Judges say delay in case let accused roam free for years; observe ‘law and order machinery had broken down’
NEWDELHI:The role of Delhi police as an investigating agency has yet again come under scanner with the Delhi High Court slamming it for its failure (in 1984) to control anti-Sikh riots that killed 2,733 people and shielding the accused by not registering cases against them.
A bench of Justice S Muralidhar and Justice Vinod Goel stated that there was an “abject failure” of the Delhi police in registering FIRs and probing the cases, which let the accused roam free for several years.
“….it requires to be noticed that this is a case where there was an abject failure by the Delhi Police to conduct a proper investigation and this has already been adverted to extensively hereinbefore,” the court said in its judgment.
The court said that the “law and order machinery had clearly broken down and it was literally a “free for all” situation which persisted. “The aftershocks of those atrocities are still being felt. That many cases remained to be properly investigated was acknowledged recently by the Supreme Court by which it was considered appropriate to constitute a three-member Special Investigating Team (SIT) to proceed to investigate as many as 186 cases in which further investigation had not taken place”.
The judgment also noted that many witnesses, at several occasions, deposed in their statements of how the police did not register an FIR and even if they did, the cases were not investigated fairly.
The court also stated that the police did not prepare the site plan and it was prepared only in 2006, 22 years after the incident.
A site plan is a drawing prepared by the investigating officer to explain the crime spot, which is submitted along with other case papers to the court.
“This is a case based on direct evidence and not circumstantial evidence. Had it been prepared contemporaneously at the earliest point in time, the site plan might have been an important document. In the present case, however, the site plan was prepared in 2006, i.e. 22 years later,” the court noted.
Addressing the issue on the credibility of the witnesses, the court said, “The fact of the matter is that many of these witnesses
were living in fear and had completely lost confidence in Delhi Police and were therefore, unsure about coming forward to speak the truth. They could gather confidence only after the CBI took over the investigation”.
The judge said it was “extraordinary that despite there being as many as 341 deaths in the Delhi Cantonment area alone over the span of four days beginning Nov 1 1984, only 21 FIRs were registered and, of these, only 15 pertained to deaths/murders”.
Terming it to be “strange”, the court said that despite widespread killings in the area, no mention was found in the Daily Diary Register (DDR).
“It is clear, therefore, that in those chaotic conditions, the local police force was inadequate for the task at hand,” the court said adding that there was an utter failure to register separate FIRs with respect to each of the five deaths that form the subject matter of the present appeals.
Judge slams ‘political patronage’
It is important to assure those victims waiting patiently that despite the challenges, truth will prevail and justice will be done. JUSTICE S MURALIDHAR
NEW DELHI: Convicting Congress leader and former MP Sajjan Kumar in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, the Delhi High Court on Monday criticised political leaders for providing “patronage” by shielding perpetrators and “engineering the riots”.
Justice S Muralidhar said courts required a different approach to deal with the cases as the perpetrators had been aided by an “indifferent law enforcement agency.”
“A majority of the perpetrators of these horrific mass crimes, enjoyed political patronage and were aided by an indifferent law enforcement agency. The criminals escaped prosecution and punishment for over two decades,” justice Muralidhar said.
“It took as many as 10 committees and commissions for the investigation into the role of some of them to be entrusted in 2005 to the CBI, 21 years after the occurrence,” he added.
“The court would like to note that cases of the present kind are indeed extraordinary and require a different approach to be adopted by the courts. The mass killings of Sikhs between 1st and 4th November 1984 in Delhi and the rest of the country, engineered by political actors with the assistance of the law enforcement agencies, answer the description of ‘crimes against humanity’…,” justice Muralidhar said.
The court said that “crime against humanity” was first acknowledged in a joint declaration by Britain, Russia and France on May 28, 1915, against the government of Turkey following the large scale killing of Armenians by the Kurds and Turks with the assistance of the Ottoman administration.
The observations came while deciding a batch of appeals filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the victims against the acquittal of 73-yearold Kumar in May 2013. The case relates to the killing of five Sikhs in Raj Nagar Part-1 in Palam Colony in southwest Delhi on November 1 and 2, 1984 and burning down of a gurdwara in Raj Nagar Part-2.
Out of the six accused, Kumar was acquitted, five others were convicted for armed rioting and murder. The accused had also appealed their conviction and quantum of sentence.
The court also said that it was impossible to proceed against Sajjan Kumar in the normal scheme of things because of the ongoing large-scale efforts to suppress cases against him by not recording or registering them.
The judge added that the criminal justice system stands “severely tested” in the process of trial and it is essential in a democracy governed by the rule of law to be able to call out those responsible for such mass crimes.
A much-needed balm for victims after 34 years of tortuous battle
THE SENTENCING WILL NOW ADD SPEED AND HOPE TO THE OTHER CASES THAT ARE STILL BEING INVESTIGATED
NEW DELHI: From late-evening of October 31 to November 3 in 1984, a daughter saw her father being set on fire, a wife looked on helplessly as her husband and son were dragged by lumpens and bludgeoned to death with iron rods and a brother lost three siblings. He identified them from the watch one was wearing and the other two, from their half-burnt clothes.
Daughter Nirpreet Kaur, wife Jagdish Kaur and brother Jagsher Singh have lived a wretched life in the pursuit of justice, perhaps because their claim is that they saw a powerful Congressman and Member of Parliament of the area, Sajjan Kumar, exhort the mob and order the killing of Sikhs in the Raj Nagar locality, in Palam Colony.
Finally, after a long wait of 34 years, justice has knocked on their door. Until then, each of the three variously approached the police and the many commissions of inquiry to give a first-hand, ‘I witnessed the carnage’ account, but it stayed buried in affidavit after affidavit.
For them, revisiting 1984 was always a painful memory; the denial of justice a second stab in the heart.
They say that they saw Sajjan Kumar, and heard him, saying, “Ek bhi sardar zinda nahi bachna chahiye… en sardaron ko maro, enhone hamari maa ko mara hai,” (not even one Sikh should be spared. Kill them, they have killed our mother), but till the year 2011, no court of law even heard their testimonies.
As their lawyer, HS Phoolka once said: “Whenever it came to commissions of inquiry, Sajjan Kumar’s name appeared prominently, but whenever it went to the police, his name disappeared.”
If today, Sajjan Kumar stands convicted, it is because the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and not the police was the investigating and prosecuting agency.
The Congress leader was acquitted by the lower court, even though the public prosecutor RS Cheema, in his concluding remarks in the session’s court, said that the riots were a conspiracy of terrifying proportions that indict the police.
Simply put, his argument was that the men in uniform took the side of the rioters.
According to police rules, all movements of police officers are recorded minute by minute in the thana daily diary but the diaries for those days were totally blank. In Raj Nagar, specifically, Jagdish says she saw the chowki in-charge applaud the mob and ask them, ‘kitne murge bhun diye’ (how many Sikhs have you roasted). All this, while the bodies of her husband and son lay nearby. The policemen did the same in Delhi Cantt, tagging over 30 deaths, including Nirpreet’s father, Nirmal Singh, into a single FIR.
Sajjan Kumar’s name was never put in the list of the accused and the summons for Nirpreet were sent to an address that never belonged to her.
Respite for the victims came only after the Nanavati Commission submitted its report in 2005 and concluded that there was ‘credible evidence’ against Sajjan Kumar.
Affidavits filed by Jagsher and Jagdish finally counted for something. The case against Kumar was entrusted to the CBI.
They stood strong, through the threats and the lure to turn hostile.
The pressure was so acute and the frequency of threats so alarming, the victims applied for police protection; and they couldn’t be from the Delhi police. The CBI director finally wrote to the DGP Punjab and got them gun-toting policemen who would shadow them to court.
It is important to detail each step that derailed justice for over three decades.
Finally, the CBI secured the testimony of a joint secretary in Delhi government’s home department, who told the court that the director of prosecution had signed off on a file, saying the sanction to prosecute Kumar should not be granted.
With Kumar’s conviction, the thousands who still await justice can hold on to some hope.
The same evidence did not hold good in the sessions court, but with the High Court reversing that order, the victims can breathe easy in the belief that even though justice was delayed, it was not entirely denied.
The victims spent close to a life time testifying to Kumar’s role. He has now been sentenced to life imprisonment in a strong judgement in which the court held that the accused ‘enjoyed political patronage.’
Kumar’s sentencing will now add speed and hope to the many other cases that are still being investigated. 1984 saw the worst riot —many like to call it genocide —in which over 3000 Sikhs were brutally killed.
For all those who witnessed these deaths, the judgement comes as a long needed balm.
SIT probing 2 other cases against Sajjan
NEWDELHI:The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) case of the five murders during anti-Sikh riots in west Delhi’s Raj Nagar, in which senior Congress leader Sajjan Kumar was convicted on Monday, is not the only case in which the former parliamentarian is said to be involved.
A three-member special investigation team (SIT), formed to reinvestigate the cases of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, is probing Kumar’s alleged role in two other cases. One of them includes the murders of a man and his son in west Delhi. The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) had constituted the SIT in 2015.
The two cases are among the eight that the SIT reopened for investigation. An official said Kumar has already been interrogated twice during the probe. He was last interrogated by the team in March last year.
An official said the case is related to the murder of Jaswant Singh and his son, Hardeep. Singh’s wife, Dajleet Kaur, is an eyewitness. The woman in her statement to the police in 1991 has reportedly accused Kumar of instigating the mob to attack the Sikhs in her neighbourhood.
Delhi Police had registered the case in 1991 but closed the probe in 1993.
“This is an important case against Kumar. This is the one case in which there is an eyewitness. The team is yet to file a chargesheet in court. In the two other cases, too, his role has come up but the evidence in the third case is not very strong,” an official familiar with the case details said on condition of anonymity.
In 2015, after the SIT was formed, the team re-examined 293 cases which were closed by the Delhi Police. Of the 293 cases, the team filed closure reports in 233 cases, citing lack of evidence. In 52 cases, the team filed reports in which the victims or the accused were not traced and started probe in eight cases. Of the eight cases, the police filed a chargesheet in five, while the remaining three are pending investigation. Kumar is one of the alleged accused in these three cases.
In November, a city court awarded death sentence to man for the murder of two men in south Delhi’s Mahipalpur on November 1, 1984. This was one of the five cases in which the police had filed a chargesheet.