Justice Girish T Nanavati, the retired Supreme Court judge who headed the inquiry commissions into the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and the 2002 Gujarat riots, passed away at his home in Ahmedabad on Saturday. He was 87.Maulik Nanavati, his younger son who is a Gujarat High Court lawyer, said Nanavati had been suffering from lung fibrosis and died following a heart attack. “His system was getting weaker due to age and illness,” Maulik said. One of the toughest episodes of Nanavati’s life was investigating the Gujarat riots. He was appointed to head the inquiry commission in 2002.
In his inquiry report in the 2002 riots, submitted in two parts — one in 2008 on the Sabarmati Express fire in which 59 people, mostly kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya, were killed; and another in 2014 on the riots that followed the incident, which was made public in 2019 — Justice Nanavati gave a clean chit to then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, and his council of ministers. Terming Justice Nanavati as “one of the finest judges” and a “great human being”, with a “quick grasp of the law”, Advocate General of Gujarat Kamal Trivedi said, “He was a man with a lot of warmth, not only for his family but each and everyone, particularly the larger fraternity of lawyers. He was very straightforward.”