One step sideways

Once upon a time, not very long ago, Justice M.C. Jain passed the buck to the government. He produced a report on the Rajiv Gandhi assass...

Once upon a time, not very long ago, Justice M.C. Jain passed the buck to the government. He produced a report on the Rajiv Gandhi assassination that was rife with suspicion and wild surmise, but containing very little by way of evidence. Now, the government has passed the buck on to its lesser organs.

It cannot afford to upset Sonia Gandhi, who entered politics on the strength of her khoon bhari maang and will not let the Jain Commission issue drop. Therefore, the government cannot take either of the two logical steps open to it: to rubbish the report and then either forget about the assassination case or call for a fresh investigation, done from scratch.

So the case must remain in suspended animation and the investigation must be ongoing, incessant and completely open-ended. A multidisciplinary monitoring agency MDMA, to be set up within the CBI, will pursue the matter further. It will, in particular, look into the movements of all suspicious characters who were on the loose in the period ofRajiv8217;s killing, an activity that will keep it safely occupied for many years. In the process, if the government can keep Jayalalitha happy, so much the better.

So the Action Taken Report ATR tabled in Parliament duly finds Subramanian Swamy to be vaguely suspicious. And whether the DMK in Tamil Nadu gave tactical support to the LTTE 8212; and its government should therefore be dismissed 8212; is to be determined by the MDMA. In other words, the political class is washing its hands of the mess in Tamil Nadu.

This is just the final or is it perennially semifinal act of the Jain drama. Throughout, it has been an object lesson in infructuous activity. The purpose of a judicial commission of enquiry is to collect sufficient evidence for the state to put together its case for the prosecution.

What Justice Jain has collected is raw data, not evidence. The voluminous interim and final reports are packed with facts which have only the most tangential bearing on the case. One that refuses to be forgotten, forinstance, is a disposition of the security detail at Rajiv Gandhi8217;s residence. Of what value is this information when he was killed at Sriperumbudur?

And, famously, there is Justice Jain8217;s first chapter, a five-finger exercise that attempts to be the definitive hagiography of Rajiv Gandhi.

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The Jain Commission story has always consisted of one step forward and one step back. Now, the government has been creative and taken a step sideways. The true story of the assassination is not about to become public knowledge. The case will find use only in insulating the politics of Delhi from that of Chennai.

In the process, the 26 accused who were delivered death sentences at Poonamallee will probably get a reprieve. After all, how can a sentence be carried out while the case is still being investigated? When the sentence in question is capital punishment, the argument does seem to be compelling and will carry weight with the Supreme Court, where the appeals are coming up.

There is only one bright spot in theJain Commission story: hopefully, the precedent of the MDMA will stop the practice of appointing politically-motivated judicial commissions. The machinery of justice should never be used for partisan purposes.