SOME JUSTICE AFTER ’84
In August this year, Rahul Gandhi, speaking before an audience of parliamentarians and local leaders in London, distanced his family and the Congress party from the carnage that followed his grandmother Indira Gandhi’s assassination in October 1984. It’s come back to haunt the Congress now, with the December 17 conviction of senior party leader and Delhi strongman Sajjan Kumar and five others for the killing of five Sikhs in November 1984.
It’s taken 34 long years to bring Sajjan Kumar—the first Congress leader to be convicted—to justice. Reversing his acquittal by the trial court in 2013, the Delhi High Court bench consisting of Justices S. Muralidhar and Vinod Goel, acknowledged for the first time that many of the perpetrators had managed to escape prosecution and punishment till now because of political backing. The investigation only picked up in 2005 after it was handed over to the CBI on the recommendation of the Justice Nanavati Commission.
Freshly in power as the main constituent of the UPA-I government, the Congress initially rejected the commission’s findings against Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler (then a Union minister). It was only after the furore inside and outside Parliament that the Manmohan Singh government capitulated in August 2005. The judges noted how it took as many as 10 commissions and committees for the cases to be entrusted to the bureau.
The landmark 203-page high court ruling affirms what has been common knowledge for years. The bench accepted the testimony of complainant Jagdish Kaur, who had witnessed Kumar (then the Outer Delhi MP) instigating rioters. Recording her account in some detail, the judgment states: “Around 9 am on November 2, 1984, when Jagdish Kaur went to lodge a report at the police post, she saw that a public meeting was taking place, which was attended by local MP Sajjan Kumar. She heard him declare, “Sikh saala ek nahin bachna chahiye, jo Hindu bhai unko sharan deta hai, uska ghar bhi jala do aur unko bhi maro.” She claimed she heard officer-in-charge of the police post ask mobsters, “Kitne murge bhoon diye?”
Kaur has had a very tough time of it all these years. Not only was she rejected as an “unreliable” witness (by the trial court in 2013), she was also jailed for nine years after being falsely accused under the infamous Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (TADA) Act.
Journalist Manoj Mitta, author of When a Tree Shook Delhi: The 1984 Carnage, says “the belated conviction
exposes the Rajiv Gandhi government’s culpability for not only the carnage, but also the systematic attempts to shield the culprits”.
Another prominent Congress leader widely alleged to have played a role in the 1984 carnage that killed 2,733 Sikhs in the national capital and another 3,350 in other states has now been appointed Madhya Pradesh chief minister. Ironically, Kamal Nath was sworn in on the very day that Kumar was handed a life sentence. Although the Nanavati Commission let him off for want of “better evidence”, the allegations against Nath still linger. Questions continue to be raised amid eyewitness accounts that place him amid a mob outside the Rakabganj gurudwara on November 1, 1984.
In the end, it is not just the Congress party that finds itself in the dock after the high court’s December 17 ruling. The bench cited “the familiar pattern of mass killings in Mumbai in 1993, in Gujarat in 2002, in Kandhamal (Odisha) in 2008 [and] in Muzaffarnagar in UP in 2013” while calling for a law against crimes against humanity and genocide.
THE INVESTIGATION ONLY PICKED UP IN 2005 AFTER IT WAS HANDED OVER TO THE CBI ON THE ADVICE OF THE JUSTICE NANAVATI COMMISSION