But Prime Minister Vajpayee was obviously keen to send one more to Baripada. This time he discarded the time-tested method of sending a team of bureaucrats, preferring instead to despatch three of his ministers, George Fernandes, Naveen Patnaik and Murli Manohar Joshi, to do the sleuthing for him. Faceless bureaucrats may have credibility, but how can these three men -- one of whom is aspiring to replace J.B. Patnaik as the Orissa Chief Minister, the other known for his deep commitment to the Hindutvacause, and a third who has always acted as Vajpayee's praetorian guard claim to be disinterested parties? In any case, what fact-finding can a few rushed hours in Baripada achieve?

The fact is that for this government, fact-finding has become synonymous with fire-fighting. The fact also is that this fire-fighting would not have been required if the Vajpayee government had adhered to principles of fair and sound governance in the first place. It's not that the Prime Minister neglected to make the right noises after the Baripada horror story, it's just that his government had so compromised itself on the issue of protecting minorities in the country that those noises carried no conviction.

What hasn't helped is the doublespeak emanating from the corridors of power. Home Minister L.K. Advani belied his years of experience as a public figure by exonerating the Bajrang Dal of any malfeasance. If the Union Home minister had already made up his mind on the issue and gone public on this, what conviction will anysubsequent fact-finding muster anyway?

There are clear laws laid out in the country on how to deal with those who consciously and maliciously stoke trouble and set one community against another. All that the Vajpayee government should have done when the first signs of this surfaced was to have unequivocally come down on the mischief makers and let the law run its course. The rape of four nuns in Madhya Pradesh, the sporadic incidents that broke out in Gujarat and, later, in western Karnataka, provoked no real sense of outrage in the law-enforcers and their political guardians.

Vajpayee's controversial suggestion for a debate on conversion had the effect of opening wounds at a time when the nation needed to heal them. The ugly genie of community disaffection was thus allowed to slip out of the bottle. Today, its presence is being felt in regions as far apart as Allahabad and Vadakara. Motivated fact-finding missions will not have the effect of getting it back into the bottle. Only effective and impartialgovernment action can perform this task.