Shedding tears for Gujarat, Cong laughs at ’84 victims: flaunts carnage poster boys

This despite the fact that barely six months ago, the Justice G T Nanavati Commission, probing the 1984 carnage, issued Section 8B notices to Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler, who have since been cleared as Congress candidates for Outer Delhi and Sadar constituencies.

The Nanavati Commission issued those notices to Kumar and Tytler after recording evidence which suggests their complicity in the violence and is therefore ‘‘prejudicial’’ to their reputation.

Both the leaders gave their responses denying the allegations against them and the Commission has given them the option of recalling and cross-examining the witnesses who deposed against them.

The third carnage-tainted leader is the Congress party’s candidate in South Delhi constituency, senior advocate R K Anand, who has all through appeared against the victims before inquiry commissions and courts on behalf of either the Delhi Administration or the accused Congress leaders.

Anand was the counsel for the Delhi Administration and police in the in-camera inquiry conducted in 1985-86 by the Justice Ranganath Misra Commission, which white-washed the role of the Congress party and its leaders in the massacre that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi.

Justice Misra has since been made a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha and his inquiry report has been so discredited that, on a resolution passed unanimously in Parliament, the Vajpayee Government appointed Justice Nanavati in 2000 to hold a fresh probe into the same matter.

While defending accused Congress leaders, Anand once secured anticipatory bail for Kumar in 1990 even after a CBI team had actually arrested him. Anand could do so because of the bizarre development in which the CBI officials, who arrested Kumar, were locked up in his house by a mob of his supporters.

Anand later appeared for H K L Bhagat in the trial court and the Delhi High Court. In recent months, he has been representing Tytler and another accused Congress leader, Kamal Nath, before the Nanavati Commission. The high court is currently dealing with a clutch of appeals against the acquittal of Sajjan Kumar by a sessions judge in December 2002 in that same case in which he was ‘arrested’ in 1990.

Based on the affidavit of riot widow Anwar Kaur, the murder case against Kumar was registered only in 1990, that is six years after the carnage, because the police had refused to book any Congress leader throughout Rajiv Gandhi’s reign.

The police closed six other cases against Kumar in the nineties during Narasimha Rao’s reign. Anwar Kaur’s complaint was the only 1984 riot case to be handled by the CBI and that was also the case against Kumar to have reached the stage of trial.

Tytler’s involvement first came to light on November 6, 1984 when he barged into a press conference of the then Delhi police commissioner S C Tandon and asked his supporters to be released saying, ‘‘By holding my men you are hampering relief work.’’ In 1994, the Justice R S Narula Committee, appointed by the then BJP Government of Delhi, recommended that a case against Tytler closed by the police be reopened.

The Nanavati Commission’s Section 8B notice to Tytler is based on the allegation made by the head granthi of the historic Gurdwara Rakabganj, Surender Singh, that he had led a mob which killed two Sikhs in a north Delhi locality. Tytler pleaded innocent by saying Surender Singh filed another affidavit withdrawing the allegation against him.