After commission, omission?

On the face of it, Justice BN Srikrishna, who headed the Mumbai riots commission of inquiry, has no case when he says (as quoted in a news report) that any judge taking up such a task must do so only on the promise that the final report will be binding on the government. The main reason for this is that the commission is not a court of law, only a fact-finding mission. While courts do attempt to find out the facts before coming to a judgment, the difference is that a commission does not try a case, giving the accused's lawyers a chance to tear up the prosecution's arguments. Equally, since judges themselves do get it wrong, and that is why there is a process of appeal, sentencing people on the basis of a commission report is unfair. It does not help matters that, for every commission of inquiry that is well run, there are many that are simply there to fulfil a political mandate or take the heat off some scandal.

That said, if the purpose of the commission is not to provide justice, what is it? The Mumbai riots took place in 1992-93, and it took the Srikrishna Commission around five years to submit its report. The report indicted political leaders such as the Shiv Sena chief, Bal Thackeray, for their role. Yet, successive governments have sat on the report and done nothing. Even by Indian standards, waiting for 15 years for justice is a bit of a stretch. What lesson are the victims and the perpetrators (of riots in the future as well) to draw from this? That commissions are essentially a political tool to take off the immediate heat, to put some distance between the event and the identification of the guilty, so that when the time comes to take action, most people have lost interest?

If such cynicism is not to be encouraged, solutions have to be found. The country must put in place a mechanism to ensure that whenever a commission's report is put in the public domain, there is someone whose job is to take action on it, not leave the report to the tender mercies of the government of the day, which, given how long such commissions generally take, can well be the party whose misdeeds the commission was set up to probe in the first place. Public prosecutors who are not answerable to the government of the day (like Archibald Cox, who got on to President Nixon's tail in the Watergate scandal) provide one option. In an ideal situation, the Central Bureau of Investigation could play this role but, as is well-known, the CBI is heavily influenced by the government of the day and its record is full of botched investigations. Justice Srikrishna is not right in demanding that all commission reports have to be binding on the government, but putting in place an institutional structure to take forward a commission's report is not asking for too much.