For two decades, she waged a legal battle against government officials in India after her husband was brutally killed in Gujarat in 2002.
Zakia Jafri, who turned her personal loss into an uphill campaign for justice after her husband, Ehsan Jafri, was brutally murdered during sectarian riots in the Indian state of Gujarat in 2002, died on Feb. 2 at her daughter’s home in Ahmedabad, India. She was 86.
Her death was confirmed by her son Tanveer Jafri.
More than 1,000 people, a majority of them Muslim, died in the riots that gripped Gujarat, on the western coast of India, in 2002. They began on Feb. 27, when a fire killed nearly 60 people on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims to Godhra, a town in Gujarat. The cause of the fire was disputed.
But as rumors spread that Muslims were responsible for the blaze, mobs erupted across large parts of Gujarat, attacking Muslim homes and businesses and killing people by hacking and burning them to death. Among those killed was Ms. Jafri’s husband, who was a union leader, a lawyer and a former member of Parliament.
In a legal battle that dragged on for almost two decades, Ms. Jafri accused Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, who at the time was the leader of Gujarat, of “conspiracy and abetment” in the riots.
In all that time “she remained stoic, despairing, yet hopeful,” Teesta Setalvad, a human-rights activist, said in an interview. “For me, for us, she was the mother of all the survivors of 2002, carrying the burden of her pain and loss with dignity and fortitude and always giving us strength.”