Nellie and beyond: How inquiry commissions in India are used as political tools to hide the truth
Understanding the strategies that governments use to complicate truth-seeking.
Raheel Dhattiwala (Scroll India) 27 November 2025
The Nellie massacre of 1983 is in the news after four decades. The careful exercise that went into forgetting and moving on from the killings of nearly 3,000 Muslims was suddenly disbanded when, on November 26, the Assam government finally released two investigation commission reports about the violence.
The reports are contradictory. One of the them, the civil society-led TU Mehta Commission report, blames political provocation as the crucial trigger for the violence. The other, the official Tewary Commission report, is bureaucratic in tone, descriptive in nature and does not blame politics.
Which of the two do we believe? Do they serve any purpose for the survivors of the violence – aside from opening a Pandora’s box before state elections next year?
Politics everywhere is a game of subterfuge. In India, though, it is played at the cost of civilian lives. It is well known that large-scale killings in India, the kind that were carried out in Nellie, are not riots but orchestrated attacks targeting specific groups. That violence is a ploy to mobilise key voters on emotionally-charged issues.
One of the ways to keep the camouflage and subterfuge going is by juggling democratic procedure – such as setting up investigation commissions – with selective omissions. Useful tactics to complicate truth-seeking include, first, to set up multiple commissions for each wave of violence; second, to delay setting up the commissions and releasing their report and; third, to reject as invalid any report that does not suit the government’s agenda.
Scholars such as B Rajeshwari and, later, Renee Jeffery and Shivangi Seth have studied inquiry commissions in India in great depth. It was a struggle to collect information, Jeffery and Seth write. Information that should be public is concealed to great lengths in India. The scholars eventually managed to get information on 47 commissions established between 1947 and the Manipur violence of 2023-’24. Except for 26 commissions, the rest either produced no meaningful information or were disbanded.
For example, governments over the years set up 11 inquiry commissions to investigate the massacres of Sikhs in Delhi in which senior Congress leaders were implicated.
Yet, as I have written earlier, there is little clarity on the actual number of convictions carried out or are under appeal in a higher court.
A few years ago, retired Justice SN Dhingra, who went on to lead the two-member Special Investigation Team in the anti-Sikh violence, had told me how indifference and laxity of the police, judges and prosecution had led to acquittals. What made it even worse was the inordinately long delays of multiple inquiry commissions. “Due to formations of commissions and committees, the trials took a very long time,” he said. “The accused had plenty of time and resources to win over the witnesses.”
To investigate the killings of Muslims when the Bharatiya Janata Party was in power in Gujarat in 2002 and in which senior party leaders were convicted, two inquiry commissions were set up; the ruling BJP rejected one of them because its findings that the fire in the Sabarmati Express was accidental did not suit their electoral prospects. In investigating this violence, the Nanavati-Mehta Commission took 12-and-a-half years and 24 extensions to submit its report.
In Kolkata, the 1982 Bijon Setu massacre of 17 members of the Ananda Margi group for which the Community Party of India (Marxist) were blamed for in FIRs, began to be investigated 31 years later under the Amitabh Lala Commission. In the Bhagalpur riots of 1989, it took 17 years to appoint the NN Singh Commission.
As for the Babri Masjid demolition case, after 17 years and 48 extensions when the Liberhan Commission report indicted the BJP’s top brass in instigating the demolition and the violence that followed, a special Central Bureau of Investigation court judge SK Yadav found “no conclusive evidence against the accused” and all were acquitted.
Once again, due democratic process was followed. It is not incidental, though, that less than seven months after his verdict, Yadav came to be appointed the deputy Lok Ayukta in Uttar Pradesh. Similarly, in my research on the Gujarat violence that I write about in my book, I found a robust statistical association of violence and reward: police officers who permitted the violence were rewarded, those who repressed it were punished.
Indeed, there is an implicit logic behind the democratic façade of investigating civilian violence. It pays to toe the line, and it is all done within the framework of democracy.
So now, even if we choose to believe the Mehta Commission over the Tewary Commission in the Nellie case, what will that come to? Water has flown under the bridge. At the end of the day, the purpose of an inquiry commission – to impartially uncover what happened and give recommendations to prevent it from happening again – is defeated.
Survivors are forced to forget and move on. In the worst-case scenario, as in Ahmedabad and Nellie, they are forced to live alongside their attackers for years to come. Convictions are few or, as in the case of Nellie, zero. Violence recurs. Elected politicians, often the instigators and even participants in violence, gleefully climb up the career ladder.
Inquiry commissions have become the perfectly democratic means for politicians to mask undemocratic manoeuvres that hide the truth.
https://scroll.in/article/1088855/nellie-and-beyond-how-inquiry-commissions-in-india-are-used-as-political-tools-to-hide-the-truth?
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Raheel Dhattiwala is an independent sociologist. She is the author of Keeping the Peace: Spatial Differences in Hindu-Muslim Violence in Gujarat in 2002 (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
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