Justice Ranganath Misra

Justice Ranganath Misra (also spelt Mishra) was a sitting judge of the Supreme Court of India when the Government of India named him, in April 1985, as the one-man commission of inquiry into the killing of Sikhs in Delhi after Indira Gandhi's assassination. The National Human Rights Commission says he was born on 25 November 1926 in Banpur, Odisha. The Orissa High Court's profile says he became its Chief Justice on 16 January 1981 and a judge of the Supreme Court on 15 March 1983.

The Misra Commission

• 26 April 1985: the Central Government constituted the Commission, to inquire into "the allegations in regard to the incidents of organised violence" in Delhi and to recommend measures to prevent a recurrence.
• 31 March 1986: the Citizens' Justice Committee, the premier group representing the victims in Delhi, withdrew from the proceedings, saying the procedure had made its presence "ineffective and pointless". Misra recorded his disapproval of the manner in which it withdrew.
• August 1986: he submitted his report, which was placed before Parliament in February 1987.

What he found. The violence in Delhi, he wrote, began spontaneously and later became organised "in the hands of gangsters", but was "not organised by the Congress (I) party or any official who matters in the party", though many participants were "from the lower ranks of the Congress (I) party and sympathisers". He wrote that H.K.L. Bhagat, "being a sitting M.P. and Minister", was not likely to misbehave in the manner alleged. He said it was difficult to sit in judgment on individuals and name them under section 8B, given how many were involved. On the police he found "more of indifference and negligence" than any wrongful overt act, and held that the delay in calling in the Army was "squarely" that of the Lieutenant Governor, P.G. Gavai, and the Commissioner of Police, S.C. Tandon.

He recommended three more inquiries, which the Government set up on 23 February 1987: an officer to settle the death toll (the Ahooja Committee), a judge and a civilian to inquire into the conduct of the police (the Kapur-Mittal Committee), and a committee of one judicial and one administrative officer on the registration of cases (the Jain-Banerjee Committee).

Later career: Chief Justice of India from 25 September 1990 to 24 November 1991, and first Chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission from 12 October 1993 to 24 November 1996. According to Wikipedia he was a Congress member of the Rajya Sabha for Odisha from 1998 to 2004. He died in Bhubaneswar on 13 September 2012.

Criticism: H.S. Phoolka, the Citizens' Justice Committee's counsel, wrote in The Tribune that Misra said identifying any person was not part of his terms of reference, and that he "was made a Rajya Sabha MP by the Congress after retirement". Ensaaf argues that Misra "was rewarded" for what it calls the whitewashing of the massacres.