Srikrishna commission's report - killings of muslims in Mumbai, Sept. 2001

PUCL Bulletin, September 2001 -- By Asghar Ali Engineer: "The Report of the Srikrishna Commission, which probed the Mumbai riots of 1992-93, remains unimplemented even three years after its submission. All previous riot probe reports have met with the same fate. Take, for example, the Reddy Commission Report on the 1969 Ahmedabad riots. It was prepared so painstakingly by Justice Reddy and fixed responsibility for the communal violence.

The Justice Madon Commission on the Bhiwandi-Jalgaon riots of 1970 prepared another significant report. It was in seven volumes and Justice Madon had worked very hard to get at the truth. Justice Madon had criticized the police role and pointed out that the Bhiwandi Superintendent of Police had forged the daily diaries to involve some minority leaders.

The Shiv Sena-BJP Government during whose tenure the Report was submitted naturally rejected it as biased and anti- Hindu. The then Chief Minister, ML Manoher Joshi, said that if anyone touched the Sena supremo, Mr. Bal Thackeray, he would resign as Chief Minister and agitate in the streets. One could hardly expect from such a partisan Chief Minister any action on the Report. Again, like the other reports, the Sena-BJP Government of Maharashtra accepted certain marginal recommendations about the policing system and filed the report.

Mr. Sharad Pawar's Nationalist Congress Party promised in its manifesto that if it came to power it would implement the Report within three months. However, it is more than a year since the Congress-NCP Government came to power but there is no sign of that happening. First, the Congress-NCP Government kept saying it is studying the 'legal position'. On December 6, 1999, a citizen's delegation met the Chief Minister, Mr. Vilasrao Deshmukh, and urged him to implement the report. He asked for two months' time, A signature campaign was also launched by an organisation called "Nirbhay Bano" (be fearless) and submitted to the Chief Minister. The government found another way out for non-implementation of the report by filing an affidavit in the Supreme Court in January 2000 that it plans to refer the report to the Crime Branch.
"