Thakkar Commission of Inquiry into Indira Gandhi's assassination

Who: Justice M.P. Thakkar, a sitting Supreme Court judge, whom the Government of India appointed by notification of 20 November 1984 to head a commission of inquiry under the Commissions of Inquiry Act, 1952.

What: The Commission was to inquire into the sequence of events leading to Indira Gandhi's assassination, whether the crime could have been averted, any failure of duty by those responsible for her security, the deficiencies in security and in medical attention, and whether any person or agency had planned the killing or there was a conspiracy. It sat in camera. It submitted an interim report on 19 November 1985 and a final report on 27 February 1986 (Supreme Court judgment in Kehar Singh v State). On 15 May 1986 the Government notified that the reports would not be laid before the Lok Sabha, in the interest of the security of the State and in the public interest, under an amendment to the Act that Parliament passed with retrospective effect in August 1986; the Lok Sabha approved the notification.

Gurmit Singh writes that Thakkar "reportedly" indicted 23 senior officials, among them R.N. Kao, a former chief of the Research and Analysis Wing, for failing to protect her after Operation Blue Star and for ignoring renewed threats, and "reportedly" found "a foreign hand". The Government then asked A.K. Basak, a Home Ministry Joint Secretary, to look at specific lapses, and his committee found none by IPS officials. The Government released the report in March 1989. The Christian Science Monitor reported that it alleged R.K. Dhawan, Indira Gandhi's aide, "may have been involved in a conspiracy to kill the prime minister", and that a later police investigation cleared him.

Where: The Commission sat in private, and its reports were kept from Parliament.

Why it mattered: The accused in the assassination trial asked for the Commission's report and for the earlier statements of its witnesses. On 3 August 1988, in Kehar Singh v State (Delhi Administration), the Supreme Court held that the statements could not be used to contradict witnesses at the trial and that the report "has no evidentiary value in the trial of a criminal case". Ensaaf lists this inquiry among four commissions Rajiv Gandhi's Government set up in the six months after November 1984 on other subjects, while it refused demands for one into the killing of Sikhs; the Misra Commission followed on 26 April 1985, Ensaaf says.