On February 1, 2025, Zakia Jafri passed away at the age of 86, quietly resting in her sister’s home in Ahmedabad - a city that changed her life forever, but where she kept coming back. She was Zakia appa to me, and I was her lawyer right from the Magistrate’s Court to the Supreme Court.
I met her on many occasions as she waged legal battles one after the other. We lost many of those cases, and after every loss I would find in her eyes not a glimpse of the forlornness of loss, or a stray tear, but a tenacity, a determination to pursue justice. There was one travesty of justice after another, all culminating in the final one perpetuated by the Supreme Court in 2022, when a three-judge bench led by Justice A.M. Khanwilkar dismissed her complaint of biased investigations in the Gujarat riots larger conspiracy case. Three years later, I can say confidently that she never lost her spirit of fighting.
Zakia was 63 when the Gujarat carnage started in late February 2002, a homemaker and already a senior citizen. She was staying at the Gulbarg Society, a Muslim neighbourhood in Ahmedabad, with her husband, ex-Member of Legislative Assembly in Gujarat, Ehsan Jafri. Incidentally, Ehsan was also the last Muslim MLA from the state. On February 28, 2002, following the unfortunate burning of Hindus trapped in the Sabarmati Express, a large mob attacked the Society. Despite police presence and repeated pleas from civil society activists to the highest state authorities to protect the neighbourhood, the State turned a blind eye when the mob broke in. It virtually amounted to criminal negligence and a conspiracy. Zakia was in her home when Gulbarg was attacked. Fortuitously, she was saved, but her husband, just as 68 others in the neighbourhood, was brutally and heinously murdered. Gulbarg Society was burnt down. Ehsan Jafri gave up his own life to save many others and Zakia was a witness to this.
