I SUSPECTED some design when the Justice Nanavati Commission submitted only a part of the inquiry report on what was known as the Godhra incident. I could see the contents written on the face of a gleeful Gujarat Chief Minister Narender Modi in a photograph at the time of the report’s presentation.

It was clear that Modi had been exonerated. Was it necessary for Justice Nanavati to suggest this or even release a part of the report if he did not want to favour Modi and the BJP? Nanavati has clarified after heavy criticism that his first report was confined only to the burning of the Sabarmati Express.

He has said that he did not give a clean chit to Modi or his government, and that he was still working on the rioting after the Godhra incident. Why should the Nanavati Commission which has had as many as 16 extensions submit an incomplete report? There was no pressure on the commission. Then why hurry?

It looks as if Nanavati is a party to the travesty of justice: separating the report into two parts when it should have been one document. True, the BJP and Modi wanted it that way. But I cannot comprehend why Nanavati has done so. He knows that nobody can condone the killing of some 2,000 Muslims, not even his commission. The ethnic cleansing in Gujarat has been recorded visually and there are many witnesses and documents to corroborate it. Are compulsions stemming from the second part the reason for splitting the report?

Maybe Nanavati has a point. But he has already held local Muslims guilty of “conspiracy” in the burning of the Sabarmati Express. The manner in which he has exonerated Modi and his officials suggests that Nanavati was discussing the Gujarat carnage, not the burning of the train’s bogie.

Since the full report will be ready only by the end of the year, this gives an opportunity to Modi and the BJP to go to town on what Nanavati has already said and exploit the findings in November’s assembly elections in five states.

It was clear that Nanavati was more or less repeating the version which Modi and the BJP had projected to provide an alibi for the massacre of Muslims soon after 59 kar sevaks were burnt alive in the compartment that caught fire.

The report released by Nanavati is no different. He too says the fire was “a pre-planned conspiracy” by local Muslims. Justice Nanavati has also ruled out the involvement of any religious or political organisation, exonerating the BJP, the Bajrang Dal and the like.

The version which Nanavati has relied upon is in stark contrast to what another Supreme Court judge, Justice U.C. Bannerjee, had reported. According to him — he was appointed by the railways — the fire was not ignited from outside the coach but from within it, either by accident or design. Bannerjee has repeated his findings even after Nanavati’s report.

The special investigation team appointed by the Supreme Court to reinvestigate the riots is still at work. Nanavati should have waited till it had given its report. By not doing so, Justice Nanavati, himself from the Supreme Court, has shown scant respect to the apex court. Even the petition challenging the Bannerjee Committee’s findings is still pending before the state high court. Should Nanavati have still gone ahead?

The conflicting reports bring no credit to the judiciary. Had such a thing happened at the level of two judges in a subordinate court, the high court would have taken them to task. I cannot say anything more but I do feel intrigued by the spectacle when the judges involved are from the Supreme Court.

It is obvious that Nanavati wanted to favour Gujarat, the state which appointed him to head the inquiry commission. He knows he cannot but criticise the state in the post-Godhra report. Did he intentionally separate the two incidents, which are really one? Since the first report is favourable to the state, he let it go as if it were independent of the other.

Legally, there is nothing wrong in releasing the report in parts. But ethically it is not correct because people are now expected to make up their mind on the basis of a partial report.

I have a nagging feeling that the post-Godhra report, which is bound to hold Modi and the Gujarat administration guilty, and corroborate the thesis that there was a prior plan to cleanse the state ethnically, will be released after the general elections due early next year. Wittingly or unwittingly, Nanavati has helped Modi and his party.

The Jan Sangarsh Manch (JSM), a Gujarat NGO, is the first to react to the submission of an incomplete report. It has criticised the Nanavati Commission for being hasty in presenting an incomplete report to the state government. The JSM’s convenor, S.H. Iyer, has questioned the urgency of releasing the partial report.

He asks: “Don’t the thousands of victims of the post-Godhra riots have any right to know why their lives and property were destroyed? And which minister, politician, police officer or organisation was responsible for the massacres”?

I recall talking to Justice Nanavati before he submitted his report on the 1984 riots in which 3,000 Sikhs were killed in Delhi alone. He told me what happened in Delhi could happen anywhere in India and at any time because the police knew no limits and politicians no norms of behaviour.

He even commented on the probe that he was conducting into the Gujarat killings. He said “I have seen the same pattern in Gujarat.” He also said he had no good word either for the politicians or the authorities. Therefore, I find it difficult to understand when he gives a clean chit to Modi, his council of ministers and police officials.

Former Chief Justice J.C. Verma, who has also served as chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, has released a letter which shows that he had cautioned Nanavati. In his statement, Justice Verma has said that Nanavati’s clean chit is far from the truth.

In the report on the 1984 riots, Nanavati had expressed his helplessness. After 20 years, he said, there was no concrete evidence to pursue, nothing to bring the killers to book. I hope he does not take the same line on the post-Godhra killings and expresses his helplessness once again. The 1984 killings were two decades old when Justice Nanavati was asked to probe. The killings in Gujarat are only six years old. The nation expects him to do a better job.

The writer is a leading journalist based in Delhi.

PAKISTANIS seem to have forgotten the joys of unadulterated celebration. Quite often one joins obligatory festivities full of doubts about their justification or under advice to reflect on the sobering aspects of the individual’s or the state’s condition. This happens on all national days and religious festivals.

This year’s Eid was observed by Muslim Pakistanis with a heavy heart, heavier than on many past Eids. A last-minute fit of sanity made agreement on having Eid on the first of October possible but this annoyed many who were caught unprepared.

A roaring inflation had spoiled the prospects of pleasure limited-income families used to derive from buying happiness for their little ones. The rush in markets did not conceal the fact that business had declined. A large number of producers of small pieces of decoration, indigenous playthings for children and hundreds of colourful trivia to add to the festivities did not receive as many customers as needed to cover costs.

Almost all those going to Eidgahs, parks and mohalla mosques for Eid prayers were praying for their safe return home and for the effectiveness of the security personnel under whose guns they offered prayers. At the same time it was impossible to banish from one’s mind either the feeling of grief at the loss of life in the conflict-torn north-western part of the country or the plight of the survivors who had lost all reason to smile. Above all every conscious citizen was weighed down by the seriousness of the threat to the state’s integrity. The attack on Asfandyar Wali’s home on Thursday again showed how serious this matter is.

There is no doubt that the multi-dimensional threat to the state is more serious than anything it has faced in the past, including the 1971 crisis that led to the state’s dismemberment. The militants have resolved to assume control of not only the tribal area but also the whole of the Frontier province.

Despair is writ large on the actions of the Frontier government, e.g. the proposal to again enforce Sharia in Malakand division and the governor’s reported advice to the US to start negotiations with Mullah Omar. What makes the present threat to integrity especially grave is the push to knock down the basic features of the Pakistan state and the apparent acceptability of the challengers’ thesis among fairly large sections of the people.

Quite a few other things are adding to public anxieties over Pakistan’s drift towards stormy seas. The US-Nato forces are not going to stop their air/missile attacks on Pakistan’s territory despite all the noise about our sovereign rights that were mortgaged long ago. The hopes of a political and economic turnaround aroused by the popular verdict of February last have largely dissipated. Even the feeling of relief at the change in the presidency has been replaced by the painful realisation that the more things seem to change the more they remain the same.

For a large number of Pakistanis the lawyers’ movement for the restoration of judges unjustifiably sidelined by the outgoing president was at the top of prestige issues, for which they had struggled as best they could for more than a year. Most of these new fighters for justice and rule of law feel frustrated to the extent of withdrawal from social activism.

At the same time, hardly a day passes when one does not hear of utterly horrible acts of bestiality against the weak and the underprivileged. Some of the most heart-rending reports in recent days included the disclosure of a cellar-prison in the city of Lahore where a man, literate enough to be a government employee, had imprisoned his father and sisters for over a decade, a treatment they did not deserve especially because of being infirm in mind, and the plight of an old man in Arifwala who had been chained in the street like a dog for several decades.

Stories of little girls being given away as vani and women bludgeoned to death under jirga orders appear every other day. A wretched man sold his newborn child for Rs100 and the nation was not outraged, so used it has become to wanton killing, sale of children and human beings’ brutality to fellow beings.

All this is grist to the mills of a dirge-loving people. But this is not all that is happening in Pakistan. The cup of sorrow may have filled up to the brim but nothing should make us forget that humankind, Pakistanis included, is moving forward despite the efforts of warmongers and agents of death and doom to push it back into a dark age.

There is no need to lose heart if all expectations of change after Feb 18 do not appear to have materialised. For one thing some change has taken place. For another the people never give up. They have survived many electoral disappointments and they will show their ballot power again.

Likewise, post-Musharraf disappointments cannot obscure the people’s role in the battle for the presidency, for it was they who paved the way to change. They had done this more than once earlier and they will do so again whenever required.

The lawyers and their supporters should be celebrating their triumph instead of lamenting their imaginary failures. They have succeeded to a greater extent than many other civil society movements operating on a comparable (and quite small) base. They have deprived their opponents of all decent excuses. They have carried the day even if losses on their side are unwelcome. And the struggle goes on. The loss of a battle or two does not matter so long as the war is not finally lost.

The stories of brutality against and oppression of the marginalised are surely having some effect, though not as quick and dramatic as some expect. The pressure on the government to treat violence against women and children as social problems and not merely as law and order matters is growing.

Even in the conflict-torn northern territory public resistance to terrorists is taking shape. This offers better hope of salvation than gunfire and appeasement of the pseudo-religious clerics.

Then quite a few positive things are happening. For the first time the Sindh government is offering land to hari women. One hopes the scheme will be carried out as promised. The Punjab government’s decision to open a library at each union council is the medicine needed to save the nation from falling victim to Alzheimer’s disease.

This will surely provoke all those who recognise change only when it occurs at the macro level. But there is no harm in doing one’s bit at the micro level without giving up the tools that will be needed when the time for revolution comes.

THE Bush administration has lost the confidence of the American people, and so has Wall Street. Those who created the problem are now the doctors offering the prescriptions. A little while ago we were told everything was fine. Then, less than six months ago, we were told that the economy was on the mend.

Now we are told the patient needs a massive transfusion; but everyone can see that the patient is suffering from internal bleeding — in California, the number of foreclosures may already be outpacing voluntary sales. Yet nothing is being done to stem the haemorrhaging.

While the president says the economy faces the risk of economic meltdown, he threatens to veto a stimulus package that would create jobs — and he seems particularly adamant about a stimulus package that includes improved unemployment benefits. Traditionally, this is done when there is a threat of an economic downturn; if the downturn doesn’t materialise, it doesn’t cost anything. And while the administration and Wall Street promise this is just a temporary loan, not a bail-out, there was strong opposition to making the financial industry pay for any losses. Why would that be, if they are so sure that there won’t be losses?

The rescue bill left enormous discretion to an administration on the wane, an administration that has shown unparalleled incompetence, an administration which even tried to politicise the attorney general’s office. Americans worry that there will be political favourites among the recipients of the hundreds of billions of dollars. That treasury secretary Hank Paulson seemed tough on Lehman but reversed course when his old firm Goldman Sachs was at risk is hardly reassuring.

If the administration really thought the problems were as severe as claimed, shouldn’t they have put forward a bill that was less outrageous? Did they really think that Americans would swallow giving them authority to spend $700bn, without oversight or judicial review, in a bill of a few pages? Normally, if you think there is a crisis, you try to forge a compromise with those who see the world differently — workers who worry about the loss of jobs, and homeowners who worry about the risk of foreclosure.

Americans have lost faith not only in the administration, but in its economic philosophy: a new corporate welfarism masquerading behind free-market ideology; another version of trickle-down economics, where the hundreds of billions to Wall Street that caused the problem were supposed to somehow trickle down to help ordinary Americans. Trickle-down hasn’t been working well in America over the past eight years.

The very assumption that the rescue plan has to help is suspect. After all, the IMF and US treasury bail-outs for Wall Street 10 years ago in South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia and Argentina didn’t work for those countries, although it did enable Wall Street to get back most of its money. The taxpayers in these other poor countries picked up the tab for the financial markets’ mistakes. This time, it is American taxpayers who are being asked to pick up the tab. And that’s the difference.

There is, in fact, a widespread consensus among economists about what should be done. The economy is weak, and would remain so even with a good rescue plan. That is why there is a need for a strong stimulus. The February stimulus package was badly designed, and its anaemic effects offset by soaring oil and food prices. Given the enormous increase in the deficit during the past seven years (from $5.7bn to over $9 trillion — and that doesn’t include the bills yet to be paid for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars) we have to be sure that we get the biggest bang for the buck. We need increased unemployment benefits, and aid to states and localities, which otherwise will be forced to cut back on spending, depressing the economy further. We need more investment in both the public and private sectors.

The fundamental problem with the financial system is that there have been large losses. Loans were made to people who couldn’t repay. They were made on the basis of collateral whose value was inflated by a bubble. That bubble has burst, and the collateral is now worth less than the loan. The experts believe real estate prices have still a way to fall. This is not a matter of market confidence. This is a matter of market reality. Paulson would have us believe otherwise, but the American people know better. The fact that he and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke don’t seem to grasp these realities undermines confidence that they know what they are doing.

In environmental economics, there is a basic concept called the polluter pays principle. It is a matter of fairness, but also of efficiency. Wall Street has polluted our economy with toxic mortgages. It should now pay for the cleanup.

What is so sad about this whole debacle is that it was predictable. Predicatable and avoidable. Perhaps Paulson and the administration believed that they could bamboozle Americans into doing whatever they asked. But Americans had been bamboozled before — into signing a blank cheque for the Iraq war.

—The Guardian, London

The writer is a Nobel laureate economist.