Long Road to Nowhere

With the resignation of Jagdish Tytler from the union cabinet, the discussion of the Nanavati commission report on the anti-Sikh violence of 1984 has died down. The furore about Tytler and others served, however, to divert attention from the fact that the commission has failed - like the ones before it - to go to the bottom of the violence of 1984 and offers little hope of justice to the victims. What the report leaves us with is the realisation that political power gives immunity and that the pursuit of justice is an illusion when the state is complicit in the violence.