The art of not forgetting

British jurist Sir Cyril Salmon in a lecture on `Tribunals of inquiry’had observed that “in all countries, certainly in those which enjoy freedom of speech and a free Press, moments occur….causing a nation-wide crisis of confidence in the integrity of public life….When it does, it is essential that public confidence should be restored, for without it no democracy can long survive…” Indisputably, the Mumbai riots constituted such a moment.

There is no getting away, of course, from the fact that inquiry commissions have often served, not as a way of remembering the horror, but of forgetting it the perfect bureaucratic response to the butcher’s machete. If it was left to the Rajiv Gandhi government, the November ’84 Delhi riots, in which an estimated 2,733 (official figure) Sikhs were killed, would have been quietly explained away as the inevitable effect of a big tree falling. It was only because of pressure from civil liberties groups and Sikh organisations it may be recalled that PUDR-PUCL released its report, `Who are the guilty?’ two weeks after the riots that itappointed the Justice Ranganath Mishra Commission on April 1985 to inquire into the deaths.

The Mishra Commission report, tabled in Parliament on February 23, 1987, neatly transferred the blame for the mayhem from the ruling Congress party to certain “anti-social elements”, unnamed of course. It did not even name the 19 Congress functionaries who it held guilty. H.K.L. Bhagat was exonerated by the Commission “in the absence of convincing material”.

Then take the Bhagalpur riots that first broke out on October 22, 1989, in those explosive days of the Ramshilyanas processions. Officially, 414 died — the majority of them, Muslim. The unofficial figure is over twice this, with at least 40,000 people forced to take shelter in impromptu relief camps. So what was the State’s response to it? Lackadaisical, to say the least. A judicial inquiry was announced on December 8, 1989. Nothing happened for more than a month thereafter, until Justice R.N. Prasad, a retired judge of the Patna High Court, formed asingle-member commission to look into the events. By the time it had got around to issuing its first public notification, its term had expired. Thereafter, although granted extensions, it continued to flounder on institutional delays, lack of staff, infrastructure and poor financial support.

When its report was finally submitted in 1995, the villains of 1989 had melted away or were wearing new faces. Just like the PAC functionaries named in the Gian Prakash Commission inquiring into the Meerut riots of 1987 had. Or the guilty named by the Justice C.D. Parekh inquiry into the riots that had broken out in that same city in 1982.

It’s a case of layer upon layer of amnesia building a brick wall of apathy over time. But it is in this apathy that the seeds of future blood-letting lies. There are at least three great delays which render such inquiries bankrupt. First, there is the delay in appointing the commission, with politicians playing a pro-active role in the choice of who should head it. Then there arethe inevitable pauses in the course of the inquiry, many of them caused by adjournments and attempts at preventing the smooth conduct of hearings by vested interests. Finally, there is the gap between the submission of the final report and its appearance in Parliament or the State Assembly.

Under the Commission of Inquiry Act, 1952, this time lag must not exceed six months. But state governments have often got away with a caveat in the Act that allows it to delay the tabling indefinitely “in the interest of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the state….or in public interest”.

In the case of the Justice Srikrishna Commission Report, although it was appointed shortly after the riots ended on January 25, 1993, numerous attempts were made by the Shiv Sena-BJP government to stymie its proceedings. Almost the first thing it did when it came to power in early 1995 was to extend the terms of the Commission to include the Bombay blasts.

There also came a time when it decided it could nottake Justice Srikrishna’s persistent interrogation anymore. On January 23, 1996, shortly before Shiv Sena MP Madhukar Sarpotdar, who had been intercepted by the police in a jeep loaded with unlicensed weapons during the riots, was to be questioned by the Commission, it was officially disbanded. It needed A.B. Vajpayee’s intervention in his brief spell as prime minister that May to breathe fresh life into the Commission. The nation had to wait until that September to hear Sarpotdar articulate to the Commission his philosophy of “retaliation”. There were other spokes in the wheel as well. As late as last March, Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray, angered by Justice Srikrishna’s demand for classified documents relating to the withdrawal of criminal cases against him by the state government, threatened to abolish the Commission.

Finally, five years of labour of painstakingly interviewing 503 witnesses and poring over 150,000 pages of evidence came to an end last week. The findings contained in the Report should,ideally, be made available to Mumbai’s electorate before it goes to the polls tomorrow. But that would be too much to expect from the Maharashtra government, given its dismal track record. There may now be attempts to bury it, despite protestations to the contrary. This the people of Mumbai must resist at all costs. The Justice Srikrishna Commission Report must not be a way of forgetting, but of remembering. Because otherwise poet Gulshan’s words may prove prophetic: Aapas hi mein larh larh kat kat mareyngey jis din/ Mit jaegaa jahaan se naam-o-nishan hamara…(if we keep on fighting each other, cutting each other’s throats/ A day will come when no trace will remain of our existence…)