Summaries of the actual report of the M. C. Jain Commission, tabled in Parliament on Thursday, read no better than the unsubstantiated allegations which have been aired in public by various politicians over the last three years. It is a disgrace that the expenditure of crores and years of investigation have produced words to fill 17 volumes but so little clarity and precision. The country has waited patiently for an exact reconstruction of the events and circumstances leading to the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991. What it has been given is a surfeit of careless words, fallacious reasoning and, despite the verbiage, huge gaps in the story.

The purpose of a commission of inquiry is to get as close as possible to the truth. That purpose is defeated if it is unable to rise above the politics and emotion of the subject matter, if loose thinking takes the place of rigorous analysis, and if the essential facts are not separated from the waffle. Extracts published so far reveal all these shortcomings and are, therefore, not a recommendation for the full interim report or for the last part (the conspiracy angle) which is still awaited. So, few people will look for enlightenment in them. The Jain volumes will end up as tombstones.

The sloppiness of the report is shocking. A gross example of careless and, therefore, dangerous language which has the effect of making conspirators of millions of ordinary people is the statement linking the assassination with ``the deep nexus between the LTTE and the Tamils of Tamil Nadu''. For lack of more specific findings the intellectually convenient but politically damaging word ``tacit'' is used to describe the DMK's support to the LTTE. From finding V. P. Singh myopic, the report leaps to the conclusion he was motivated. If the LTTE was already an anti-national force in 1984 according to the Commission, it ought to have delivered its view on whether tacit or other support given to the organisation by the Government of India between 1984 and 1987 had a bearing on the LTTE's later operations in India.

The political impact of the Jain Commission report takes attention away from two crucial questions. One concerns the mechanism for consultation between the Centre and the States in foreign policy issues which have a bearing on internal security and domestic politics. There is no doubt the federal system came under strain during the Centre's shifts of stance on the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. Serious thought needs to be given to the matter of improving Centre-State cooperation in this area. The Intelligence Bureau is said by the Jain Commission to have perceived the highest threat to the life of Rajiv Gandhi at one stage and deliberately underestimated the threat at another. This is not the only occasion when security organisations have been suspected of altering their assessments according to the prevailing political wind. Independent judgment in the security agencies has never been highly prized by their political bosses. The one worthwhile thing in the Jain report is that it underlines the high price paid for that.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.