Congress president Sonia Gandhi is said to have expressed shock at the court ruling on the Khairlanji issue. During a recent discussion on communal violence bill at the National Advisory Council (NAC) Narendra Jadhav raised the Khairlanji issue. The Congress chief was shocked when Jadhav said it was "distressing" that the perpetrators of such heinous caste crimes got away with lower punishment. He was referring to the Court's commuting of the death sentence and, worse, clearing the accused of a caste taint, the Times of India reported.

Sonia asked "why it happened", to which Jadhav said the case was weakened by the police which did not book the accused under the Prevention of Atrocities (SC/ST) Act. A probe was demanded on why PoA was not pressed in the Khairlanji case.

The NAC members, meanwhile, have raised concern that the communal violence bill may also prove ineffectual if authorities did not invoke it in relevant cases.

NAC is learnt to be discussing provisions to ensure that the communal violence bill is enforced in relevant cases and a malafide intent in not doing so invites punishment. It involves making it easy to book officials for malafide intent unlike the present conditions which are difficult to prove.

The move seems to be towards hiking the punishment for errant officials by including jail sentence and fine. As of now, it is either jail or small fine, which is not deterrent enough.

The Khairlanji case faltered on the crucial test of being a caste atrocity because the cops did not invoke the PoA Act in the FIR. The issue has agitated activists ever since a local court in 2008 gave death sentence to the accused but cleared them of anti-dalit motivation. The then social justice minister Meira Kumar had raised alarm, telling Maharashtra and the Centre that such verdicts would make PoA Act "irrelevant".