The Anti-Sikh Violence of 1984

Successive commissions and committees over three decades, and the clearest available answer to what a commission of inquiry is worth.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: a Commission of Inquiry into the violence in Delhi and elsewhere in November 1984 is appointed under section 3 of the Commissions of Inquiry Act 1952, has the powers of a civil court under section 4 and such additional powers as the Government notifies under section 5, gives a witness the immunity in section 6, regulates its own procedure under section 8, and must give a hearing under section 8B to anyone whose conduct it inquires into or whose reputation is likely to be prejudicially affected; and the Government must lay its report before the Legislature with a memorandum of the action taken, within six months of submission, under section 3(4).

Why this episode is set as a question

Not for the events. For the sequence of inquiries. No other episode of collective violence in India has been examined by so many bodies over so long a period, and the sequence is the material from which a student can answer the standing question: what is a commission of inquiry worth?

The pattern is worth stating before the detail. An inquiry is appointed, its terms are narrow, it reports, a memorandum of action taken is laid, and another body is appointed to examine what the first did not. That happened repeatedly over more than thirty years, and the last of the bodies was appointed to re-examine cases that earlier bodies had closed.

What the sequence demonstrates

One: a commission's reach is fixed by its terms of reference. Each successive body was appointed because the previous one's terms had not covered something, or because its findings were thought incomplete. Since the terms are settled by the Government in the notification under section 3(1), the scope of every inquiry into official conduct is set by the officials' own Government.

Two: an inquiry does not produce a prosecution. Section 6 gives the witness immunity: no statement made in the course of giving evidence shall subject him to, or be used against him in, any civil or criminal proceeding, except a prosecution for giving false evidence. So the fullest account of what happened is also unusable in the trials.

Three: the prosecutions that did follow came from re-investigation, not from the reports. The only route from a report to a conviction is for the police to investigate again, from the beginning, with evidence gathered afresh. That is why the later bodies were investigative, examining closed cases and directing fresh investigation, rather than inquisitorial.

Four: delay defeats a criminal case. Witnesses die or move, records are lost, and the identification of an accused twenty years after the event is nearly impossible. Every remedy in this module that works at all works quickly: the sixty-day charge sheet in section 4(2)(e) of the Atrocities Act, the two-month trial in section 14 of that Act, the six-month trial directed in Tehseen S. Poonawalla v. Union of India, AIR 2018 SC 3354, and the thirty-day interim relief in the compensation scheme it required.