The Nanavati Commission, probing last year's sectarian violence in Gujarat, started its hearings in Ahmedabad on Wednesday under a cloud of controversy with a prominent Muslim organization boycotting the proceedings.
"Our stand has been clear from the day Justice KG Shah was inducted into the commission. We knew that justice would elude us," chairperson of the Gujarat chapter of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Mohammed Safi Madni said.
The group, which has been involved in relief work, is currently engaged in helping rehabilitate the riot victims.
As the two-member commission began hearing depositions of the riot victims, there were others who expressed their lack of faith in it.
Senior High Court advocate Mohsin Quadri said it was a state government tool.
"The commission is the state government's tool to collect evidence in support of the perpetrators of the communal violence," Quadri alleged.
The two-member commission, headed by retired Justice GT Nanavati, has been entrusted with the task of investigating the causes of last year's riots, which killed at least 1,000 people.
The hearings in Ahmedabad, the last stop before the commission completes its investigation, are considered particularly crucial because the city accounted for about half of the killings.
In the first phase of the hearings until July 22, the commission will hear only
those from the predominantly Hindu neighbourhoods of western Ahmedabad.
It is only in the second phase, scheduled to begin from July 28, when the commission will investigate the killings in Naroda-Patia and Gulbarg Society -- 85 people were killed in Naroda-Patia and 39, including former Congress parliamentarian Ehsan Jafri, in Gulbarg Society in eastern Ahmedabad.
Thus, the riot victims of two of the most brutal incidents in last year's violence will have to wait before they get a chance to depose.
Human rights activists pointed out that only incidents of looting of Muslim property and minor skirmishes were reported from western Ahmedabad. The major incidents of violence occurred in the eastern Ahmedabad, which has a mixed population of Hindus and Muslims.
But controversy is not new for the commission.
Two months ago in May, Nanavati created a storm when he gave a clean chit to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. He said the government had no role to play in the communal violence and there was no clinching evidence available against it.
This was despite several rights groups and victims who said the state government had actively colluded with rightwing Hindu groups in the riots.
Following the widely criticized statement, the commission's hearing in Vadodara last month was boycotted by several NGOs and civil liberties groups.
The commission began its hearing last year from Godhra, from where the riots had sparked off after the killing of 59 train passengers.
The commission has so far held hearings in 22 of the 25 districts and received more than 4,000 representations from the riot victims narrating incidents of violence.