1984 Delhi Sikh Genocide - Misra Commission

Blind Justice

Creation

After rejecting all demands for a judicial inquiry for over five months, the Rajiv Gandhi finally appointed a Commission in April 1985 under the chairmanship of a sitting Supreme Court judge Ranganath Misra.

Focus

According to its terms of reference, the object of the Misra Commission was to inquire into "the allegations in regard to the incidents of organised violence" which took place in Delhi. Misra interpreted this to mean that his job was only to find out whether the violence in Delhi was organised or not. His finding was that the violence was initially spontaneous and, as the police failed to act promptly, anti-social elements took over and organised the carnage that followed.

Report

Misra did not however identify those anti-social elements, much less did he explain why the police either failed to act against them or in several cases even colluded with them. The Commission categorically ruled out the possibility of the Congress Party and the Rajiv Gandhi Government having a hand in the holocaust. The only political involvement Misra conceded was that Congress workers had on their own participated in the violence.

It did not seem to matter much to the Misra Commission that its findings were hardly convincing. The report is breath-taking crude in its reasoning and vindicates the apprehensions that led the Citizens Justice Committee, the main representative of the victims, to withdraw from the Commission's proceedings at an advanced stage.

Reward For Miscarriage Of Justice

A subsequent Congress Government headed by P.V. Narasimha Rao, who was home minister during the carnage, rewarded Misra by appointing him the first chairman of (all the things), the National Human Rights Commission.

Later, Misra himself put a question mark over the integrity of his inquiry by joining the Congress party and becoming its Rajya Sabha member. The Indian Parliament sought to atone for all these sordid happenings by passing a unanimous resolution in support of the Vajpayee Government's decision to order a fresh judicial inquiry into the 1984 carnage in the form of the Justice G.T. Nanavati Commission.

Aftermath

Justice Misra submitted his report in August 1986 and the report was made public six months thereafter in February 1987. In his report, Justice Misra stated that it was not part of his terms of reference to identify any person and recommended the formation of three committees.

The commission and its report was criticised by People's Union for Civil Liberties and Human Rights Watch as biased. A Human Rights Watch report recording the Misra Commission noted:

It recommended no criminal prosecution of any individual, and it cleared all high-level officials of directing the pogroms. In its findings, the commission did acknowledge that many of the victims testifying before it had received threats from local police. While the commission noted that there had been "widespread lapses" on the part of the police, it concluded that "the allegations before the commission about the conduct of the police are more of indifference and negligence during the riots than of any wrongful overt act."

You can read a report on the Misra Commission here:

Misra Commission Report
by Unknown
(unknown) Ten commissions and committees have so far enquired into the 1984 Sikh genocide. Most like this one were miscarriages of justice.

People's Union for Civil Liberties criticised the Misra commission for keeping information on the accused secret while revealing the names and addresses of victims of violence.

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