Hailed and failed

Appointing commissions of inquiries has almost become a reflex action for the Government, but the decision taken last month to set up a judicial panel to inquire into the Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose mystery shows a habit gone too far.

On March 25, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) solemnly announced that this commission, at considerable expense, would finally unravel the truth about whether Bose was alive or dead, notwithstanding the fact that even if he had survived the air crash, he would have long crossed the geriatric barrier. But Home Ministry officials add they are only following the wishes of the Calcutta High Court.

Ever since Netaji's reported death in an air crash at Taihokv (Formosa) on August 18, 1945, the issue has been plagued by controversy. Already, two inquiries have been held to settle the question. Union Home Minister L.K. Advani himself admits that the last inquiry had found no substance in the claims that Netaji was alive, but adds that a large number of people still believeotherwise.

Critics of the commission point out that a judicial panel cannot function as an investigator who can actually establish authentic facts so many years after the event. Says a cynical MHA official: ``It was either a judicial commission or a CBI inquiry, we chose the easier way out.''

The formal appointment of this new commission will inevitably lead to acquisition of the accoutrements of such panels spacious offices, preferably in Luyten's Delhi, large secretarial staff, and housing and other facilities for the officials reporting to the commission. The last panel appointed by the Government, the Wadhwa commission, to inquire into the Graham Staines killings in Orissa, is said to have already made several demands to the MHA regarding office space, secretarial staff and even high-tech tele-conferencing facilities.

But what do judicial commissions, appointed by the Government to examine issues ranging from riots, scandals and assassinations to inter-state disputes actually achieve? Critics ofcommissions note that their recent history has been extremely spotty. Apart from taking inordinately long to deliver reports, they seldom achieve anything. A walk down the dusty corridors of Vigyan Bhavan, which has nearly become a commission haven after hosting the infamous Jain Commission and now the Wadhwa commission, shows the history of this hailed and ``failed'' panels:

LIBERHAN COMMISSION: The one-man Justice M.S. Liberhan commission had been appointed in 1992 to inquire into the Ayodhya demolition. First based in Lucknow, the panel later shifted to its current location in Delhi. It summoned 17 Sangh Parivar leaders, only to be confronted with a high court stay order. Four years down the line, various Union governments have been unable to get the stay vacated. So the final report is still nowhere in sight.

JAIN COMMISSION: The panel was set up to inquire into the conspiracy behind the assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. In its seven long years, it cost the exchequer Rs2.81 crore, followed a tortuous route and created diplomatic problems and controversies. Finally, its report came to no specific conclusion except breeding yet another commission -- the Multi-Disciplinary Monitoring Agency (MDMA), which is currently going into the merits of the Jain commission report. In the MDMA case, commission fever also struck an unexpected victim, the Central Bureau of Investigation, which is currently working with 33 per cent less staff as it had to release senior officials to chart the course of the roving probe.

THAKKAR COMMISSION: Set up to inquire into the assassination of former prime minister Indira Gandhi, it also ended up creating a controversy. Thakkar took less than two years to submit his report, the expenditure on the panel being over Rs 21 lakh. The final report dwelt extensively on the role of R.K. Dhawan, a close aide of Mrs Gandhi, and Thakkar even put him through a lie-detector test. However, eventually, the famous ``needle of suspicion'' in Thakkar's wordsamounted to nothing as the then PM Rajiv Gandhi chose to ignore the report and rehabilitated Dhawan.

LAHOTI COMMISSION: Similar was the fate of the Lahoti Commission which inquired into the air crash at Charkhi Dadri and which submitted its report on 16 July, 1997. Two years later, the Aviation Ministry is still ``studying it findings'' without taking any substantive action.

The trend of governments dismissing commission reports can, in fact, be traced back to the Shah Commission, which looked into the Emergency excesses. Mrs Gandhi and her son Sanjay Gandhi deposed before the panel, which had been set up by the Janata Party government. However, the commission met an ignominious fate, dismissed by the Congress as ``partisan'' and ``biased'', the moment Mrs Gandhi came back to office.The fact that panel reports are not actually judicial findings is one of the crucial failings of commissions of enquiries, according to critics. The Commission of Enquiry Act, 1952, enables the ``appropriate government toset up a commission to inquire into `any definite matter of public importance' providing a resolution to that effect has been passed by Parliament or the state legislature as the case may be''. It was only in 1990 that the Act was amended to make it compulsory for the Government not only to submit the report to Parliament or the state Assembly as the case may be, but to also submit the action taken on it.

However, if the Government finds the final report inconvenient, it can simply dismiss it, as the Maharashtra Government did in the case of the Srikrishna Commission report on the Mumbai riots after the fall of the Babri Masjid. While rejecting the report, the then Maharashtra chief minister, Manohar Joshi, accused Justice Srikrishna of being biased against Hindus. This infuriated the judiciary, with former chief justice of India Justice J.S. Verma, who inquired into the security aspect of the Rajiv Gandhi assassination, saying judges should head a commission only on matters of great public importance. Inhis own case, Verma remarkably managed to finish his inquiry in little over a year and used to hold commission hearings in the morning and attend the court in the afternoon. The Verma Commission cost the exchequer around Rs 29 lakh.

Members of the judiciary are increasingly becoming critical about being drafted to chair commissions. Justice Jeevan Reddy, Law Commission Chairman and a Supreme Court chief justice, feels ``no sitting or retired judges should accept any commission of inquiry which has political overtones''. Justice Bakhtavar Lentin of the Bombay High Court, describing the Government's commission fever, had said on an earlier occasion: ``Commissions of inquiry are a waste of time and public money.''

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