The Hindu Business Line : Fuzzy findings

THE tabling of the report of the Commission headed by the former Supreme Court Justice, Mr G. T. Nanavati, on the November 1984 riots following Indira Gandhi's assassination and of the Action Taken Report (ATR) of the Government on its recommendations has been of little help in finding the "smoking gun(s)" responsible for the happenings in which more than 3000 innocent Sikhs were murdered and whose memory even today haunts the nation.

That the full truth behind the tragedy is still proving elusive is most perturbing because the long shadow of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots is continuing to darken the political landscape, fuelling as it does suspicions about the complicity of some prominent Congress leaders. In fact, right from the beginning, the efforts at pinpointing the identities of culprits had been characterised by tergiversations and smokescreens. After stalling the demand for a full-scale judicial inquiry for nearly six months, the Government appointed the Justice Ranganath Mishra Commission in April 1985, but its report of 1987 side-stepped the core issue by only recommending the appointment of a committee to pursue the matter, while exonerating the authorities, in general, and H. K. L. Bhagat, in particular. Since then, successive governments appointed a total of seven committees and commissions which had practically very little to show for all their labours. The Nanavati Commission was the ninth in the series of attempts to fix responsibility, but it alsoseems set to end up as another exercise in futility.

If the heart-rending massacre of the innocents has moved no farther than where it was in 1984, insofar as exposing and punishing the masterminds is concerned, it is because of the fuzzy, and at places hedging, language employed in the various reports, defeating the very purpose of appointing such bodies. The weight and authority of even former Supreme Court Justices have been of little avail in arriving at definitive findings. It is but natural for the UPA Government, led by the party some of whose members are implicated in the carnage, to take advantage of the vague and inconclusive phraseology of the reports and indulge in a bit of legerdemain of its own. So much the pity.

B. S. Raghavan

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