Tags:
Journalism of Courage
The victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots have been victimised twice by the Indian State. Whoever may have been responsible for the riots, the state failed to give the victims protection in any substantial measure. But their tragedy was compounded by the state8217;s failure to bring the perpetrators of those gruesome crimes to justice. Very few convictions have been handed down in proportion to the scale of the horrors inflicted on that fateful day. The Ranganath Mishra Commission was given so narrow a mandate, that it was unlikely to produce justice. The Nanavati Commission has finally submitted its report. Yet the state continues to repeat its pattern of evasion and procrastination. Although the home minister has suggested that the Report will be made public at some point, the hesitation in doing so instantly, does not speak well. The report must be made public immediately. The victims of the riots deserve at least this much good faith effort on their behalf. And it is a travesty that in a democracy, making public reports on such vital issues is a matter of executive discretion.
The contents of the report can be judged only when it is made fully public. There is something of an oddity in the fact that the home minister has been exercising his discretion already in discussing the report with the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi. Whether or not, or to what extent, Congress politicians are indicted in the report remains to be seen. But there is something of a conflict of interest at work in the whole situation. The very party, whose members are the object of the Report, will now exercise the discretion to make it public. The only way to maintain propriety in such a situation would have been to make the report public instantly.
