Enough is enough

The interim report of the Jain Commission is a bundle of inanities and contradictions, as borne out by a scrutiny of the same by this newsp...

The interim report of the Jain Commission is a bundle of inanities and contradictions, as borne out by a scrutiny of the same by this newspaper. If this is really a forerunner of the final report due to be submitted early next year, it is futile to expect anything conclusive in it.

However, it would be improper to blame Justice M.C. Jain wholly for the shortcomings of the report. This is because the very purpose of the appointment of the commission was to placate a grieving widow and her cronies, rather than to get to the bottom of the matter.

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As the report itself reveals, enlightened opinion was against its constitution, knowing as it did that the Verma Commission was firmly in place and a regular police investigation into the assassination was already on. The fear of overlap was built into the situation but the government ignored it, as its overriding motive was political in nature.

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More than anyone else, the commission knew the compulsions under which it was appointed. The eulogistic biographical sketch of Rajiv Gandhi that it has pieced together is a giveaway. Perhaps this would not have been noticed if the commission had been able to marshal evidence to unravel the conspiracy behind the former Prime Minister’s assassination, if there was any. Unfortunately, that is where it has miserably failed.

Even the Congress, which went ga-ga about the indictment of the DMK and brought down the Gujral Government on this specious score, seems to have realised that it cannot be relied upon to whip up electoral emotions. For the report has, through its sweeping remarks, cast aspersions on the whole Tamil community.

It did not think twice before indicting the head of a neighbouring country. The commission seems to have been suffering from delusions of grandeur as it relished cross-examining anyone and everyone it fancied. Had the commission been left to itself, it would have laid its hands on every scrap of paper that intelligence agencies routinely sent to the government before and after the bomb blast at Sriperumbudur. It did not mind exceeding its brief, as digression after digression in the voluminous report clearly vouchsafes.

The commission was equally unmindful of the ill-effects of poking its nose into affairs that were none of its business. Even security considerations did not weigh with it as it sought — and obtained — extension after extension to produce this insipid report.

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The President’s keenness to avert a parliamentary debate on the report, with which most mainstream parties concurred, was a pointer to the terrible embarrassment the government would have faced if debaters flung Justice Jain’s observations at one another to score a point.

While the details of the relationship that Indian intelligence agencies had with the LTTE buttress the point that the DMK was not the only one to blame for the free run that the former had in Tamil Nadu that facilitated its macabre deed. But in the process, the commission has needlessly exposed India to charges of interfering in the internal affairs of its neighbours.

At the end of it all, what the nation has got is a compendium of affidavits filed by an assortment of people and findings that leave no one any wiser. In the circumstances, it would be more prudent to wind up the commission than let the present agony be exacerbated.