Mumbai rewind

After one and a half decades, the perpetrators of the Mumbai blasts are being brought to justice. Sure, delayed justice is better than no justice. But to bring a measure of closure to the tragedy, we need to ensure credible justice is also delivered to the victims of the riots that preceded those blasts. This means dusting down the Justice Srikrishna Commission report. The Commission, after five years of relentless inquiry, painstakingly pieced together a shocking story of communal politics, administrative apathy and police impunity. The contents of the report seared the conscience of the nation but could not, it appears, shame the political guardians of Mumbai into taking necessary action.

The Shiv Sena did all it could to sabotage the Commission. When it was in power, the party changed the Commission’s terms of reference, prematurely and arbitrarily wound it up and rejected its findings. When out of power, its leaders did all they could to browbeat the rulers of the day into inaction. This is entirely unsurprising. The commission had passed strictures against the Shiv Sena supremo, Bal Thackeray, former chief minister, Manohar Joshi, and several other senior leaders of the party.

But while the Shiv Sena’s animosity towards the commission can be explained, what can account for the Congress’s complete indifference to the Srikrishna report? A party that has been in power in Maharashtra in coalition with the NCP since 1999 has deliberately and persistently stalled any attempt to punish the guilty — ranging from politicians who provoked and encouraged crowds to massacre and pillage to trigger-happy, communal policemen. The Commission, in fact, indicted 31 police officers, ranging from the rank of deputy commissioner of police to constables, for their roles in the riots. The Congress has been extremely vocal about the Gujarat riots of 2002 and justifiably so. But the unfinished business of justice delivery in the Mumbai riots, which had occurred under its watch a whole decade earlier, may yet come to haunt the Grand Old Party and its leaders.