While delivering the judgment on Article 370 of the Constitution, Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul of the Supreme Court of India also recommended the constitution of a truth and reconciliation commission to heal the wounds and suffering of the victims of the insurgency that gripped the Kashmir Valley, particularly in 1989-90. Justice Kaul wrote that this may help to ‘achieve collective understanding of the human rights’ violations perpetrated by State and non-State actors, against people of the region’. Since truth-telling provides an opportunity for victims to narrate their stories which may facilitate an acknowledgement from those responsible for perpetrating the wrongs, and from society as a whole, this may pave the way for reconciliation, he wrote separately in the Epilogue. At the same time, he cautioned that the commission, if constituted, should not turn into a criminal court.
Defining parameters
The purpose of a truth and reconciliation commission is to facilitate the process of reconciliation in societies that are divided during periods of violence and grave human rights abuses. While Uganda had a truth commission constituted (Uganda 1: Commission of Inquiry into Disappearances of People of Uganda, 1974) in 1974 — said to be the world’s first — to investigate and report on hundreds of disappearances that occurred during the earlier regime, most of such commissions have been constituted to study the pattern of human rights violations that took place either during an earlier regime or military dictatorship or arising out of insurgency or similar grave acts of violence. Justice Kaul, for instance, referred to the South African truth and reconciliation commission, which was set up to investigate rights violations during the apartheid regime.
