In a 2016 interview to a leading national daily, former chief justice of India and then chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), H.L. Dattu, had lamented that he was heading a statutory body that was, in reality, a “toothless tiger”. The appellation was reiterated by the Supreme Court, in 2017, while hearing a petition on extra-judicial killings in Manipur. The nation’s apex body for the protection of rights was called out by its own chief and the top court directed the Centre “to take note of the concerns of the NHRC and remedy them at the earliest”. These seem to have had little effect. From being a toothless tiger in 2016, the NHRC appears to have become, in 2020, one that also lost its will to even bare its fangs over growing iniquities, and suffered an impaired vision that saw flagrant human rights violations only selectively.
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