Chief Minister Manohar Joshi's attempt to prejudice the public mind by calling the Srikrishna Commission's report anti-Hindu and pro-Muslim is highly irresponsible. The accusation of bias is unsubstantiated, false and bogus. It is a communalist interpretation intended to damage the credibility of a democratic institution and process.

Joshi may be prepared to go to any length to protect the Shiv Sena, betraying his own office and recreating communal divisions. But after this report no one else can fall intothe trap of conflating the Shiv Sena with the whole Hindu community or believe that deeply illiberal and undemocratic organisations and violent methods can further anyone's interests. Mumbai's survival as a free and open city depends on getting rid of the pall of fear that has hung over it for years and forced rich and poor, powerful and powerless to come to terms in any way they can with political and criminal terror.

It is not essential to accept unquestioningly Justice B. N. Srikrishna's impartiality. The virtues of the Commission's report speak for themselves.

To see where law and order first starts to break down, one needs to look at the socio-economic pyramid. At the bottom is a vast base of deprivation, the slums and informal sector in which more than half the population of Mumbai lives and works. It is described as a world of rank exploitation and cruelty, and a world where no law reigns. The political discourse changes in the 1980s and 1990s. Hindutva strikes roots at the base of the pyramid.

Muslims are driven to assert their identity but do not acquire sufficient political clout in municipal or legislative affairs.

The proximate cause of the riots for five days in December 1992 was the demolition of the Babri Masjid followed by celebration rallies by Hindu groups and police insensitivity in handling initially peaceful mobs of protesting Mu-slims. In every recorded incident of violence, it is made clear where individual Muslims or gro-ups of them or criminals were involved, and also where the presumption must be that they were involved.

The Comm-ission absolves no one. Both communities were violent but it is plainly stated that Muslims were responsible for the bulk of incidents during this period.

Nor does the Commission accept the charge that the disproportionate number of Muslim fatalities and casualties in this first phase was the result of police prejudice. The judge certainly finds evidence of malicious intent in the harsh treatment of Muslim victims and suspects and in at least twomajor incidents of firing. But he tends to agree with police station records and the Commissioner of Police's explanation that the more aggressive and violent mobs at the time were comprised of Muslims. Hence the fatalities and casualties among them.

Communal writing in the Urdu press over a period of time and allegations that there were calls to action during the riots from some mosques are noted. The essential fact remains: there was an inchoate response from Muslims aroused to anger by the events at Ayodhya, distrustful of the authorities and without a leadership or organisation of their own.

The Commission does not accept the theory of a spontaneous Hindu backlash, propounded chiefly by the Shiv Sena, about the second phase of riots for 15 days in January 1993 when roles were reversed and Hindu mobs were the more violent and aggressive. It allows for some degree of spontaneity up to January 8 when Hindu feelings were raised to fever pitch by communal propaganda and conspiracy theories, and a number ofincidents in which Hindus were the victims. But from January 8 and before criminals took over, it has no doubt the Shiv Sena commanded by Bal Thackeray organised attacks on Muslims and their property with ``military precision''. Details of these operations are available in recorded testimony.

Another self-serving Shiv Sena theory is dismissed. The Commission finds nothing in evidence presented by the state and central governments to prove the riots were part of a master conspiracy culminating in the series of explosions in Mumbai on March 12, 1993. It is inclined to accept the view of the chief investigator into the bomb blasts, Mahesh Narain Singh, that the blasts were a reaction to the ``totality of events'' at Ayodhya and Mumbai in December 1992 and January 1993.

We are left in the end with degrees of guilt. The culpability of Bal Thackeray and other Sena leaders goes beyond incendiary propaganda and communal mobilisation. In the past, the courts and Maharashtra Legislature have responded weakly atbest to Sena provocations. The Election Commission has on occasions been more firm. One after the other, the Congress and the BJP have chosen to come to an accommodation with it. The Srikrishna report establishes that accommodation and more accommodation is not the road to peace and sanity. The events of 1992 and 1993 demand that the political and the legal systems draw a line somewhere. It is not a Hindu-Muslim question.

It is a question of how much lawlessness and organised political terror the system can tolerate and still be called democratic.

There were immediate and long-term causes for the collapse of state authority and the Congress party must bear the larger share of the blame for it. The Commission shows Sudhakar Naik shockingly derelict, indecisive and ignorant of administrative procedure. Confused orders went down the line and the government failed to intervene effectively at a critical juncture. But political and policy failures going back many years are also evident throughout the report.Successive Congress governments are responsible for the abysmal state of the police force, the appalling conditions in which the majority of Mumbai's people live and work and the unchallenged rise of communalism in the Hindu and Muslim communities. The Congress has all this to answer for.