1984 Delhi Massacre of Sikhs by

the Goondas of Rajiv Gandhi and

Justice Denied
Naunidhi Kaur

A Sikh woman whose husband was killed in the 1984 massacre

of Sikhs protesting near the Indian Parliament.

It is not easy to come to terms with images of a family member

being burnt alive by a mob in front of you. If that happens,
psychoanalysts say, you end up living with “death guilt.” Most
survivors of 1984 carnage live with this death guilt. Silently they
condemn themselves for not getting killed with their family
member. Punishment to the guilty can assuage their feelings.
This has not happened. Twenty years after the 1984 carnage
the guilty politicians who led the riots are members of the
parliament and cabinet ministers. The police officers who
helped the killing mobs have retired or have been promoted.

Immediately after the carnage a number of human rights

organizations documented the violence. People’s Union for
Civil Liberties published a list of 200 guilty Congress (I)
politicians and policemen who participated in the killings.
Twenty years have passed and the Indian government has not
punished the guilty. Why has justice been denied for so long to
the victims? Where exactly is the criminal justice system failing
in India?

To say that Indian government and Indians hate Sikhs and will
never do anything for them would be too simplistic an
explanation. The 1984 massacre did not occur because of a
deep-seated antagonism between Hindus and Sikhs in India. On
the contrary, in many parts of North India, during the five days
of violence nightly vigils were held by Hindu and Sikh neighbors
to protect their colony from mobs. In the days following
carnage, 50,000 victims found relief in camps set-up by
concerned Hindu citizens.

In the last 20 years after riots the victims have had two options-
-commissions of inquiry and judicial courts—to get justice.
They have tried both, without success. The commissions of
inquiry have no prosecution powers. The best they can do is to
come up with a set of recommendations against the guilty
police officers and politicians. These recommendations are not
binding on the government. Eight commissions have been set-
up in the last twenty years to find the guilty. The plight of the
commissions is as deplorable as that of survivors of the riots.

Where the Commissions have come up with recommendations,

they have been ignored and not implemented. The Kapoor-
Mittal committee presented a comprehensive 400-page
document, which went into the conduct of the personnel of all
the police stations in Delhi, the Delhi Railway Police and the
Delhi Armed Police in a detailed manner. It found 72 police
officers guilty. It recommended termination of these officers.
No action has been taken on its recommendations.

Some policemen on the list of guilty have been promoted. The

Jain-Aggrawal committee was formed to replace Potti-Rosha
committee. It submitted its report in 1993, which named police
officials who shielded the guilty politicians. The committee’s
report was never made public. There is no question of
implementing its recommendations.

At present, the GT Nanavati commission is probing the riots. It

was set-up in May 2000. It was asked to fix the responsibility for
any lapses or dereliction of duty on the part of the authorities in
taking steps to prevent the incidents. An interim report was not
made mandatory; the Commission was asked to make a
decision as and when it deemed it fit. In four years the
Commission completed its probe. In the first year of its running
the Commission managed to examine only 15 witnesses.

One reason for this delay was that it asked the Home Ministry in
Delhi for files and affidavits presented to one of the earlier
commissions. The Home ministry had lost these important files
containing sworn affidavits of the victims with horrific tales
about the killings of their loved ones along with
correspondence between the army, police and ministers at the
time of riots. In the end, the home ministry did manage to
salvage some documents from an unclaimed almirah in the
home ministry basement from underneath some old files.

Most people, who have been deposing before the commission,

admit they are doing so only out of a sense of duty to their
family members who died in the riots. They know that the
politicians who were behind it have long been acquitted by the
courts for lack of evidence or because witnesses turned
hostile. Going from one commission to another has become a
part of their lives.
An activist lawyer, set about studying the 1984 riot cases in the
trial court has come to some revealing conclusions. She has
found that in the representative sample of 126 cases only eight
cases resulted in conviction while the remaining 118 cases
ended in acquittals. Of these 8 convictions, two were
overturned by the High Court. On the question of sentencing,
the Supreme Court reduced the death sentence awarded in
three cases to life imprisonment. In sum, the Indian judiciary
has found three people guilty of killing 3000 innocent Sikhs.

The acquittals have been made possible by the police, which

carried cursory investigations or deliberately omitted names of
guilty from reports. Judges who sat down for judgments have
found omnibus First Information Report (F.I.R) being submitted
to them by the police. Instead of recording the statement of
each victim separately the policemen have recorded murders
of 200 people in one information report.

Such reports contain no specific details regarding the names of

persons killed or the names of rioters. Where the police have
conducted perfunctory investigation they have made no effort
to join any other witness apart from the complainant in the
case. It is because of this reason that politicians like Sajjan
Kumar, HKL Bhagat and Jagdish Tytler have been acquitted by
the courts. The police, working on the dictates of the ruling
political party, has made acquittal of guilty possible.

Riots like 1984 or Gujarat do not take place because Hindus,

Muslims or Sikhs cannot live together. The arithmetic of
polarized votes at the time of elections leads the politicians to
create communal hatred among communities. The 1984 riots
made it possible for Congress party to reap the benefits when
they overwhelmingly won from almost every seat they
contested in the national elections. It is the very democratic
politics which makes India the world’s largest democracy that
orchestrates domestic violence.