Ex Gujarat DGP Sreekumar wants 2002 Nanavati riot report released

Sreekumar contends that the Commissions of Enquiry Act, 1952, stipulates that a probe report should be laid before the house of the people.

Gandhinagar: Former Gujarat Police chief RB Sreekumar, who had locked horns with then chief minister Narendra Modi over the 2002 riots, has asked the Anandiben Patel government to make public the inquiry commission report on the violence.

The report was submitted by retired Supreme Court judge GT Nanavati and former Gujarat High Court judge Akshay Mehta, 12 years after it concluded the inquiry with 25 extensions. 

The Modi government had on March 6, 2002 appointed justices Nanavati and Mehta to look into the February 27 Sabarmati Express train burning that left 59 people dead and the subsequent riots that killed 1,169 people in the state.

The commission submitted the final report to Chief Minister Anandiben Patel last year soon after she took over the reins of Gujarat from Modi after he became the prime minister. 

In a letter to the chief Minister, Sreekumar, who as additional director-general of police (intelligence) reported that Modi's comments after the riots could prove incendiary in an already communally surcharged atmosphere, said he found it “painful” that no legislator in the state had shown any hurry to ensure an early public release of the commission's report. 

Sreekumar’s letter dated November 18, a copy of which is with IANS, asserts that this was an “obvious instance of breach of legislature’s privilege by the executive wing of the government”. 

He pointed out that the Commissions of Enquiry Act, 1952, stipulates that a probe report should be laid before the house of the people or, as the case may be, the legislative assembly… together with a memorandum of the action taken thereon, within six months of the submission of the report.