1984 genocide of Sikhs

SIT to Reopen Seven 1984 Anti-Sikh Riot Cases

After the notification became public, Delhi MLA Manjinder Singh Sirsa said senior Congress leader and Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath had allegedly given shelter to five people who were accused in one of the seven cases.

New Delhi: A Special Investigation Team (SIT), set up by the Union Home Ministry, has decided to reopen seven anti-Sikh riot cases, where the accused were either acquitted or the trial closed, according to an official notification.

“Nath was never named in the FIR registered in New Delhi’s Parliament Street police station. Five persons named as accused in the case (FIR No. 601/84) were accommodated in Nath’s residence. All these accused were discharged due to lack of evidence.

“Since the SIT will reinvestigate this case also, two witnesses will appear before the SIT where they will tell about Kamal Nath’s role in the riots,” Sirsa told PTI.

The witnesses were Sanjay Suri, who now lives in England, and Mukhtiyar Singh, who is now in Patna, he said.

“I have spoken to both of the witnesses and they are ready to appear before the SIT to record their statements,” Sirsa said.

The case is related to a mob of rioters storming the Gurdwara Rakab Ganj Sahib here.

Nath had previously denied the charges.

According to the Home Ministry notification, the SIT has taken up the discharged cases for scrutiny or preliminary enquiry.

The seven anti-Sikh riot cases were registered in 1984 at police stations in Vasant Vihar, Sun Light Colony, Kalyanpuri, Parliament Street, Connaught Place, Patel Nagar and Shahdara.

The SIT has issued public notices asking individuals and organisations to provide information related to the seven cases.

“This is to inform to all individuals, groups of persons, associations, institutions and organisations that if they have any information in respect of any of the cases, they may contact the officer in-charge of SIT police station,” the SIT said.

Sirsa claimed that Kamal Nath’s name was never included in the FIR nor was he investigated by the police.

The SIT was set up on February 12, 2015 following a recommendation by the Home Ministry-appointed Justice (retd) G P Mathur committee.

The three-member SIT comprises two Inspector General-rank IPS officers and a judicial officer.

The SIT has so far re-opened around 80 out of the 650 cases registered in connection with anti-Sikh riots following the assassination of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Gandhi was shot dead by her Sikh bodyguards on October 31, 1984.

A total of 3,325 people were killed in the riots in which Delhi alone accounted for 2,733 deaths, while the rest occurred in Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and other states.

The Delhi Police had closed 241 cases citing lack of evidence. Justice Nanavati Commission had recommended reopening of only four of them but the Modi government constituted the SIT for re-investigation of all cases which the probe team finds appropriate.

The CBI had reopened and re-investigated only four cases. In two of them, the probe agency had filed a charge sheet and in one, five persons, including a former MLA, were convicted.

Last year, Congress leader Sajjan Kumar was sentenced to life for his role in the anti-Sikh riots.

On December 10, 2014, the Narendra Modi government had announced an additional compensation of Rs five lakh to the kin of each of those killed in the 1984 riots.

In May, 2016, the Home Ministry had announced that 1,020 families, which had been hit by the riots and migrated to Punjab from different parts of the country, will be given Rs two lakh each as part of a centrally-sponsored rehabilitation scheme.

After Sajjan Kumar, Time to Hold the Police Accountable for Their Role in 1984 Massacre

India’s future as a democracy depends on a grim determination that such heinous will crimes never be forgotten, and the guilty never escape.

Within a few kilometres of the Parliament House in the national capital, an estimated 2,733 Sikhs – possibly more – were murdered by rampaging mobs over four days in November 1984. Four days of butchery with direct or indirect connivance of the police. Four days of authorities refusing to impose a curfew. Four days without the government of the day deploying the army. Rajiv Gandhi, the then prime minister, said at the time: “When a big tree falls, the Earth does shake a little”. There was no mainstream coverage of the massacre, let alone any on Doordarshan or Akashvani.

After 34 years, on December 17, the Delhi high court convicted Sajjan Kumar in the 1984 anti-Sikh massacre case. In convicting him, the high court overturned a lower court order that had acquitted the Congress leader in the case. The bench of Justices S. Muralidhar and Vinod Goel described the 1984 killings as “crimes against humanity” perpetrated by those who had “political patronage and were aided by an indifferent law enforcement agency”.

The Delhi high court also rapped the Delhi Police for “failing to prevent and control the violence” in the riots case. “The Delhi Police failed to register separate FIRs. There was nothing registered in daily diary by the police,” the court said.

What did the police and their leaders, the members of the IPS, do during those four days and how did they manage to help the perpetrators of the massacre escape with impunity for these 34 years?

Here are the specifics.

One, that the police had full knowledge of the carnage that swept Delhi from the morning of November 1 is documented in the form of FIRs lodged by the police themselves.

Two, on the morning of November 1, a radio order from Delhi Police headquarters instructed all Sikh police officers to “lay down their arms” and stand down. As they left police stations, unaware they were walking into a holocaust, ‘…some were murdered en route to their homes or later on with their families.’ Twenty-nine years later, Cobrapost aired ‘Chapter 84′, an investigation into the violence, where eight former Delhi police officers revealed ‘how they had acted on orders from above,’ implicating the Congress government of the time.

Also read: India’s Justice System Has Failed Victims of the 1984 Anti-Sikh Massacre

Three, as per witness accounts, the police stopped Sikhs from protecting themselves by taking away their weapons. They then allowed the mobs to attack. The police persuaded Sikhs out of hiding, and then stood back as they were murdered. As per one statement, a police officer was overheard saying, “You have 36 hours, do what you want.” Later, even the Delhi Fire Services complained the police had refused to escort them to fires.

Four, the ‘deployment’ of paramilitary forces of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and the Border Security Force (BSF) announced by the government were nowhere to be seen. “I have called CRPF and BSF control rooms every ten minutes”, said a duty officer at the Nizamuddin police station, “but each time I am told that there is nothing that can be done.”

Five, everything was done leisurely – the killing, the arson, the looting. As per an Outlook report:

“Liquor flowed like water, tea was served to the ‘vigilant’ police sitting on their stools, jokes were shared, there was a lot of laughter and glee, trucks came and went loaded with booty – dispatched unhurriedly to safe place – car loads of well-dressed men stopped for a while to supervise if things were going according to plan.”

Six, the collusion was so pervasive that it took over 36 hours for the Block 32 of Trilokpuri massacre to come to light, although it was barely ten km from the Delhi police headquarters. But only a few officers, including one Maxwell Pereira, stood up for the victims. The rest of the top brass bowed to the party in power and grounded the police machinery to an administrative halt. Amod Kanth even got a gallantry award despite Ranganath Mishra Commission saying he was unfit to be a policeman.

Seven, at some places, the “police removed truckloads of dead bodies of Sikhs” in order to destroy evidence. Between midnight and 4 am on the morning of November 2, Tejinder Singh – a 37-year-old resident of Block 29 in Trilokpuri, Delhi’s worst-affected neighbourhood – who was attacked during the massacre, said, “police removed truckloads of the dead bodies of Sikhs of Blocks 30 and 32. I had seen eight such truckloads being taken by the police.”

Apart from Delhi police, the Congress Party got a few willing supporters in the judiciary. That Ranganath Mishra, then a sitting Supreme Court judge who wanted people to forget what had happened in 1984, went on to become the CJI in 1990 and, later, the first chairman of the National Human Rights Commission and then a member of parliament in Rajya Sabha from the Congress Party between 1998-2004, is a matter of national shame.

Also read: Thirty-Four Years On, Long Arm of the Law Finally Catches up With Sajjan Kumar

Is Sajjan Kumar the only politician in the history of independent India who has been instrumental in killings of masses on the streets? Is Congress the only political party that has blood on its hands? Is November 1984 the only instance of a party in power choosing to let the leashes off its followers and instructing law enforcement agencies to stand down?

The answer is no.

India’s policymakers need to make the police and police leaders accountable for their commissions and omissions.

One of the reasons behind these incidents occurring and resulting in deaths so frequently is that more often than not, the leaders of communal mobs go scot-free.

The Indian constitution is as much about making the state machinery – bureaucracy, police, army etc – accountable for protecting the fundamental rights of the citizens as about regularly conducting general elections. This accountability goes beyond the formal legal definition of the concept.

India’s future as a democracy depends on a grim determination that such heinous crimes will never be forgotten, and the guilty never escape. It is not so much the case of the vulnerabilities of a religious minority in an overwhelmingly Hindu state – the true significance of 1984 was to show how insecure an average Indian can be if he or she is identified as a part of a group of people ‘that needs to be taught a lesson’.

What happened to the Sikh community of Delhi and elsewhere in the country in November 1984 could happen to anyone else at any time. Gujarat 2002 riots are a case in point.

Basant Rath is 2000 batch IPS officer who belongs to the Jammu and Kashmir cadre. Views expressed are personal.

Delhi HC: ‘1984 Massacre a Crime Against Humanity, India Must Plug Legal Loopholes’

“Common to the instances of mass crimes are the targeting of minorities and the attacks spearheaded by the dominant political actors facilitated by the law enforcement agencies. The criminals responsible for the mass crimes have enjoyed political patronage and managed to evade prosecution and punishment.”

The following are excerpts, lightly edited for style, from the judgment of Justice S. Muralidhar and Justice Vinod Goel of the Delhi high court in the Sajjan Kumar case. The court convicted the senior Congress leader for his involvement in the November 1984 mass killing of Sikhs but drew attention to the need for India to address shortcomings in its legal system that make it difficult to prosecute mass crimes that invariably occur with political patronage and official support.

The full text of the judgment is available on the Delhi high court website.

In the summer of 1947, during partition, this country witnessed horrific mass crimes where several lakhs of civilians, including Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus were massacred.

A young poet, Amrita Pritam, who fled to this country with her two little children from Lahore was witness to the manifold tragedies during that perilous journey. She was moved to pen an ‘Ode to Waris Shah‘ in which she spoke of the fertile land of Punjab having “sprouted poisonous weeds far and near” and where “Seeds of hatred have grown high, bloodshed is everywhere / Poisoned breeze in forest turned bamboo flutes into snakes / Their venom has turned the bright and rosy Punjab all blue”

The killings would continue in the streets of Delhi.

Thirty-seven years later, the country was again witness to another enormous human tragedy. Following the assassination of Smt. Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India, on the morning of 31st October 1984 by two of her Sikh bodyguards, a communal frenzy was unleashed. For four days between 1st and 4th November of that year, all over Delhi, 2,733 Sikhs were brutally murdered. Their houses were destroyed. In the rest of the country too, thousands of Sikhs were killed.

A majority of the perpetrators of these horrific mass crimes, enjoyed political patronage and were aided by an indifferent law enforcement agency. The criminals escaped prosecution and punishment for over two decades. It took as many as ten Committees and Commissions for the investigation into the role of some of them to be entrusted in 2005 to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), 21 years after the occurrence.

The present appeals arise as a result of the investigation by the CBI into the killing of five Sikhs in the Raj Nagar Part I area in Palam Colony in South West Delhi on 1st and 2nd November 1984 and the burning down of a Gurudwara in Raj Nagar Part II. Six accused, including Sajjan Kumar a Congress leader who was a Member of Parliament at that time, were sent up for trial some time in 2010. Three years later, the trial court convicted five of the accused: three of them for the offences of armed rioting and murder and two of them for the offence of armed rioting. Sajjan Kumar stood acquitted by the trial Court of all offences. The convicted accused as well as the CBI appealed to this Court…

This Court is of the view that the mass killings of Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere in November 1984 were in fact ‘crimes against humanity’. They will continue to shock the collective conscience of society for a long time to come. While it is undeniable that it has taken over three decades to bring the accused in this case to justice, and that our criminal justice system stands severely tested in that process, it is essential, in a democracy governed by the rule of law to be able to call out those responsible for such mass crimes. It is important to assure those countless victims waiting patiently that despite the challenges, truth will prevail and justice will be done…

Crimes against Humanity

The Court would like to note that cases of the present kind are indeed extraordinary and require a different approach to be adopted by the Courts. The mass killings of Sikhs between 1st and 4th November 1984 in Delhi and the rest of the country, engineered by political actors with the assistance of the law enforcement agencies, answer the description of „crimes against humanity‟ that was acknowledged for the first time in a joint declaration by the governments of Britain, Russia and France on 28th May 1915 against the government of Turkey following the large scale killing of Armenians by the Kurds and Turks with the assistance and connivance of the Ottoman administration. The declaration termed the killings as “crimes against humanity and civilisation for which all the members of the Turkish Government will be held responsible together with its agents implicated in the massacres”.

The Charter that established, after the conclusion of the Second World War, the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg to try Nazi criminals accused of mass extermination of Jews defined ‘crimes against humanity’ as:

“…murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or prosecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.”

The IMT proceeded to hold many of the defendants before it guilty of that crime. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), as well as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), held trials for a series of offences including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The definition adopted of ‘crimes against humanity’ in Article 3 of the ICTR Statute was that they were ‘inhumane acts’ that were part of a “systematic or widespread attack against any civilian population on national, political, ethnic, racial or religious grounds.”

Justice S. Muralidhar (left) and Justice Vinod Goel of the Delhi high court.

Article 7 of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court defines ‘crimes against humanity’ as meaning “any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack..” and this includes (a) Murder; (b) Extermination; (c) Enslavement and so on and “other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.” It incorporates the criminal element of ‘murder, rape’ etc. but also a contextual element viz., the perpetrator must be aware that he is contributing to a widespread or systematic attack against civilians.

It is widely acknowledged that Prof. Hersch Lauterpacht, a renowned international law jurist… was responsible for making the offence of ‘crime against humanity’ part of the offences for which the Nazi defendants would be tried at the IMT in Nuremberg.

Another renowned scholar, a contemporary of Prof. Lauterpacht, was Prof. Raphael Lemkin whose academic efforts were instrumental in bringing about the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention) which has been ratified by India. In a book titled East West Street (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016) p. xxix, Prof. Philippe Sands explains the distinction between the two concepts as under:

“What is the difference between crimes against humanity and genocide?

Imagine the killing of 1000,000 people who happened to come from the same group…..Jews or Poles in the city of Lviv. For Lauterpacht, the killing of individuals, if part of a systematic plan, would be a crime against humanity. For Lemkin, the focus was genocide, the killing of the many with the intention of destroying the group of which they were a part. For a prosecutor today, the difference between the two was largely the question of establishing intent: to prove genocide, you needed to show that the act of killing was motivated by an intent to destroy the group, whereas for crimes against humanity no such intent had to be shown…. proving intent to destroy a group in whole or in part was notoriously difficult, since those involved in such killings tended not to leave a trail of helpful paperwork.”

In India, the riots in early November 1984 in which in Delhi alone 2,733 Sikhs and nearly 3,350 all over the country were brutally murdered (these are official figures) was neither the first instance of a mass crime nor, tragically, the last. The mass killings in Punjab, Delhi and elsewhere during the country‟s partition remains a collective painful memory as is the killings of innocent Sikhs in November 1984.

Pattern of mass killings

There has been a familiar pattern of mass killings in Mumbai in 1993, in Gujarat in 2002, in Kandhamal, Odisha in 2008, in Muzaffarnagar in U.P. in 2013 to name a few.

Common to these mass crimes were the targeting of minorities and the attacks spearheaded by the dominant political actors being facilitated by the law enforcement agencies. The criminals responsible for the mass crimes have enjoyed political patronage and managed to evade prosecution and punishment.

Bringing such criminals to justice poses a serious challenge to our legal system. As these appeals themselves demonstrate, decades pass by before they can be made answerable. This calls for strengthening the legal system. Neither ‘crimes against humanity’ nor ‘genocide’ is part of our domestic law of crime. This loophole needs to be addressed urgently.

Challenge of dealing with crimes against humanity

Elsewhere too, the legal systems of the world are grappling with ‘crimes against humanity’. The Supreme Court of Bangladesh, in Abdul Quader Molla, considered the appeal of the government against the acquittal of the accused of mass killing of Bangladeshi citizens committed in 1971 by sympathisers of the Pakistani Army. The trial commenced in 2009, 38 years after the incident, and concluded in 2013…

The Court of Appeal in United Kingdom in Anthony Sawoniuk was dealing with the issue of framing criminal proceedings 56 years after the alleged crime. The Jury had convicted the Appellant on two counts of murder and on account of killing of Polish Jews during the Nazi era. The Appellate Court rejected the contention of the accused and refused leave to appeal before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Thereafter, the ECHR, by its judgment dated 29th May 2001, upheld his conviction.

This obligation to prosecute crimes against humanity, no matter the lapse of time, has also been echoed by International Criminal Law: Critical Concepts in Law, 2015 wherein it was opined that “no amount of time can be ‘too long’ to satisfy the needs for truth and some measure of accountability, nor can come arbitrary legal time limit be set. The argument that some wounds are too old to be exposed has little moral integrity… the wounds are still there for all to see”.

The International Law Commission („ILC‟) is at present working towards a Convention on Crimes against Humanity. It has submitted the draft articles of the Convention to the UN General Assembly. It is expected that after comments are received from governments, international organisations and others, followed by a second reading of the draft articles by the ILC in 2018, the proposed convention will be adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2019 or 2020. India, in view of her experience with the issue, should be able to contribute usefully to the process.

The Court has digressed into the above brief discussion on ‘crimes against humanity’ since cases like the present are to be viewed in the larger context of mass crimes that require a different approach and much can be learnt from similar experiences elsewhere…

Conclusions

(i) There was an abject failure by the police to investigate the violence which broke out in the aftermath of the assassination of the then Prime Minister Smt. Indira Gandhi is apparent from the several circumstances highlighted hereinabove.

(ii) There was an utter failure to register separate FIRs with respect to the five deaths that form the subject matter of the present appeals. The failure to record any incident whatsoever in the DDR and the lack of mention of [the main prosecution witness’s] statement therein, amongst other circumstances, established the apathy of the Delhi Police and their active connivance in the brutal murders being perpetrated.

(iii) What happened in the aftermath of the assassination of the then Prime Minister was carnage of unbelievable proportions in which over 2,700 Sikhs were murdered in Delhi alone. The law and order machinery clearly broke down and it was literally a ‘free for all’ situation which persisted. The aftershocks of those atrocities are still being felt.

(iv) This was an extraordinary case where it was going to be impossible to proceed against [Sajjan Kumar] in the normal scheme of things because there appeared to be ongoing large-scale efforts to suppress the cases against him by not even recording or registering them. Even if they were registered they were not investigated properly and even the investigations which saw any progress were not carried to the logical end of a charge sheet actually being filed…

(xi) The mass killings of Sikhs between 1st and 4th November 1984 in Delhi and the rest of the country, engineered by political actors with the assistance of the law enforcement agencies, answer the description of ‘crimes against humanity’. Cases like the present are to be viewed in the larger context of mass crimes that require a different approach and much can be learnt from similar experiences elsewhere.

(xii) Common to the instances of mass crimes are the targeting of minorities and the attacks spearheaded by the dominant political actors facilitated by the law enforcement agencies. The criminals responsible for the mass crimes have enjoyed political patronage and managed to evade prosecution and punishment. Bringing such criminals to justice poses a serious challenge to our legal system. Decades pass by before they can be made answerable. This calls for strengthening the legal system. Neither ‘crimes against humanity’ nor ‘genocide’ is part of our domestic law of crime. This loophole needs to be addressed urgently.

(xiii) The acquittal of [Sajjan Kumar] by the trial Court is set aside. He is convicted of the offence of criminal conspiracy punishable under Section 120B read with Sections 302, 436, 295, and 153A (1) (a) and (b) IPC; for the offence punishable under Section 109 IPC of abetting the commission of the aforementioned offences; and for the offence of delivering provocative speeches instigating violence against Sikhs punishable under Section 153A (1) (a) and (b) IPC.