Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi appears to have turned the tables on the media, to say little of the Supreme Court-supervised Special Investigation Team (SIT). Not only did Modi not visit the team's Gandhinagar office, which was apparently kept specially open on March 21, a Sunday, but also a day later he claimed that despite the frenetic build-up in the media no date had really been fixed. Curiously, neither the SIT chief nor the media challenged the chief minister's contention.

Even as Modi's appearance would have yielded little information on his role in the horrific riots of 2002, is it really possible that both the SIT and the media goofed up in this case? If the SIT summons did not mention a specific date and if the chief minister did not communicate an acceptable date, where did this date of March 21 materialise from? Is this how the investigating team expects to extract a confession of complicity in mass murder? Fervent enthusiasm is clearly a poor substitute for plain rigour in such cases.