[46][47] Historian Ainslie Thomas Embree stated that the official story of the attack on the train (that it was organized and carried out by people under orders from Pakistan) was entirely baseless.
[48] The Union government led by the Indian National Congress party in 2005 also set up a committee to probe the incident, headed up by retired Supreme Court judge Umesh Chandra Banerjee.
[42][51] Maulvi Husain Haji Ibrahim Umarji, a cleric in Godhra, and a dismissed Central Reserve Police Force officer named Nanumiyan were presented as the "masterminds" behind the arson.
Organizations such as Human Rights Watch criticised the Indian government and the Gujarat state administration for failure to address the resulting humanitarian condition of victims who fled their homes for relief camps during the violence, the "overwhelming majority of them Muslim.
According to Kalpana Kannabiran the rapes were part of a well-organized, deliberate and pre-planned strategy, and which facts place the violence into the categories of political pogrom and genocide.
[86] George Fernandes in a discussion in parliament on the violence caused widespread furor in his defense of the state government, saying that this was not the first time that women had been violated and raped in India.
[109][110] The report also highlighted a second meeting, held in Lunawada village of Panchmahal district, attended by state ministers Ashok Bhatt, and Prabhatsinh Chauhan, among other BJP and RSS leaders, where "detailed plans were made on the use of kerosene and petrol for arson and other methods of killing.
[111] Dipankar Gupta believes that the state and police were clearly complicit in the violence, but that some officers were outstanding in the performance of their duties, such as Himanshu Bhatt and Rahul Sharma.
[76][77] In response to allegations of state involvement, Gujarat government spokesman, Bharat Pandya, told the BBC that the rioting was a spontaneous Hindu backlash fueled by widespread anger against Muslims.
The Supreme Court also lambasted the Gujarat government as "modern day Neros" who looked elsewhere when innocent women and children were burning and then interfered with prosecution.
The Indian Supreme Court, acting on a petition by social activist Teesta Setalvad, ordered a retrial outside Gujarat in which nine accused were found guilty in 2006.
[126] After police dismissed the case against her assailants, she approached the National Human Rights Commission of India and petitioned the Supreme Court seeking a reinvestigation.
[131] The Mumbai High Court upheld the life imprisonment of the eleven men convicted for the gang rape of Bilkis Bano and the murder of her family members on 8 May 2017.
[138][139] In 2005, the Vadodara fast-track court acquitted 108 people accused of murdering two youths during a mob attack on a group of displaced Muslims returning under police escort to their homes in Avdhootnagar.
[145] A stringent anti-terror law, the POTA, was used by the Gujarat government to charge 131 people in connection to the Godhra train fire, but not invoked in prosecuting any of the accused in the post-Godhra riots.
[160][161][162] Headed by retired Supreme Court Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer, the CCT released its findings in 2003 and stated that, contrary to the government allegation of a conspiracy in Godhra, the incident had not been pre-planned and there was no evidence to indicate otherwise.
[177] Sreekumar also claims it is common practice to intimidate whistleblowers and otherwise subvert the justice system,[178] and that the state government issued "unconstitutional directives", with officials asking him to kill Muslims involved in rioting or disrupting a Hindu religious event.
[183] In August 2002 Shahid Ahmad Bakshi, an operative for the militant group Lashkar-e-Toiba planned to assassinate Modi, Pravin Togadia of the VHP, and other members of the right wing nationalist movement to avenge the 2002 Gujarat violence.
[187] Defending the Modi administration in the Rajya Sabha against charges of genocide, BJP spokesman V. K. Malhotra said that the official toll of 254 Hindus, killed mostly by police fire, indicates how the state authorities took effective steps to curb the violence.
[188] Opposition parties and three coalition partners of the BJP-led central government demanded the dismissal of Modi for failing to contain the violence, with some calling for the removal of Union Home Minister L. K. Advani as well.
[193][110] In 2004, the weekly magazine Tehelka published a hidden camera exposé alleging that BJP legislator Madhu Srivastava bribed Zaheera Sheikh, a witness in the Best Bakery case.
[194] Srivastava denied the allegation,[195] and an inquiry committee appointed by the Supreme Court drew an "adverse inference" from the video footage, though it failed to uncover evidence that money was actually paid.
[207] The Gujarat government blocked telecast of cable news channels broadcasting the expose, a move strongly condemned by the Editors Guild of India.
[213] In his report, Raju Ramachandran, the amicus curiae for the case, strongly disagreed with a key conclusion of R. K. Raghavan who led SIT: that IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt was not present at a late-night meeting of top Gujarat cops held at the Chief Minister's residence in the wake of 27 February 2002 Godhra carnage.
It has been Bhatt's claim—made in an affidavit before the apex court and in statements to the SIT and the amicus—that he was present at the meeting where Modi allegedly said Hindus must be allowed to carry out retaliatory violence against Muslims.
"[214][215] Further, R. K. Shah, the public prosecutor in the Gulbarg Society massacre, resigned because he found it impossible to work with the SIT and further stated that "Here I am collecting witnesses who know something about a gruesome case in which so many people, mostly women and children huddled in Jafri's house, were killed and I get no cooperation.
[32][220] As Modi rose to prominence in India, the UK and the EU lifted their bans in October 2012 and March 2013, respectively,[221][222] and after his election as prime minister he was invited to Washington, in the US.
[231] In contrast, Amnesty International's annual report on India in 2003 claimed the "Gujarat government did not actively fulfill its duty to provide appropriate relief and rehabilitation to the survivors".
[233] In February, several weeks after the ban, the Indian tax authorities raided the British media group's local offices, seizing employees' laptops and mobile phones.
[234] Reporters Without Borders denounced the actions as "attempts to clamp down on independent media", noting that the raids had "all the appearance of a reprisal against the BBC for releasing a documentary critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi".