu Joitaram Patel were among the accused. Both were among the 31 convicted on Wednesday for murdering 33 people in the village they were the political custodians of.

The village’s deputy sarpanch, Someshwar Pandya, on the other hand, was attacked and blinded in one eye because he had helped the survivors lodge a complaint.

Almost all the accused were Patels, people who owned land in the village, while the victims were mostly labourers in their own farms. Muslims comprised nearly 10 per cent of the population; they were mostly Shaikhs, Pathans and Memons. They felt assured that their Shaikh Vaas area would be safe as they worked on farms owned by the local Patels. It was this area that bore the brunt of the attack.

Following the Godhra train carnage, the first signs of trouble in this part of north Gujarat showed by February 28, 2002, when some shops were burnt. Sensing danger, all but some 100 Muslims left the village. Shaikh Vaas mostly had 15-20 mudhouses where the Muslims lived.

On the night of March 1, a mob of around 1,500 people attacked residents of Sheikh Vaas. The men residents herded their women, children and elders into the locality’s only concrete house, which belonged to Mehmood Sheikh. Inside the 10 ft × 12ft room in which they were cramped, bales of cotton were stacked. The rioters doused these bales in oil, locked the house from the outside and set it on fire. Twenty-eight died there, their bodies charred by the time they were recovered the next morning; the rest died later.

Some others took shelter in the homes of Rawals but were chased into the fields. Some hid behind graves.

A police officer who was posted in Panchmahal district that year, and in Mehsana later, compared the massacre to the burning of the Sabarmati Express. The villagers were killed in the same manner as the 59 passengers, mostly kar sevaks, had been killed, he said.

In terms of the number of people killed, the Sardarpura massacre is next only to the killings at Ahmedabad’s Naroda Patiya (95 victims) and Gulberg Society (69). The case was one of nine from the 2002 riots that were re-investigated by a Special Investigation Team (SIT) on the directions of the Supreme Court. In 2002, the National Human Rights Commission had listed this as one of the cases deserving a CBI inquiry.

The district itself, Mehsana, was among the worst hit by the post-Godhra riots with three places —Dipda village and Kadi town besides Sardarpura — seeing bloodshed.

Since the killings, most Muslims have left Sadarpura, having been outcast and not allowed to work. For months, they had no interaction with the others, as most shopkeepers decided not to deal with Muslims. Besides, the 55 accused who had been arrested were all out on bail, and the survivors were scared of facing them.

Then superintendent of police Anupamsinh Gehlot reached the village early in the morning after the attack and helped rescue some of the survivors. Roads were blocked at several places to prevent the rescue.

Most of the survivors are resettled in Himmatnagar and afraid to return to Sardarpura, portions of which are now just a crime scene.