Pointless panels

A “Commission of Inquiry” is a potent instrument available to the politicians in power. On Thursday, both Punjab and Haryana saw such commissions cause excitement in the administrative and political circles. True to past experience, the purpose behind the very setting up of these panels seemed to be to defuse, or confuse, a given situation and pass on the burden of indicting culprits to an entity with little teeth. The Zora Singh Commission in Punjab was tasked with looking into the incidents of desecration and the subsequent killing of two innocent protesters in police firing. If the police did not investigate the various incidents to credibly identify culprits, it would be too much to expect a panel with no investigative resources to dig out any new facts. The SN Dhingra Commission, set up in Haryana to probe Vadra land deals, lost its focus the day its scope was expanded to include deals in nine sectors of Gurgaon.

The report presented by the Zora Singh panel and the extension received by Justice Dhingra suggest that the respective governments’ designs have been well served. From Justice Zora Singh’s statements it does not seem his work is about to leave us any wiser. He could possibly have studied the incidents to discern any pattern or conspiracy behind the incidents — but he did not, and has merely recorded the same allegations from people that were already in the public domain. The extension to the Dhingra panel has served to put off the bringing up of any specific charges against Robert Vadra, a poll promise of the BJP government for which it is under tremendous pressure.

The reality is these panels were doomed to achieve little right from inception. In the Punjab case the political leadership needed to cool things down, buy time and detract the aggrieved citizens with another “cause”. To that extent the Zora Singh panel has served the purpose rather well. In Haryana, we can expect another extension to Justice Dhingra. The idea is to keep dragging the Vadra case. It is politics, simple and petty.