There is no legal requirement for the government to table reports of commissions of inquiry first in the legislature, according to a cross-section of civil servants, both serving and retired.
It is only a “matter of convention and legislative privilege” that reports of the commissions, say, constituted by the State governments, are presented to the Assemblies, they explain, pointing to the rationale that the Assemblies are bodies of elected representatives.
On Monday, the Tamil Nadu government, in a release, touched upon certain recommendations of the Justice Aruna Jagadeesan Commission of Inquiry into the Thoothukudi firing in May 2018 and the Justice A. Arumughaswamy Commission on the hospitalisation and death of former Chief Minister Jayalalithaa.
The civil servants are of the view that it is the prerogative of the government to place, on the floor of the legislature, reports submitted by commissions of inquiry which have been constituted under the Commissions of Inquiry Act, 1952. However, a former Assembly Secretary contends that it is incumbent upon the government to present the report to the legislature. But, C. Ponnaiyan, an AIADMK veteran who handled various portfolios, including Law, under the chief ministership of M.G. Ramachandran and Jayalalithaa, argues that the presentation of reports of commissions of inquiry to the legislature was a matter of propriety.
“When a government chooses to have a commission of inquiry, it wants to prove that the investigation into a given matter is conducted in a credible manner. The report of a neutral body has to be placed first only before the Assembly,” he says.
Apart from the publication of certain portions of the Aruna Jagadeesan Commission report recently in Frontline, a sister publication of The Hindu, the report of the C.J.R. Paul Commission, which went into the death of Tiruchendur temple official C. Subramania Pillai in November 1980, was made public by the then DMK president, M. Karunanidhi, at a press conference exactly a year later. This led to a huge political controversy and police searches at the DMK leader’s residences and office. Karunanidhi’s son-in-law ‘Murasoli’ Selvam and his personal assistant S. Shanmuganathan were among those who were arrested in the Paul Commission report leak case.
