There were riots in 2002 in Gujarat and Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time. He has been accused of initiating and condoning the violence, as have police and government officials who allegedly directed the rioters and gave lists of Muslim-owned properties to them.

The "riots" weren't really riots per se or protests but rather acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing from both Muslims and Hindus in the area due to earlier incidents.

The Majority of victims were Muslims. It is estimated that at least 250 girls and women had been gang raped and then burned to death. Children were killed by being burnt alive and those digging mass graves described the bodies as "burned and butchered beyond recognition". Children were force fed petrol and then set on fire, pregnant women were gutted and their unborn child's body then shown to the women.

In the Naroda Patiya mass grave of 96 bodies 46 were women. The murderers also flooded homes and electrocuted entire families inside.

Violence against women also included their being stripped naked, objects being forced into their bodies and then their being killed. According to Kalpana Kannabiran the rapes were part of a well organized, deliberate and pre-planned strategy, and that this puts the violence in the area of a political pogrom and genocide. Other acts of violence against women were acid attacks, beatings and the killing of women who were pregnant. Children were also killed in front of their parents.

Children and infants were speared and held aloft before being thrown into fires. Describing the sexual violence perpetrated against Muslim women and girls, Renu Khanna writes that the survivors reported "that sexual violence consisted of forced nudity, mass rapes, gang-rapes, mutilation, insertion of objects into bodies, cutting of breasts, slitting the stomach and reproductive organs, and carving of Hindu religious symbols on women's body parts."

Testimony heard by the committee stated that:
A chilling technique, absent in pogroms unleashed hitherto but very much in evidence this time in a large number of cases, was the deliberate destruction of evidence. Barring a few, in most instances of sexual violence, the women victims were stripped and paraded naked, then gang-raped, and thereafter quartered and burnt beyond recognition ... The leaders of the mobs even raped young girls, some as young as 11 years old ... before burning them alive ... Even a 20-day-old infant, or a fetus in the womb of its mother, was not spared.

Frontline magazine reported that in Ahmedabad of the 249 bodies recovered by 5 March, 30 were of Hindus. Of the Hindus that had been killed, 13 had died as a result of police action and several others had died while attacking Muslim owned properties. Despite the relatively few attacks by Muslim mobs on Hindu neighbourhoods, 24 Muslims were reported to have died in police shootings

According to official figures, the riots resulted in the deaths of 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus; 2,500 people were injured non-fatally, and 223 more were reported missing. Other sources estimate that up to 2,500 Muslims died.

The US State Department's International Religious Freedom Report quoted the NHRC as concluding that the attacks had been premeditated, that state ( Gujarat ) government officials were complicit, and that there was evidence of police not acting during the assaults on Muslims. The US state department also found that Gujarat's high school textbooks described Hitler's 'charismatic personality' and the 'achievements of Nazism'. US Congressmen John Conyers and Joe Pitts subsequently introduced a resolution in the House condemning the conduct of Modi in inciting religious persection in Gujarat. They stated that Modi's government had a role in "promoting the attitudes of racial supremacy, racial hatred and the legacy of Nazism through his governments support of school textbooks in which Nazism is glorified". They also wrote a letter to the US State Department asking it deny Modi a visa to the United States.