The cover-up
Within weeks of the massacre, a fact-finding report
prepared by the civil liberties groups, People’s Union for Civil Liberties
and People’s Union for Democratic Rights (‘Who are the Guilty’, PUCL-PUDR
report, November 1984), 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. The report listed HKL
Bhagat, Jagdish Tytler, Sajjan Kumar and Lalit Maken among the Congress
leaders active in inciting mobs against the Sikh community. The media had
named only one, Dharam Das Shastri, a former MP.
Riding the wave of nationwide sympathy following Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the Congress party swept to power
in the general elections held in late December. Her son, Rajiv, failed to
isolate the leaders who had been specifically named for their role in the
massacre. Far from being politically isolated, these men were instead
given tickets for the polls by the party leadership. Worse, they contested
and won the election.
Within a short and bloody spell of 48 to 72 hours, nearly
4,000 Sikhs, residents of Delhi, were massacred or burnt to death in cold
blood. The central government announced no judicial steps for redressal,
to identify and punish the guilty and offer justice to the victim
survivors. Within weeks of the assassination and the massacre, the ruling
party had switched to election mode and, winning a landslide victory in
the polls, came to power with an overwhelming majority in the newly formed
Lok Sabha. When Parliament met in January 1985, resolutions were passed
condemning the assassination of the former prime minister; another
condemned the loss of life in the Bhopal gas tragedy of December 1984. No
official condolence motion was moved to mark the massacre of Sikhs. To
date, the Indian Parliament has not rectified this shocking lapse.
None of the four politicians named for leading the mobs
have so far been punished. Instead, their election to seats in Parliament,
from the city where they were accused of leading mobs, signalled brute
democratic sanction for the massacres. HKL Bhagat, who was named by
several eyewitnesses as leading mobs, was chosen as the Congress party’s
candidate from East Delhi, the worst affected area. Of the whopping 76.97
per cent of votes polled, Bhagat cornered a staggering 59.8 per cent
(3,86,150 votes as opposed to the BJP’s 73,970). The majority of
constituents chose to back a man identified as leading a murderous mob.
Was this democratic sanction for carnage?
Similarly, Jagdish Tytler, chosen by the Congress party to
contest elections from Sadar in Delhi, won with a whopping 62 per cent of
the total 71.83 per cent of votes polled. His opponent, Madan Lal Khurana,
won the remaining 35.78 per cent. Lalit Maken, another accused, fielded by
the party from South Delhi, received 61.07 per cent of the 64.68 per cent
of votes polled, capturing 2,15,898 votes.
Amidst the euphoria of the electoral victory that followed
the massacre, these men were also elevated to more powerful positions in
government. HKL Bhagat, previously a minister of state, was elevated to
cabinet rank and Jagdish Tytler was made minister of state for the first
time. Lalit Maken, formerly a councillor, had already been rewarded with a
ticket for the polls in which he had won.
By early 1985 the Congress party was in the seat of power,
with a 90 per cent majority in the Lok Sabha. Not surprisingly, the new
government did not set up a commission of inquiry until forced to do so,
five months after the massacre. It was under pressure to initiate talks
with the more moderate Akalis (remember the Rajiv-Longowal accord) that
Rajiv Gandhi, the new prime minister, was forced to accede to the
precondition for talks set by the Sikh leadership – their demand that an
inquiry commission be established to investigate the massacre. The Akalis
had even threatened a nationwide agitation on April 13, 1985 to press
their demand. Two days before the threatened stir, the Congress government
finally announced the establishment of an inquiry commission.
A former judge of the Supreme Court, Justice Ranganath
Misra, was appointed to head the commission set up in May 1985. But the
commission did little to advance the cause of justice as the judge, who
was subsequently associated with the Congress party’s human rights cell
for several years, in fact covered up the role of the ruling Congress
party in the violence, failing to summon top Congress leaders and subject
them to the rigours of cross-examination. However, even the Misra
Commission was compelled to concede that during the carnage the police
refused to register any first information reports (FIRs) that named any
policeman or person in authority as the accused:
"It is a fact and the commission on the basis of
satisfaction records a finding that first information reports were not
received if they implicated the police or any person in authority and the
informants were required to delete such allegations from written reports.
When oral reports were recorded, they were not taken down verbatim and
brief statements dropping out allegations against police or other
officials and men in power were written" (Misra Commission report).
The Jain-Banerjee Committee (one of three committees set
up on the recommendation of the Misra Commission and which investigated
omission in registration of cases) actually instructed the Delhi police in
October 1987 to register a case of murder against Sajjan Kumar, who was a
Congress MP from the Outer Delhi constituency in 1984, on the basis of an
affidavit filed by a riot widow, Anwar Kaur. However, no action was taken
until the cover-up was exposed by journalist Manoj Mitta in The Times
of India. (An individual named Brahmanand Gupta, who was also named in
the affidavit, obtained a stay order against the Jain-Banerjee Committee
from the Delhi high court and the court allowed the matter to languish for
two years, furthering injustice to the victims.)
The CBI finally registered a case against Sajjan Kumar
only in 1990 and completed its investigations two years later. Apart from
charging Sajjan Kumar with murder, the CBI also charged him with hate
speech, invoking Section 153A of the Indian Penal Code. This required
central government sanction before prosecution, which was obtained from
the Narasimha Rao government only in June 1994.
In 1991 the Jain-Agarwal Committee, a panel set up to
continue the unfinished task of the Jain-Banerjee Committee, had
specifically recommended the registration of two cases against HKL Bhagat.
The then lieutenant governor of Delhi, Markandey Singh, accepted the
committee’s recommendation but Bhagat made a representation before him
claiming that he had already been exonerated by the Misra Commission, a
plea that was finally turned down on the grounds that the commission had
not examined the matter beyond a prima facie look at the case. Despite the
firm stand taken by the lieutenant governor, for five years no case was
registered against Bhagat at all. It was only in 1996, when the Congress
party was out of power, that the police registered the two cases in
question.
The Jain-Agarwal Committee had in 1991 also recommended
the registration of cases against other politicians and Markandey Singh
had ordered the registration of those cases as well. But in a
Machiavellian ploy, the Rao government actively prevented the registration
of the stronger cases against politicians whilst registering those that
relied on flimsier evidence thus ensuring that justice was not done. Manoj
Mitta and HS Phoolka, co-authors of When a Tree Shook Delhi (Roli
Books, 2007), exposed this as a government sham. They dug out, in
affidavit form, the original testimonies of witnesses against all these
politicians, demonstrating that the authorities, by replacing them with
weak and false testimonies, had suppressed the honest, unambiguous and
strong testimonies on oath.
Another panel appointed on the recommendation of the Misra
Commission, the Kapur-Mittal Committee, which investigated acts of
omission and commission by police officers, had identified delinquent
police officials. A report submitted in 1990 by one of the two committee
members, Kusum Lata Mittal, recommended various degrees of punishment for
72 police officials, including six IPS officers. But, on one flimsy
pretext or another, the government has so far not taken any action against
any of those indicted.
It was against this dismal background of legal deception
and failure to punish the perpetrators that the Vajpayee government took
the momentous decision in December 1999 to accept the demand for a fresh
judicial inquiry into the 1984 carnage. In Parliament, the members of all
political parties, including the Congress party, now under the leadership
of Sonia Gandhi, passed a resolution supporting the government’s decision
in this regard. The subsequent appointment of the Justice GT Nanavati
Commission in May 2000, nearly 16 years after the killings, was an
unprecedented development. The commission submitted its report in February
2005.
Through the findings of the Nanavati Commission, many
eminent persons have for the first time been able to put on record how,
during the massacre of 1984, the then union home minister, PV Narasimha
Rao, and the then lieutenant governor of Delhi, PG Gavai, failed to take
constitutionally binding and firm measures when urged to call in the army.
Several depositions before the Nanavati Commission also provided fresh
evidence against Congress leaders HKL Bhagat and Sajjan Kumar, reiterating
their role in the violence. Analysis of the evidence before the commission
also brought to light an important pattern/strategy followed by the police
authorities during that period, which was to first disarm Sikhs and then
arrest them. The Kusum Lata Mittal report, which revealed police
complicity at the highest level, was also revealed for the first time
through documents placed before the Nanavati Commission.
Communalism Combat has over the years revisited the
1984 carnage in its commitment as a journal to examine and illustrate the
breakdown of the rule of law within a functioning, vibrant democracy. The
1984 Sikh massacre in the nation’s capital was also the first full-fledged
anti-minority pogrom in independent India. That justice has not been done
and perpetrators among policemen and politicians have not been brought to
book is a comment on our agencies and institutions. We dedicate this issue
to the pursuit of justice even as we pay homage to the victims and salute
the grit and courage of the survivors.