‘Complainant planted in political vendetta by probe agency’: Sajjan Kumar challenges conviction in 1984 anti-Sikh riots case

The appeal, listed for hearing before a bench of Justices Vivek Chaudhary and Manoj Jain on Friday, has been adjourned to November 19 as the bench was not available.

The Special Investigation Team (SIT), which probed this case, alleged that Kumar, who was the then Congress MP for Outer Delhi, led a mob that burnt alive the two Sikh men — Jaswant Singh and his son Tarundeep Singh — and destroyed and looted their houses acting on his directions.

Appealing against the trial court’s order, Kumar termed the verdict “wrong” and “erroneous”. He said the trial court “totally ignored the cross-examination of the defence, which clearly established that fresh allegations have been leveled and witnesses are not trustworthy and their deposition was script(ed) and does not inspire any confidence, rather their evidence creates a serious doubt”.

Kumar has submitted that the complainant in the case — wife of the deceased, her daughter and her niece — have been “manifestly planted… to give effect to a political vendetta by the investigating agency as the appellant was an elected Member of Parliament at the relevant time of the constituency consisting of place of incident”.

Kumar, in his plea, also submitted that “there is no evidence at all” of his involvement in the incident, “much less of formation of unlawful assembly and the commission of offences or any act with common object”.

He submitted that the trial court failed to consider the fact that “the killing of Jaswant Singh, his son Tarundeep Singh and injured persons belonging to the family of the deceased was investigated twice earlier prior to present case taken over by SIT for further investigation and no evidence was found against the appellant by the… earlier investigating agencies”.

The FIR in this case was initially registered in November 1984 at the Punjabi Bagh police station. Kumar has highlighted that he was not named in this FIR.

The complainant had then filed an affidavit in September 1985 before the Justice Ranganath Mishra Commission, which was appointed by then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi “to inquire into the organised violence that took place in Delhi… and to recommend measures that may be adopted for prevention of recurrence of such incidents”.

Subsequently, taking the affidavit into account, an FIR was lodged at Saraswati Vihar police station in 1991.

Kumar is currently lodged in Tihar Jail; he is serving a life sentence handed down by the HC in 2018 in a case related to the killing of five Sikhs at Raj Nagar Part I in Palam Colony on November 1-2, 1984, and the burning down of a gurdwara in Raj Nagar Part II.