Fourteen Years, No Report, Two Fathers Dead

The Delay Is Not a Gap

• It Is the Harm There is a way of talking about slow justice that treats delay as an unfortunate side effect: courts are backlogged, files move slowly, these things take time. The death of Amarshi Sumra on the railway tracks in Thangadh last week asks a harder question. When an inquiry report into the killing of your son stays unpublished for thirteen years and the trial of the men accused of killing him has not moved past recording evidence after fourteen, is that delay still just an absence of justice - or has it become an active harm the state is inflicting, year after year, on the people still waiting?

What Actually Happened and What Didn't In September 2012,

police firing during and after a communal clash at Thangadh's Tarnetar Mela killed three young Dalit men - Mehul Rathod, 17, Pankaj Sumra, 16 and Prakash Parmar, 26. The state ordered an administrative inquiry under IAS officer Sanjay Prasad, who submitted his findings in May 2013.

That report has never been made public. A Special Investigation Team formed only in 2016 chargesheeted police in one of the three deaths; the other two cases were closed. The surviving case, involving Pankaj Sumra, is still at the stage of recording prosecution evidence - not yet at argument, let alone verdict.

Prakash Parmar's father died of heart failure in 2015. Now Amarshi Sumra, Pankaj's father, has died too, on the same tracks where a memorial to the three youths stands.

Why This Is a Test of the State, Not Just the System

It would be convenient to file this under judicial backlog - a problem of capacity, not intention. But an administrative inquiry report is not bound by court calendars; a state government's decision not to release the Sanjay Prasad report for thirteen years is a choice, renewed by successive administrations, not an inevitability.

Each year that choice stands, it tells three families that the state's account of what happened to their sons is something they are not entitled to see. That is a specific, ongoing act, not a passive gap.

The Cost Measured in Two Deaths, Not One Valji Rathod, the

last surviving father of the three victims, put it plainly: he believes the delay in justice took Amarshi's life just as it took Babubhai Parmar's a decade before. Whether or not that causal claim can be proven in any legal sense, the pattern is its own evidence - two men, over a decade apart, worn down by the same unresolved case, dying before either an inquiry report or a trial verdict ever reached them.

What Accountability Would Require Tabling the Sanjay

Prasad report, even now, would not undo thirteen years of withholding it - but continuing to withhold it, after this second death, is no longer a bureaucratic oversight. It is a demonstrated willingness to let institutional inertia stand in for an answer these families have been owed since 2013.