India has had recurrent episodes of massive human rights violations and large-scale violent conflict, replete with killings, disappearances, sexual violence and the destruction of property. Yet there have been several episodes where the perpetrators have not been held accountable and the victims’ struggles went unacknowledged. In many instances, the process remained ambiguous.
What could be the reasons for such ambiguity: Is it that we prefer to avoid unpleasantness by raking up these issues? Is it that we refuse to look at the victim and at the processes, systems and actions that made citizens into victims? Or is it that we would rather not hear about the events that happen in our midst and refuse to acknowledge our fellow citizens who have been deprived of their human rights?
In such a scenario, especially in Manipur’s case, would a Northeast Truth and Reconciliation Commission help people cope with large-scale conflict, violence and human rights abuse?
Calling for peace in Manipur, women’s rights groups and organisations, in early May, called for the establishment of a Northeast India Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as a process of “truth telling, learning each other’s histories, stories and struggle”.
What do Truth and Reconciliation Commissions do?
Truth commissions are independent or government groups that investigate political crimes and human rights violations.
In the early 1970s, several countries had adopted the Truth Commission – also called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission or the Truth and Memory Commission – to help the country acknowledge its conflict-ridden past and human rights violations that marked that past.
These Commissions are usually associated with transitional justice, which, according to the United Nations, comprises “the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempt to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past violations and abuses to ensure accountability, serve justice, and achieve reconciliation”.
South America and Africa, in particular, have adopted such truth commissions. Canada set up one in 2008 to investigate the violations in the First Nation Indian residential school system (similar to the American-Indian boarding school systems, which involved the children of First Nation tribes being forcibly sent to residential schools, which were characterised by extreme discipline and often led to widespread abuse of the children as well as several deaths).
The latter was aimed at restorative rather than transitional justice.
Also read: Canada’s Long Overdue Reckoning With Its Colonial Past
In 2022, the International Center for Transitional Justice released a report advocating a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the US, which has “never collectively confronted its history of colonialism, slavery and racism in an effort to reform the systems that perpetuate harms to Black communities and other marginalised and oppressed groups, or to redress these wrongs.”
The report suggested that while the US is not in a moment of transition “from armed conflict or authoritarian rule as may be the case for many countries that have undertaken a transitional justice process, it can learn from the experiences of these countries to confront its legacy of human rights violations.”
Many Truth and Reconciliation Commissions have also recognised the concept of learning from the past, as revealed by the processes of the Commission, so that the atrocities of the past and the systems that enabled those to take place do not repeat in the future.
This is evident from various reports such as the one for Argentina in 1985, which was titled Nunca Más (‘Never Again’).
A Truth and Reconciliation Commission helps other countries and people groups to learn from it. These nations can look at these reports and see how exactly large-scale human rights violations were enabled, and can thus recognise symptoms and features in their own countries.
The common factors across these Commissions are that they are modes of dealing with the past, specifically a past that features various kinds of human rights violations and is not focused on a single event.
The Commissions are also time-bound exercises, vested with the authority to investigate and seek information from victims of human rights abuse. They are expected to submit a report at the end of their term, as defined by Priscilla B. Hayner in her early comparative study of 15 Truth Commissions in 1994.
Even with such a limited definition of the Truth Commission, it is possible to see its relevance for India and Indian conditions.
Why does India need a Truth Commission?
Women’s groups in the Northeast were clear that a Commission was necessary to “begin processes of truth telling, healing and reconciliation”, and therefore, as mentioned earlier, they called for the establishment of a Northeast India Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
But if India is to set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, should it only limit it to the Northeast? If we are to set its mandate in the past, which past are we considering as apt for such a Commission?
What about the human rights abuses during the Emergency, the Sikh riots of 1984, Partition, and the 2002 Gujarat riots? And what about Kashmir and its long and terrible history; the atrocities on Dalits, such as the Khairlanji killings or the Tsundur massacre?
And what about the Northeast with its history of unrest and the imposition of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act? We also need to look at the communal riots that were an annual feature in Hyderabad in the 1980s and early 1990s? And we need to consider the systematic oppression and marginalisation of the minorities in the past ten years?
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Which of these issues will a Truth and Reconciliation Commission address?
If we are to set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, we need to ask ourselves what we hope to achieve by doing so. To return to Hayner,
The most straightforward reason to set up a truth commission is that of sanctioned fact-finding: establish an accurate record of a country’s past, and thus help to provide a fair record of a country’s history and its government’s much-disputed acts. Leaving an honest account of the violence prevents history from being lost or re-written, and allows a society to learn from its past in order to prevent a repetition of such violence in the future.
This presupposes that we as a nation believe that it is necessary to face up to what happened in the past and to record it, that we believe that this history teaches us, even if it is unpleasant and disturbing.
Is it possible for us to think the unthinkable: that we in India are condemned to repeat these cycles of human rights violations and extreme violence because we have not, at any point, in our 76 years of independence, confronted and dealt with the sequences of violence that have periodically erupted in our land?
While the wounds of the Partition were papered over by Gandhi’s fasts and appeals, the following episodes, whether of communal or caste violence, were left unaddressed, except for token apologies and minimal compensation to the victims, many of whom were never identified.
India had set up commissions to investigate some of these human rights violations. For instance, the Shah Commission of Enquiry was set up to account for the excesses of the Emergency.
However, we have not set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, nor have we attempted to learn from those such as the South African or Rwandan Truth and Reconciliation Commissions.
Rwanda formed a National Unity and Reconciliation Commission in 1999 after the brutal Rwandan genocide, in which more than a million Rwandans died and two million were displaced. Photo: Flickr/Robin Kirk. CC BY-2.0.
The demand for the setting up of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission also presupposes that the nation is acknowledging wrongdoing, of violence perpetrated, of the abuse of trust and a shared culpability. The women’s groups in the Northeast were clear in that they were looking to “share the many challenges, tell our stories, acknowledge the mistakes and work toward collective healing and forgiveness”.
In their statement, the women groups outlined the process and purpose of the Commission: that they work towards sharing truths and stories, that there is honesty and through that process there can eventually be healing and forgiveness.
That said, the hope for healing that the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions engender is one that is open to question. This is because there are several accounts of how victims are re-traumatised by having to narrate the violence they suffered. Moreover, there is limited time to spend on each person’s testimony and there is no follow-up support or help afterwards.
The challenges and issues
Most Truth and Reconciliation Commissions are set up when a transition is underway or has just taken place, or when a newly installed government seeks to acknowledge the past and look to a better future.
In that context, how would it work for India?
The history of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions shows that they have been set up mainly during a transition or when a government faces international pressure regarding its human rights record and hopes to manipulate public opinion.
In the latter context, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission may not be a valid mechanism to help towards a new future. It could well be a manipulative political tool which is used to legitimise a government.
However, such a Commission set up in good faith and tasked with creating a timely report of the truth of human rights violations has been acknowledged as a mechanism that helps a society to move forward.
One of the most difficult challenges for the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in India is with regard to the word ‘truth’.
Given the vitiated nature of the meaning of ‘truth’ in contemporary societies, such as those of the US and India, with people believing in alternative truths and emotional truths, is it possible to think of the ‘truth’ as stable and factual anymore?
Also read: The Contours of India’s Post-Truth State
Truth Commissions rely on fact-finding and truth-telling, but in this era of relative truths, where people compete for their truths to be acknowledged as the only truth, what chance does a Commission stand?
Another challenge to establishing a Truth Commission in India is with regard to who will actually institute one. While civil society might believe itself to be essential to this process, these Commissions have worked best when they are established by a country’s executive.
Commissions set up by civil society rarely have the same validity and endorsement, and their reports do not carry the same heft. But if a Commission is set up by the State, then its findings are usually watered down – especially where the human rights violations are in line with the ideology of the State – and will avoid acknowledging unpalatable truths through acts of omission.
Of course, there remains the elephant in this particular room: why will a Truth and Reconciliation Commission be set up when several of those who have been or are in power might fear that they will be implicated in the findings?
And this remains true irrespective of which party is in power at any given time: people are still awaiting justice for the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, and all the commissions set up to investigate the riots have been inconclusive in their findings as to who can be named as the perpetrator.
That the leaders of several, if not all the political parties in India, are indirectly or directly responsible for many of the human rights violations in the country is a ‘given’, known to many. However, there is little stomach for an open acknowledgement of this fact and hence for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
This is because a Truth and Reconciliation Commission has, as one of its main features, the open acknowledgement of the truths of abuse and how its perpetration was made possible by the institutions of the state and its leaders. Even though there is no authority for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to recommend prosecution or the meting out of justice, the very acknowledgement of the ‘truth’ is often seen as a deterrent enough in India.
Writing about the limitations of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, Eric Brahm speaks of how, for many, they “represent some form of accountability for human rights abuses when historically this has been rare the world over”. This is considered a virtue when the only other option is that there is no accountability whatsoever, victims are ignored, their stories untold and there is little possibility of reconciliation, renewal, and peaceful coexistence.
This viewpoint is the one that claims that the prosecution of criminals is far more effective than the Commision’s discovery of underlying patterns and institutions which facilitated the large-scale violence and abuse.
In India, generally, this doesn’t happen, as the prosecutions are usually weak-willed and ineffective and the truth is shrouded in secrecy. The acknowledgement of abuse is as rare as the prosecution of perpetrators.
While the patterns which led to human rights violations might be discernible to even the general public, there is no acknowledgment of them, and consequently, no accountability.
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The usual options after a sequence of human rights violations are juridical intervention and punitive action for perpetrators versus a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which may not lead to punishment for the guilty but will provide a space wherein the truth can be told.
While ideally both should be possible, that is rarely so. Punitive action is usually only for whom Brahm calls the “lowest level perpetrators” rather than for the leadership.
In this context, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which makes it possible to identify the system that enabled the human rights abuse and those who set up the system or benefitted from it, seems a better alternative insofar as people will at least know the route that was taken to get to this point.
And while the highest level of perpetrators may never be held accountable, to be known and named in a Truth and Reconciliation Commission report is itself a move forward from absolutely no accountability.
So, when the women of the Northeast asked for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission , just when the violence in Manipur began, it was a radical departure from the norm, demonstrating a willingness to confront the truth, to acknowledge one’s own culpability and/or victimhood, a determination to try to move on into a new, better future marked by some degree of healing and reconciliation, and a greater commitment to human rights.
However, their request has disappeared in the light of the fires burning in Manipur. We prefer to watch the fires burn than to ask for accountability and the acknowledgement of our own failures or culpability.
But will India ever set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission?
Anna Kurian teaches at the department of English in the University of Hyderabad.
