Facts About Fact-Finding

Context: A critical analysis of citizen-led investigative reports in enriching the judicial process and empower citizens.

Significance of citizen’s led investigation:

• Seen as a sign of democratic and legal consciousness, they are not taking the law into their hands or encouraging vigilante justice.
• Cost-effective, rapidly mobilised, and encourage civic participation
• Can potentially transform public and governmental understanding of an event or crime.

Critique of citizens-led investigative reports: Recently, The Solicitor-General Of India challenged five fact-finding reports conducted on the riots in Northeast Delhi in 2020 in the Delhi High Court on February 24.

• He argued them as examples of a self-constituted, extra-constitutional, “parallel judicial system” that did not have any authority in law.

Citizen’s led investigation: A well-established practice in India.

• The Champaran satyagraha of 1917 started as an extensive fact-finding exercise by Gandhiji…“to enquire into the conditions of” the indigo planters.
  • To make these statements credible, the peasants signed or put thumb impressions on them, and these were recorded in the presence of an officer from the Criminal Investigation Department (CID).
  • This exercise forced the Lieutenant Governor of Bihar, Sir Edward Gait, to set up a formal enquiry committee with Gandhi as one of its members.
• Jallianwala Bagh Massacre 1919: Disappointed with the work and political motivations of the Hunter Commission, the Congress set up the Punjab sub-committee.
• Police firing in Kanpur Cotton Mills, 1924: The enquiry exposed the collusion between the mill management and the police, which had resulted in the deaths.
• Naxalite investigation post-independence: In 1977, the Andhra Pradesh Civil Rights Committee (APCRC), under V M Tarkunde, took up an investigation of encounters of Naxalite political prisoners during the Emergency.
  • This committee demanded a judicial commission to investigate all other cases of encounters, which obliged central government to institute a judicial inquiry.
• In 1987, a citizens’ group constituted itself as the Indian People’s Human Rights Commission (IPHRC) and conducted several fact-finding investigations and published reports.
• In the 1990s, people’s tribunals were set up in the wake of the 1992-93 Mumbai riots after the Babri Masjid demolition.
• In 2008, having read the news items of deaths of several workers in manholes, a group of lawyers from the Alternative Law Forum undertook a fact-finding investigation.
  • They submitted a report to the State Human Rights Commission and filed a Public Interest Litigation in the Karnataka High Court.
  • Having received a report from this committee, the court instructed the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board to procure manhole cleaning machines.

Conclusion:

• Fact-finding reports should be verified and criticised if they lack rigour or evidentiary standards and should not be dismissed just because these are self-constituted by citizens.
• The long tradition of fact-finding investigations is a strength of India’s democracy. One that should be pre-served not discredited