On February 28, 2002, the second day after riots broke out in Gujarat, alongside hundreds of Muslim men, women and children, then Congress MP Ehsan Jafri was killed, his body slashed into pieces and burnt during the Gulbarg Society massacre. 23 years on, his party, the Indian National Congress fails to remember their leader who stood by the party and its ideals till his last breath.
Ehsan Jafri’s death anniversary in 2025 is also marked as the first after the death of his wife, Zakiya Jafri, who dedicated her life after surviving the massacre, in legal battles to bring to justice the culprits of her husband’s killing. She passed away on February 1, 2025, aged 86, leaving a legacy of resistance against the Hindutva machinery.
Congressman Ehsan Jafri’s death anniversary was not remembered by any Congress leaders or the party itself, while its leaders promptly remembered to pay their respects to another Congress leader and the first President of India, Rajendra Prasad, and Kamala Nehru, whose death anniversaries fall on the same day.
Meanwhile, it was the Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan who remembered the fallen Congress leader and freedom fighter on the day of his martyrdom at the hands of mobs fuelled by Hindutva.
Ehsan Jafri was born in 1929 to a Shiite Bohra Muslim family in Madhya Pradesh and moved to Ahmedabad with his family when he was six.
He joined the Congress party and the freedom movement in his youth years and remained with the party post independence.
He and his family were subjected to violence in the Gujarat communal riots of 1969. Although the police rescued him and his family, their house in Khandwa was ransacked and burned down, in the riots that occurred when the Congress party was in power in the state.
The event forced the family to move to a refugee camp in Ahmedabad in 1971. That year, the Jafri family moved to their house in Gulbarg Society and lived there until Ehsan’s last in 2002.
He was one of the few Congress leaders who emerged victorious in the first Lok Sabha election after the Indian Emergency was lifted, even as the Congress party was rooted out of power, with Indira Gandhi and her ever-powerful son Sanjay Gandhi losing from their sitting seats.
A day after anti-Muslim riots broke out on February 27, 2002, following the Godhra train burning, the state of Gujarat fumed with communal violence, with Hindutva-fuelled rioters indiscriminately unleashing violence against Muslims in the state.
The same was the case at Gulbarg Society in Ahmedabad, an upper-middle-class housing colony, predominantly occupied by Muslim families, ghettoised in the aftermath of the earlier communal riots.
On the morning of February 28, a 5000-strong armed mob surrounded the housing colony, chanting Hindutva slogans, and calling for violence against the residents in the housing society.
According to an FIR over the riots, the Gujarat police dispersed the mob in the morning, but they regrouped by noon, this time with more arms and strategies to attack the housing colony.
The FIR mentions that the rioters had printouts of voter lists, to identify and target Muslim-owned properties.
Residents of the Gulbarg Society took refuge in the house of the MP and senior political leader in Gujarat, Ehsan Jafri, thinking that he would be able to assure safety to them.
The Congress MP, taking responsibility for the people who have trusted their life with him, tried to contact senior police officials, and political leaders to provide police protection and security for them. According to his wife Zakiya Jafri’s accounts, the leader even reached out to the then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, to explain the situation, which received no response.
When the rioting mob, which had been squandering and killing the people in the society reached the house of Ehsan Jafri MP, he braved his life, reportedly by going out of the house and requesting the rioters with a bundle of currency he had at his house, offering it to the rioters and requesting the rioters to spare the lives of the people.
But the rioters, with no mercy, attacked him with swords and other weapons, and burnt him alive. They also attacked the house, killing multiple people and burning his house and multiple others in the society.
Overall, the rioters killed 69 people with at least 31 individuals being burnt alive.
Four years after losing her husband and a man who stood by his people till the last breath, to the Hindutva hate, Ehsan’s wife Zakia, who survived the massacre, took matters to court in 2006.
She alleged key political and law enforcement authorities in the state, including then chief minister Narendra Modi, of incompetence and complacency in the communal riots.
What followed was a legal battle which she predominantly fought by herself and with no help from the Congress party.
Her decade-long political battle ended in 2022 when the Supreme Court cleared Narendra Modi of all charges, who was by then the Prime Minister of the country.
With Zakia Jafri’s passing earlier this month, the legacy of both her and Ehsan Jafri’s lives was etched into India’s history, while its secular nature continues to erode, fuelled by religious fundamentalism, while the ‘grand old’ Congress party remained a mere spectator.
