The National Commission for Minorities (NCM) is working towards ensuring parity in compensation for victims of communal riots and terror attacks, given the differences it has noticed between compensation for different incidents. The commission is in the process of compiling data on compensation right from the Nellie massacre in Assam in 1983 to lobby with the Centre. It hopes to establish parity in what is paid out. The Indian Express has adjusted the figures available with the NCM, factoring in inflation, so as to arrive at the current value of the compensation handed out for some of the incidents since Nellie. The figures establish that there seem to be no ground rules for compensation. (See table) Recently, the matter of compensation for riot victims was brought to the fore when the UPA found itself in a twist about an announcement regarding new compensation figures for Gujarat riot victims of 2002. Union Minister of State for Home Sriprakash Jaiswal had announced that the government would offer Rs 7 lakh to families that had lost a member in the riots to bring it at par with that announced for the Sikh families affected by the 1984 riots. But he then backtracked in an answer to an unstarred question in the Lok Sabha this winter session, saying that “no decision had been taken so far.” This caused much embarrassment to the Centre. Several voluntary groups and activists have raised the question of lack of a standard for parity in compensation for victims of all kinds of social violence, whether communal or caste riots or terror attacks. The NCM hopes by gathering the evidence on what has been the practice so far and the glaring inequalities, it will be able to lobby for a uniform standard across incidents and probably across states too. While state governments are usually responsible for the major portion of the payments made, the Centre, too, of late, has been chipping in. Often, there are huge differences in case the deaths occurs in a riot. For example, for the 2002 riots in Gujarat only Rs 1.5 lakh was paid out to each of the government’s list of 1,169 victims. In contrast, for the Mumbai train blasts just four years later, because of the fact of the deaths taking place in the train, included the amount put out separately by the railways, the total received by each of the 187 dead amounted to nearly Rs 11.25 lakh each. NCM chairman Hamid Ansari acknowledged that such a drive to persuade the central and state governments on a standard was on, but refused to comment on the numbers just yet. “The exercise of getting exact figures is still going on.” The state of Uttar Pradesh, according to the data preliminarily collected by the NCM has been one which has not discriminated at least this year between a riot or a terror blast, with victims of the Varanasi attack getting exactly what the victims of the Aligarh riots got this year, irrespective of which community they belonged to - a sum of Rs 5 lakh each. Interestingly, the (Prevention of) Communal Violence Bill which is yet to be passed by Parliament does not also go into the issue of deciding what a suitable yardstick for compensating a life lost in a communal riot or terror attack. The decision usually is political
