Justice Liberhan Is Gone - The Question His Commission Never Resolved Isn't

The Liberhan Commission Was Never Really About Babri Masjid

• It Was About What a Finding Is Worth India's Commissions of Inquiry have a recurring shape and Liberhan's is only the most extreme version of it. The Justice Nanavati Commission, set up to investigate the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, took over two decades across two separate inquiries before its final findings reached Parliament. The Srikrishna Commission, examining the 1992-93 Mumbai riots, submitted its report in 1998 and successive state governments took years to act on even its central recommendations. Liberhan's commission simply pushed this pattern to its limit: 17 years, 48 extensions, roughly 100 witnesses and a report that took so long to arrive that the political landscape it was describing had already changed twice over by the time anyone read it. What makes Liberhan's case sharper than Nanavati's or Srikrishna's is not the delay itself - it's what happened after the delay ended. The commission did not equivocate. It named names, alleged a meticulously planned conspiracy and implicated senior leaders directly. And then, in 2020, a special CBI court looked at the same underlying events through a criminal-evidentiary lens and acquitted every remaining accused for lack of conclusive proof. Liberhan never conceded the point. "I found it was a civil conspiracy, I still believe in it," he said afterward - insisting that what a Commission of Inquiry is built to establish and what a criminal court is built to convict on are simply not the same test and that losing the second does not undo the first. That is the real fault line running through India's Commissions of Inquiry and Liberhan's death makes it visible again: these bodies are fact-finding instruments, not courts, yet the public and the political system routinely expect their conclusions to carry legal weight they were never designed to carry. When a commission's findings and a court's verdict diverge - as they did here and as they have in earlier riot inquiries - the disagreement gets read as failure, when it may simply be two different institutions asking two different questions of the same set of facts. For the exam, this is worth holding onto precisely because it resists a simple villain. The 17-year delay is a genuine institutional failure - extensions of that scale erode a commission's relevance long before its report exists. But the acquittal that followed the report is not automatically a second failure layered on the first; it may just be the predictable consequence of asking a body without prosecutorial power, cross-examination discipline or the criminal standard of proof to produce something a trial can safely convict on. Liberhan spent 17 years being certain. The law asked him to be certain of the wrong thing.