The Judicial Commission of Enquiry, probing into the 2008 riots in Kandhamal district, which submitted its report to the State Government on Tuesday, was initially headed by retired Judge of the Orissa High Court, Justice Sarat Chandra Mohapatra. But after his death in June 2012, Justice AS Naidu headed the one-man panel in October 2012.
Soon after the murder of Swami laxmanananda Saraswati on August 23 of 2008, ethno-communal riots broke out in the tribals-dominated Kandhamal in which at least 38 people died and over 20,000 houses were torched rendering more than 10,000 families homeless.
The State Government instituted the judicial commission in October same year asking it to trace the causes of the riots and suggest measures to check them. Justice Mohapatra in his interim report submitted in May 2009 had opined that the riots were the outcome of the cumulative anger of certain groups of locals, who are neglected for ages. The Commission had received 825 affidavits. Justice Naidu, however, holding as many as a hundred sittings and recording the statements of nearly 300 witnesses, including 78 Government witnesses, prepared a 1,020-page report in two volumes after verifying over 4,000 pages of exhibits. The report was handed over to State Home Secretary Asit Tripathy in Bhubaneswar by the commission’s secretary AK Patnaik.