Opinion Express View on case against the accused of Delhi 1984: Lest we forget

The 1984 anti-Sikh violence remains one of the darkest episodes in independent India’s history. According to official records, more than 2,700 people were killed in the capital alone — civil society groups maintain this is a conservative estimate — in the bloodletting that erupted in the aftermath of the assassination of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Homes were burnt down, livelihoods destroyed, places of worship desecrated. Several commissions, SITs and reports found damning evidence against senior Congress members. Yet, the wheels of justice have moved at an excruciatingly slow pace in the past 40 years, deepening the anguish and trauma of the brutalised families. The conviction of Congress leader Sajjan Kumar in 2018 brought a rare moment of closure. However, other than Kumar, very few people have been punished. Now, on Friday last week, a Delhi Court has ordered the CBI to frame charges against another high-profile Congress leader, Jagdish Tytler, in a case in which three people were killed and the Pul Bangash Gurdwara in Delhi was torched.

Immediately after the terrible mass violence, fingers were pointed at Tytler, among others. Then, in 2005, the G T Nanavati Commission, set up by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA government to probe the killings, referred to eyewitness accounts that Tytler “led the mob” at Pul Bangash. That the four-time Congress MP continued, for long, to fight elections and hold ministerial portfolios in the Rajiv Gandhi, P V Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh cabinets, despite the serious accusations against him, speaks of several abdications. The CBI did register a case against the Delhi Sadar MP, nine months after the Nanavati Commission submitted its report but in less than two years, the agency concluded that there were no grounds to prosecute him. That investigation was questioned for its failure to examine all eyewitnesses, and a Delhi Sessions Court ordered the agency to probe the matter again, only for Tytler to be given a clean chit twice — in 2009 and then in 2014. Both times the Court refused to accept the CBI’s report. Last year, in its chargesheet filed in May, the CBI accused him of “inciting, instigating and provoking the mob” that had assembled near the Pul Bangash Gurdwara at Azad Market, Bara Hindu Rao, on November 1, 1984.

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In pronouncing the life sentence on Sajjan Kumar in 2018, the Delhi High Court called out the “abject failure” of investigating agencies, and observed that the “perpetrators of anti-Sikh riots enjoyed political patronage”. 1984 is a blot on the country’s law enforcement system, and indeed its democratic polity. The tortuous trajectory of the Tytler case is a larger symbol of a continuing lack of justice and closure.