The Congress burden

The notice issued by the Justice G.T. Nanavati Commission to Narasimha Rao, home minister in 1984, is a reminder and an opportunity. It reminds the nation of those three apocalyptic days in 1984, when mindless violence raged unchecked in the Capital, in which thousands of Sikhs lost their lives. It reminds us that the road to justice has been impossibly tortuous for the men and women who survived to tell the terrible tale. It is a moment to recall the clear pattern of state abdication and culpability in all eruptions of communal violence since Independence. The stonewalling of demands for justice, unforgivable delays in registering cases when they are registered at all, deliberately shoddy investigations leading to premature closing of files. The political campaigns crafted from hate.

But this notice to Rao is also a specific opportunity for the Congress. At least part of the mandate for the party in the recent polls can be decoded as the people’s revulsion at Gujarat 2002 and the BJP’s failure to acknowledge its government’s culpability or make amends. The UPA’s Common Minimum Programme implicitly recognised this when it pledged a special law to deal with communal violence. We are told that such a law would ensure that investigations are carried out by an independent agency and special courts are set up to expedite justice. But the CMP’s fine words are likely to run aground on the Congress governments’ own record in times of communal violence. More specifically, they may be rendered meaningless by the party’s reluctance to honestly confront its failures to uphold the law in Delhi ’84 and to atone for it.

The Congress has expressed ‘‘regret’’ over the years. But the accused of 1984 have thrived in the party. Kamal Nath and Jagdish Tytler, who were also issued notices by the Nanavati Commission, are ministers in the Manmohan Singh government; Sajjan Kumar is a Congress MP. The Congress will not command any credibility in its renewed avtar as upholder of an inclusive idea of India until it can come clean on its failure to protect the lives of innocent citizens in one of the worst cases of communal carnage in independent India. The commission’s notice to Rao puts the Rajiv Gandhi government in the dock. The Congress must seize the chance to make a full confession.