1984 anti-Sikh riots: Justice delayed and denied, convictions few and far between

Thirty-eight years since a horrific spate of violence was unleashed against the Sikhs after two bodyguards belonging to the community assassinated the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984, very few accused have been convicted in the pending cases related to the riots.  The first high-profile conviction in the carnage case took place when Congress leader Sajjan Kumar was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Delhi High Court in December 2018, 34 years after the riots.

According to civil rights activist Teesta Setalvad, only nine cases of murder related to the 1984 carnage have led to convictions so far. And only 20 persons have been convicted for murder in 25 years — the conviction rate is less than 1 per cent.

On November 20, 2018, a Delhi court handed death sentence to one of the two persons who were convicted of murder; it was the first capital punishment in the Sikh massacre case. The other convict was served a life term in prison. These were among the several 1984 riots cases that a Special Investigation Team (SIT), which was constituted in 2015, took up after they were shut by the Delhi Police earlier.

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On August 22 this year, a CBI court granted bail to Sajjan Kumar in connection with the killing of a man and his son during the riots; the court noted that his name was first taken by the complainant after a period of seven years; Kumar will, however, remain in jail despite the bail.

Justice delayed, and denied

Thirty-eight years on, judgements have been delayed, and justice denied, subverted and compromised; the perpetrators still roam freely. Accused politicians like Jagdish Tytler and many unnamed people have not been brought to book. So far, 10 commissions have been formed to investigate the riots. The most recent of them was headed by Justice GT Nanavati, which submitted its 185-page report to then Home Minister Shivraj Patil on February 9, 2005; the report was tabled in Parliament on August 8 of that year.

The dark shadows of the tragedy still linger in the memory of those who lost their loved ones. For them, the wounds have not yet healed. They still remain as raw as ever, say the families of those who fell prey to the premeditated frenzy.

“When a big tree falls, earth shakes..”

In the series of organised pogroms against Sikhs after Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh, apparently to avenge the military attack on the Golden Temple during Operation Blue Star, on the morning of October 31, more than 8,000 Sikhs were killed across India, according to the government’s conservative estimate; at least 2,800 were massacred in Delhi alone. Independent sources estimate the number of deaths at about 30,000 and 17,000, respectively.

Indira had angered a vast number of Sikhs after she had ordered Operation Blue Star, a military action to secure the Harmandir Sahib Sikh temple complex in Amritsar, Punjab, in June 1984. The operation had resulted in a deadly battle with armed Sikh groups who were demanding greater rights and autonomy for Punjab. Sikhs worldwide had criticized the army action and many saw it as an assault on their religion and identity.

When Delhi burned and Sikhs were being butchered, no Sikh life in the capital was safe. While eminent writer Khushwant Singh sought shelter at the Swedish embassy, Justice SS Chadha of the Delhi high court had to move to the high court complex because his residence was no longer secure.

“When a big tree falls, earth shakes,” this contentious statement by Rajiv Gandhi, who became the Prime Minister after the Congress’ landslide victory in the delayed General Election of 1984, was largely seen as the brazen justification of the state-sponsored brutalities against Sikhs that continued for three days. On November 3, 1984, army and the local police units somehow managed to subdue the violence.

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The riots mark a dark chapter in modern Indian history. On October 2 this year, US Senator Pat Toomey said in his speech on the Senate floor: “1984 marks one of the darkest years in modern Indian history. The world watched as several violent incidents broke out among ethnic groups in India, with several notably targeting the Sikh community. Today we are here to remember the tragedy that commenced on November 1, 1984, following decades of ethnic tension between Sikhs in the Punjab province and the central Indian Government,” he said. He further added: “To prevent future human rights abuses, we must recognise their past forms. We must remember the atrocities committed against Sikhs so that those responsible may be held accountable and that this type of tragedy is not repeated against the Sikh community or other communities across the globe.”

The aftermath

The People’s Union for Democratic Rights and the People’s Union for Civil Liberties conducted an inquiry into the riots, interviewing victims, police officers, neighbours of the victims, army personnel and political leaders from October 31, 1984 to November 10, 1984. In their joint report, “Who Are The Guilty”, the groups concluded: “The attacks on members of the Sikh Community in Delhi and its suburbs during the period, far from being a spontaneous expression of “madness” and of popular “grief and anger” at Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination as made out to be by the authorities, were the outcome of a well organised plan marked by acts of both deliberate commissions and omissions by important politicians of the Congress (I) at the top and by authorities in the administration.”

The report named senior Congress leaders on the basis of allegations made by victims who had taken refuge in relief camps. However, no action against the perpetrators was forthcoming. While the media had named only one, Dharam Das Shastri, a former MP, as the accused, the report listed HKL Bhagat, Jagdish Tytler, Sajjan Kumar and Lalit Maken among the Congress leaders who actively incited mobs against the Sikh community.

According to eyewitness accounts obtained by Time magazine, Delhi Police had looked on as “rioters murdered and raped, having gotten access to voter records that allowed them to mark Sikh homes with large Xs, and large mobs being bused in to large Sikh settlements”. Time reported that the riots led to only minor arrests, with no major politicians or police officers convicted. The magazine quoted Ensaaf, an Indian human-rights organisation, as saying that the government attempted to destroy evidence of its involvement by refusing to record FIRs.

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A 1991 Human Rights Watch report on violence between Sikh separatists and the Government of India traced part of the problem to government response to the violence: “Despite numerous credible eye-witness accounts that identified many of those involved in the violence, including police and politicians, in the months following the killings, the government sought no prosecutions or indictments of any persons, including officials, accused in any case of murder, rape or arson.” The violence was allegedly led (and often perpetrated) by Indian National Congress activists and sympathizers. The Congress-led government was widely criticised for doing little at the time and possibly conspiring in the riots, since voter lists were used to identify Sikh families.

How the nation remembers the riots

On August 12, 2005, then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh apologized in the Lok Sabha for the riots against Sikhs, which are often cited as a reason to support the creation of a Sikh homeland called Khalistan. After becoming the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, in a message on October 31, 2014, said that anti-Sikh riots in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination were like a, “dagger that pierced through India’s chest…Our own people were murdered, the attack was not on a particular community but on the entire nation.”

Modi skipped the fact that the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA governments, which ruled the country from 1998 to 2004, did nothing either to persecute the culprits. The Vajpayee government, however, took the momentous decision to accept the demand for a fresh judicial inquiry into the carnage in December 1999.

In his autobiography, My Country, My Life (2008) LK Advani wrote that it was his party which forced Indira Gandhi to go for army action, infamously named as Operation Blue Star, which killed a large number of Sikh pilgrims. Journalist Manoj Mitta, in When a Tree Shook Delhi: The 1984 Carnage and Its Aftermath (Roli Books, 2007), co-authored with HS Phoolka, exposed the P. V. Narasimha Rao-led government at the Centre for the registration of the stronger cases against politicians while registering those that relied on flimsier evidence, after the Jain-Agarwal Committee recommended the registration of cases against other politicians in 1991. “Despite the BJP rule, there has hardly been any will to enforce accountability for the massacres that took place under the Congress. It’s as if there is a tacit deal between the sponsors of 1984 and 2002,” write Mitta and Phoolka in the book.

On January 15, 2017, the Wall of Truth was inaugurated in Lutyens’ Delhi — at the Gurdwara Rakab Ganj Sahib complex near the Parliament of India — as a memorial for Sikhs killed during the 1984 riots, and other hate crimes across the world.

Last week, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) accused the Congress party of continuing to back the perpetrators of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. Delhi BJP spokesperson Tajinder Bagga took to Twitter to share that Jagdish Tytler was present at the AICC headquarters when Mallikarjun Kharge took charge as Congress president on October 26.

On November 1, BJP national spokesperson RP Singh wrote to Union Home Minister Amit Shah requesting him to establish a ‘Truth Commission’ to expose the conspiracy behind the 1984 Sikh pogrom. Separately, senior advocate Harinder Singh Phoolka wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, alleging that the ‘genocide of Sikhs in Delhi was planned by Indira Gandhi during her lifetime’ and demanded the constitution of the Truth Commission to unravel the truth. In his letter to Shah, Singh urged Shah to declassify the documents pertaining to Operation Blue Star and the 1984 Sikh riots.