Indian Express, November 04, 2007
Pamela Philipose
Okay, the Liberhan Omission of Inquiry, set up to unearth the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, about the Babri Masjid demolition of 1992, has just been given its 42nd extension and has already cost the government an estimated Rs 7.20 crore. Well, the Liberhan Omission was meant to make history, wasn’t it, and it is doing precisely this by the dint of delicate deliberation over the aeons. Its opinions — which should be out in the year 2102, in time, in fact, for the century commemoration of the demolition — should be most revealing.
There are some who find this delay in fixing blame and delivering justice unacceptable and wag angry fingers at the government for its deliberate attempt at postponing express action. I am not of that persuasion. I believe the whole point about setting up a big, fat, Indian omission of inquiry is that it should necessarily and completely miss the point. And do so after due deliberation. Which is also why I prefer to term these humongous confections of bureaucratic lard as ‘omissions’. Omissions are as intrinsic to us as dal-chawal, they are our unique weapons to address every issue of public significance or insignificance, public outrage or umbrage. Issues that are best addressed by being left unaddressed.
We do every kind of omission. We set up omissions to slow things down or to hasten things up in order to slow things down. We set up omissions when disasters strike or when pogroms play out. We set up omissions to cool things down or to heat things up. We set up omissions when large numbers of the public surge on to television screens instead of remaining out of sight and out of mind as they are required to do, or when a ruling functionary decides to accept wads of notes under the camera’s gaze.
We also, in the pure, unvarnished, spirit of inquiry, set up omissions for pure, unvarnished educative purposes. We set up omissions to discover, for instance, whether eminent historical personalities, born over a century ago, are still alive or whether they are, indeed, certifiably dead. We set up omissions to study the curious reason why the roads of Lithuania happen to be less potholed than those of Lucknow. And once we even set up a sitting omission, whose standing committee was required to discover whether it would be in the country’s interest to set up a joint fertiliser project in West Asia. This, by the way, involved extensive visits of Europe’s best-known tourist hotspots, but only the cynic would take this scrutiny into fertiliser manufacture as a load of dung. In actual fact, it was only further evidence of the incessant, unceasing, and tireless search for the truth which animates every pore of every member of every omission, big or small.
These omissions may appear to the untrained eye as exercises in obfuscation, prevarication, mystification. They most absolutely are not. Let me state, here and now, that every omission set up by this country is proof that it is deeply committed to taking immediate and effective action in order to counter malefic forces, correct untenable situations, set skewed records straight. We are, as a functioning democracy, always desirous of getting to the bottom of things. The point is those complex issues, which invariably call for sterling omissions to be set up as evidence of governmental concern, are by their very nature bottomless, and therefore the exercise to touch their bottoms necessarily demands unending and perpetual striving.
A good omission, as C. Northcote Parkinson has reminded us, is like a plant. It takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts, and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom in their turn. India, to its eternal credit, has produced a whole forest of omissions through this process of officially sanctioned non-nuclear proliferation.
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