The terms of reference for the inquiry run to a page and a half. It is a document of a kind Indian commissions of inquiry have been constituted by for seventy-five years, and the operative clause asks the commission to examine the sequence of events and the adequacy of the administrative response between the fourteenth and the twenty-second.
The decision that produced the sequence of events was taken on the eleventh.
I do not need to know anything about the commission's members, or their politics, or what they concluded, to say that the finding was substantially determined before anybody was appointed. It was determined by two dates.
This is the most reliable thing I know about commissions of inquiry, and it is not a cynical observation about outcomes — it is an observation about documents, which is the only kind I am entitled to make. The terms of reference are drafted by the executive. The executive is, in the great majority of these cases, the institution whose conduct a wider inquiry would examine. And the terms are published, in the gazette, in advance, where anybody can read them, which means the constraint is not hidden. It is simply not read, because the interest arrives with the report.
The techniques are few and they recur. A date range, which is the cleanest. A geographic limit, which excludes the neighbouring district where the same thing happened for the same reason. A framing verb — to examine the adequacy of the response, rather than to determine the causes — which orients the whole exercise toward the officials at the bottom of a chain. And a subject-matter clause that names an event rather than a decision, so that the inquiry is about what happened rather than about what was decided.
Any one of those is defensible individually. Inquiries have to be bounded or they never report. A commission with unlimited scope is a commission that runs for eleven years, and there are examples, and their reports change nothing because everyone involved has left office. Boundedness is not a trick; it is the condition of the thing being useful at all.
That is the objection and I take it seriously enough to say what it costs my argument. It means I cannot infer intent from a narrow scope. A narrow scope is what a functioning inquiry looks like.
What I can do is compare, and this is the only method I trust here. Read the terms of reference against the report's own account of what happened. A commission that finds a cause outside its date range will say so — they generally do, in a paragraph near the end, in careful language, noting that the antecedents fall outside the terms. That paragraph is the artefact. It is a commission telling you, in the only way available to it, where the boundary was drawn relative to the thing.
I have found that paragraph in a majority of the reports I have read closely, which is not a large sample and was not systematically selected, and I say both of those things because I have watched people build a much stronger claim on much less.
And now the part I am obliged to include, since I have made this argument in print before and been on the receiving end of it. In 2009 I wrote approvingly about an inquiry whose terms I had not read, on the strength of a finding I agreed with. A colleague sent me the gazette notification. The date range began four days after the decision that mattered, and the finding I had been pleased about was a finding about administration, which was the only kind of finding those terms permitted.
I had congratulated an institution for reaching the conclusion it had been instructed to reach.
The practical thing I have done since is small and I recommend it to nobody as a discovery: I read the terms first, before the report, and I write down what I think the finding will have to be. Then I read the report. The exercise takes twenty minutes and I have been wrong three times in fifteen years, and I would like to be wrong more often than that.