The Nanavaty judicial inquiry commission, set up on March 3, ’02, by the Narendra Modi-led BJP government in Gujarat to probe the Godhra train carnage and the subsequent communal riots, was mandated to submit its report within three months. One hundred and forty-two months or almost 12 years later, it’s just got its 21st extension, till June 30, 2014.

Dr Mukul Sinha, whose Jan San­gh­arsh Manch has been fighting the cause of the riot victims before the commission, is candid when he states that so much time’s elapsed that people may have well forgotten the very incidents that the panel was meant to inquire into. “The 2002 violence saw Modi turn into a Hindutva icon. Now the man aspi­res to lead the country in the general elections of 2014. Yet the question as to who was responsible for the death of some one thousand people still awaits an answer,” he says.

Initially headed by high court judge K.G. Shah, the state government later decided to appoint ret­­ired Supreme Court judge G.T. Nanavaty as commission...