New Delhi, Dec. 30: He is the man of the moment as the Telangana dossier’s author but old-timers remember B.N. Srikrishna most for his indictment of Shiv Sena leaders in his report on the 1992-93 Mumbai riots.
Appointed in 1993 as the head of the commission to probe the post-Babri mayhem, Bellur Narayanaswamy Srikrishna, then a Bombay High Court judge, tabled his report within five years. He did so despite his panel being temporarily dissolved in 1997.
Suketu Mehta writes in his book Maximum City about the initial doubts over Srikrishna’s secular credentials. The first volume of his report ends with a quote from the Ramayana: “Persons pleasing in speech are easy to find, it is difficult to find one who speaks or listens to the bitter, but wholesome, truth.”
Despite the epilogue, the report made him the poster boy of secularism. “It is an outstanding and a very quick report. It indicted the Shiv Sena, its leaders Bal Thackeray, (the late MP) Madhukar Sarpotdar and, (former minister) Gajanan Kirtikar, and 31 policemen. The Congress-NCP (government) never acted on its recommendations,” says social activist Teesta Setalvad.
Srikrishna is known to be judicious with time. His interim report on last year’s Madras High Court clashes came in five days. The Telangana report, too, has come within the sanctioned time.
The pace stands out in contrast to the 17 years the Liberhan Commission took to present its report on the Babri Masjid demolition and the six years the Jain Commission spent going into Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination.
Legal activist Prashant Bhushan puts Srikrishna’s punctuality down to his “corporate-mindedness”, and describes the ex-judge as “intelligent, competent, urbane, civilised and having an excellent command of English”.
But the traits, picked up during his training as a corporate lawyer in Maharashtra, also appear to have influenced some of his rulings, says Bhushan. These include his clearance to the controversial Bangalore-Mysore corridor and his reversal of a Delhi High Court ruling against foreign investors using Mauritius as a tax haven.
All these verdicts were given by Srikrishna when he was a judge at the Supreme Court. In the Mauritius case, the former judge had said: “There are many principles in fiscal economy which, though at first blush might appear to be evil, are tolerated in a developing economy, in the interest of long-term development.”
Srikrishna retired in 2006, but went on to head the Sixth Pay Commission for central government employees. “Shape out or ship out is our mantra,” Srikrishna had said in an interview in 2007 while recommending contractual employment in the government and a raise in salaries. “The spirit of competitiveness in the world of trade and commerce must be introduced in governance.”
Probing the lawyer-police clashes at Madras High Court on February 19, 2009, Srikrishna indicted the cops for using excessive force but also blamed the lawyers for provoking them.
But V. Suresh, president of the Tamil Nadu and Puducherry unit of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, felt the conclusions were less than fair.
