When a Tree Shook Delhi: The 1984 Carnage and its Aftermath 8174366199, 9788174366191

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WHEN A TREE SHOOK DELHI

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Lotus Collection © Manoj Mitta & HS Phoolka, 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published in 2007 The Lotus Collection An imprint of Roli Books Pvt. Ltd. M-75, G.K. II Market, New Delhi 110 048 Phones: ++91 (011) 2921 2271, 2921 2782 2921 0886, Fax: ++91 (011) 2921 7185 E-mail: [email protected] Website: rolibooks.com Also at Varanasi, Bangalore, Kolkata, Jaipur & Mumbai Cover design: Layout design: Narendra Shahi

ISBN: 978-81-7436-598-9 Rs. 395/-

Contents Preface PART 1 – UNCOVERING THE ‘TRUTH’ Dateline New Delhi Forebodings Disarming Tactics Block 32 Plight of a War Hero A Tale of Two Gurdwaras Masterly Inaction Rape in the Time of Mourning Under the Army’s Nose False Hero PART II – THE STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE: AN INSIDE ACCOUNT Personal Fallout The Beginning of the Struggle Clubbing the Good with the Bed A Farce of an Inquiry Withdrawal Further Cover-up Turning Point Pitched Battles Travails of Leaders A Fresh Inquiry Late Impact Small Mercy Epilogue Annexure

Preface the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi dates back to 1984, most of the Although material on it – spread over 1,000 official files – came to light incrementally from 2001 to 2004, that is, in thecourse of a second judicial inquiry into the carnage. When the inquiry report of the Justice GT Nanavati Commission was made public in 2005, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in the Lok Sabha: ‘Twenty-one years have passed … and yet the feeling persists that somehow the truth has not come out.’ An extraordinary admission, considering that the tacit purpose of appointing the second judicial inquiry in 2000, in an unprecedented development, and with a consensus among the political parties, was to undo the whitewash by the first, the Justice Ranganath Misra Commission, which had conducted all its proceedings under a veil of secrecy in 1985–86. Furthermore, since the Nanavati Commission reiterated the Misra Commission’s clean chit to his political party’s government in1984, Manmohan Singh could not have possibly had any vested interest in voicing the widespread feeling in 2005 that the truth had still not been revealed. This book seeks to bring out the truth, redressing the failure of the two judicial inquiries conducted by Supreme Court judges. The material available for setting the record straight is abundant. Though its report turned out to be deficient, the proceedings of the Nanavati Commission were themselves a model of transparency, as the body representing the victims, the Carnage Justice Committee, was allowed to photocopy almost all the documents submitted by the government. Thus, besides the reports of the two judicial inquiries published by the government, this book is based on the plethora of records disclosed during the Nanavati probe. Those include the reports of three administrative probes conducted on the recommendation of the Misra Commission: The Kusum Lata Mittal Committee report on the delinquencies of police personnel during the carnage. The Jain-Aggarwal Committee report on the deficiencies in the registration, investigation, and prosecution of cases related to the carnage. The RK Ahooja Committee report on the death toll of the carnage. Evidence collected by the abortive Ved Marwah Committee appointed by Delhi Police. Reports by police officers, from station house officers to the commissioner,

on what each of them did during the fateful period. Log books of police stations and officers. Log books of fire stations. Affidavits filed before the Misra Commission, and statements recorded by it, except those of the persons who had dealt with the carnage in various official capacities. Affidavits and statements from the records of the Nanavati Commission, including the replies filed by political leaders and public servants to specific notices about allegations of their complicity. The challenge of making sense of such elaborate and complex evidence, and locating places where the reports by Justices Misra and Nanavati had suppressed the truth demanded, sure enough, not only legal acumen but also intimate knowledge of the carnage and its aftermath. The authors of this book meet both criteria. While senior advocate, HS Phoolka, spearheaded the struggle for justice for carnage victims right from the beginning, legal journalist Manoj Mitta, served as a catalyst to the cause by exposing cover-ups at critical stages. Their coming together for this book is, in fact, an extension of their collaboration stretching over two decades. Phoolka was the convenor of the Citizens Justice Committee, which was the main representative of the victims before the Misra Commission. He also led the legal team of the successor body, the Carnage Justice Committee, in all the proceedings before the Nanavati Commission. Much as he is an interested party and, indeed, the face of the whole fight for justice, this book is by no means a summary of Phoolka’s arguments before the Nanavati Commission. Mitta’s involvement in the book has imparted a necessary detachment to it. While following up the carnage issue in a succession of national publications (The Times of India, India Today, and The Indian Express), Mitta has interacted closely with an array of persons engaged in cover-ups: political leaders, police and military officers, bureaucrats, judges, government lawyers, and defence counsel. Having conceived its structure, Mitta has taken pains to ensure that the book is based mainly on the wealth of evidence that emerged in the course of the Nanavati probe. The book is divided into two parts. The first is a journalistic reconstruction of the carnage, by Mitta, with inputs from Phoolka. The second is a first-person account of Phoolka’s struggle for justice, as told to Mitta. There is also an annexure providing excerpts from testimonies before the judicial inquiries by prominent citizens and a victim. Enhancing the value of the book is a selection of contemporaneous photographs from different sources. The authors assume collective responsibility for the veracity of the entire book.

Given the passion they share for human rights and the rule of law, the authors hope that this book will serve as a reality check on some of the most touted institutions of the Indian democracy.

PART – I UNCOVERING THE ‘TRUTH’

Dateline New Delhi 19 November 1984: It was barely a fortnight since thousands of Sikhs were orphaned, widowed, or rendered homeless in the wake of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Her son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, likened the pogrom to the reverberations caused by the impact of a fallen tree: ‘But, when a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little.’ The statement created a sensation as it was the first time Rajiv justified the conduct of the mobs, which had sought to avenge his mother’s murder. The justification set the tone for the cover-up of the massacre as well as the election held a month later. Even otherwise, the tree-shaking-the-earth metaphor caught the popular imagination because of the occasion on which Rajiv came up with it at the Boat Club near India Gate. It was the first rally addressed by him as prime minister, commemorating Indira’s first birth anniversary after her death. While paying tributes to his mother, Rajiv desisted from condemning the horrendous reprisal to her murder, let alone promising to take any action against the guilty. The closest he came to expressing any reservations about the massacre of Sikhs was for its strategic repercussions to the nation, rather than any human rights considerations. Referring to the need to ensure peace, Rajiv cautioned, ‘Any action taken in anger can cause harm to the country. Sometimes, by acting in anger, we only help those who want to break up the country.’ Empathizing with their krodh (intense anger), as he originally put it in Hindi, Rajiv commended the mobs for ending the bloodshed as they did in three days or so, even if they had killed 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi alone by then: ‘But, from the way you put a stop to it, from the way India has again been brought back to the path of unity with your help, and is able to stand united together again, the world can see that India has become a genuine democracy.’ Thus, not only did he suggest that the massacre was inevitable, he even found a silver lining to it. At that traumatic moment in India’s history, its prime minister made no bones about the fact that he was only reaching out to – or harvesting, with an eye on the upcoming election – those who were ‘very angry’ with the Sikh community. In his entire Boat Club speech, Rajiv did not say a word about the bereaved families, much less about those conscientious non-Sikhs who had tried to save the Sikhs or believed that the violence had been politically engineered. 17 January 1985: President Giani Zail Singh walked into Parliament House flanked by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who had led the Congress Party to a landslide victory in the election a fortnight earlier; and Parliamentary Affairs Minister HKL Bhagat, whose east Delhi constituency was by far the worst

affected in the1984 carnage. Addressing a joint sitting of the two houses at the behest of the Rajiv Gandhi government, Zail Singh said, ‘Disturbances and violence in Delhi and in some other parts of the country, following Indira Gandhi’s assassination, resulted in loss of life and property. Stern and effective action was taken to control the situation within the shortest possible time. My government extends its deepest sympathy to the families which suffered during the violence.’ That was the furthest the Rajiv Gandhi government went while referring to the carnage, in a tone that was evocative of his tree-shaking-the-earth metaphor. After the president’s address, the two houses separately adopted a common ‘resolution’ the same day expressing condolence for Indira Gandhi’s death. Though it said that she ‘loved India and the Indian people with a passion so sublime that it will live among us for long ages,’ the resolution expressed no regret about a section of the same Indian people being massacred in her name. Its omission to offer a token of condolence to bereaved families seemed all the more glaring four days later, when the parliament took due cognizance of another major disaster that befell India in 1984, the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, and the government responded by promising to take necessary civil and criminal actions against its perpetrators. 10 August 2005: The ghosts of the 1984 carnage returned to haunt a coalition government led by the Congress Party as the parliament debated the subject for the first time in the twenty-one years that had elapsed. The provocation was the report of a fresh judicial inquiry tabled in the parliament two days earlier. Most political parties, including coalition partners and allies, reacted adversely to the government’s decision to reject the Justice GT Nanavati Commission’s recommendation to take action against the minister for overseas Indians, Jagdish Tytler. But the Congress Party president, Rajiv Gandhi’s widow, Sonia Gandhi, was evidently in two minds about dropping Tytler from the government, as that was fraught with the risk of reviving allegations of complicity against her late husband. After all, it was Rajiv Gandhi who had made Tytler a minister for the first time, that too, within two months of the 1984 carnage. Unable to come up with a convincing response to the vehement attacks in the Lok Sabha on the government’s action taken report (ATR), Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made the candid admission: ‘Twenty-one years have passed, more than one political party has been in power, and yet the feeling persists that somehow the truth has not come out and justice has not prevailed.’ Conceding that ‘there is something called perception, and there is the sentiment of the House,’ Manmohan Singh gave ‘a solemn promise and a solemn commitment’ to the Lok Sabha to reconsider the ATR. He also promised ‘all possible steps’ wherever the Nanavati Commission had ‘named any specific

individuals as needing further examination or specific cases needing re-opening and re-examination.’ The message went home the same evening, and Tytler finally yielded to the pressure to resign, and saved further embarrassment to the government and the Congress Party. Simultaneously, another Congress MP indicted by the Nanavati report, Sajjan Kumar, quit a post given to him by the local Delhi government. 11 August 2005: Emboldened by the resignations of Tytler and Sajjan Kumar, Manmohan Singh was more forthcoming in the Rajya Sabha than he was the previous day in the Lok Sabha. If he had conceded generally in the Lower House that ‘the feeling persists that somehow the truth has not come out,’ the prime minister was more categorical in the Upper House in owning up to that feeling:‘There were lapses in 1984. Several commissions have gone into this matter. We all know that we still do not know the truth, and the search must go on.’ What he called a ‘feeling’ one day transformed the next day into something ‘we all know’. Tracing the events that followed the carnage, ManmohanSingh, who is himself a Sikh, said, ‘It took the Sikh community alot of time to regain its selfconfidence after the tragic events of1984.’ Since he did not have to be defensive any longer abouthaving a carnage-tainted person like Tytler in his council ofministers, he himself seemed to have regained self-confidence,literally overnight. Upping the ante, Manmohan Singh mustered the courage todo the minimum that Rajiv Gandhi should have done in theimmediate aftermath of the carnage, namely, to apologize to theSikhs for the 1984 carnage. ‘I have no hesitation in apologizing notonly to the Sikh community but the whole Indian nation becausewhat took place in 1984 is the negation of the concept ofnationhood, as enshrined in our Constitution,’ Manmohan Singhsaid, adding, ‘On behalf of our government, on behalf of the entirepeople of this country, I bow my head in shame that such a thingtook place.’

Forebodings

Armed with sticks and burning torches, a mob of about twenty men pounced on the cavalcade of the president of India, GianiZail Singh. Luckily, the president’s limousine drove past them before the assailants could reach the convoy. The car in which the president’s press secretary was travelling was, however, not so lucky. Since it was at the tail of the cavalcade, the mob succeeded in smashing its windowpanes. The miscreants tried to set it on fire by flinging torches inside the car through its broken windows. This audacious attack on the president’s cavalcade, around 4.45 pm on 31 October 1984, marked the beginning of a wave of violence that culminated in a massacre of 3,000 Sikhs over the next three days right in the capital. At the time of the attack on his cavalcade, President Zail Singh was heading towards the hospital, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), to see the body of India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, who had been assassinated that morning. Mrs Gandhi was shot in her house by two of her security guards. Both of them were Sikhs, a minority community constituting barely two per cent of India’s population. They took revenge on Mrs Gandhi for ordering the army to storm into the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, the Golden Temple at Amritsar, in an anti-insurgency operation five months earlier, in Punjab, killing scores of innocent pilgrims, as collateral damage. That was the first – and mercifully, the only – instance in India of a sitting prime minister, head of government, being killed. Given that the assassination was the fallout of prolonged insurgency in Punjab, the thirty-four-year-old Indian republic was in the throes of a crisis. The president of India is the titular head of state, first citizen, and supreme commander of the armed forces. The mob that attacked his cavalcade on the evening of 31 October 1984, was shouting anti-Sikh slogans. In a quirk of fate, the president happened to be a Sikh. Zail Singh was then going to AIIMS straight from Palam Airport. He had just flown in from North Yemen, cutting short his state visit, to rush back home. Zail Singh’s cavalcade approached AIIMS from the inner Ring Road, which is formally called Mahatma Gandhi Marg after the apostle of non-violence. The mob attacked the cavalcade at what was then known as the Kamal Cinema intersection, about a kilometre short of AIIMS. About two decades later, Tarlochan Singh, who was Zail Sngh’s press secretary in 1984 and who went on to become chairman of the National

Commission for Minorities (NCM), gave a first-person account of the attack on the president’s cavalcade. He was testifying before the Justice GT Nanavati Commission, which was set up in 2000 to conduct a fresh judicial inquiry into the 1984 carnage, as the first had commanded little credibility. Despite the security breach exposed by the attack on the president’s cavalcade, the policemen present then in large numbers around AIIMS, failed to take cognizance of it. None of the armed miscreants, who had dared to attack the first citizen of the country, was apprehended. The omission paved the way, within minutes, for another attack on Zail Singh, this time, right in front of AIIMS. Raising slogans against him and his community, a mob pelted stones at his cavalcade. The president’s car itself was hit. But, being bulletproof, its windows and windshield withstood the attack. His bodyguards, however, sustained injuries while trying to shield the president. The attacks on the president’s cavalcade were widely reported in the next morning’s newspapers amid stories about Indira Gandhi’s assassination. ‘Zail’s car stoned, panic in Delhi’ was a headline in The Telegraph, which said: ‘The President’s motorcade, as it proceeded towards AIIMS from the airport, was heavily brickbatted. Three cars in the motorcade were damaged, though the president, who was in his bulletproof car, was unaffected.’ Jagjit Singh, an activist of the trade union wing of the ruling Congress Party, was among the many Sikhs who felt secure enough to join the milling crowd of mourners around AIIMS. Despite a delay in official confirmation, the news that Mrs Gandhi had succumbed to her injuries was out by 1.00 pm. That was thanks mainly to the special afternoon editions of newspapers brought out at a time when twenty-four hour private news channels were still unheard of in India. In his affidavit before the Justice Ranganath Misra Commission, the first judicial inquiry ordered in 1985, Jagjit Singh gave an eyewitness account of the second attack on President Zail Singh. All the stone pelting, he said, was done by a small group which raised slogans such as ‘Giani Murdabad’ (Down with Zail Singh), ‘Sardar gaddar hai’ (Sikhs are traitors) and ‘Khoon ka badla khoon’ (Avenge murder with murder). Since the police remained mute spectators to such a grave provocation, the slogans against Sikhs caught on and did not subside even after the president’s departure from AIIMS by about 5.15 pm. ‘On seeing that the situation was turning anti-Sikh, the Sikhs who had been standing there started moving away,’ Jagjit Singh added. A Hindu witness, DP Gulati, who was then an engineer with the Delhi Development Authority, corroborated that, even as the crowd in the vicinity of AIIMS shouted anti-Sikh slogans, those who indulged in violence there at that stage were no more than ‘twenty to twenty-five persons.’ In his affidavit before the Nanavati Commission, Gulati specified that the mob was led by local

Congress Party councillor, Arjan Dass. (Incidentally, within a few months of the carnage, Arjan Dass became one of the first casualties of the terrorist attacks fuelled by it.) Kuldip Singh, a Sikh businessman from a nearby colony, Safdarjang Enclave, had left AIIMS a little before the arrival of the president’s cavalcade. In his affidavit filed in 1985 before the Misra Commission, Kuldip Singh confirmed that Sikhs were then very much present in the throng of mourners at AIIMS. In fact, the law and order situation in the earlier part of 31 October, was evidently normal enough for Kuldip Singh to visit AIIMS twice in the course of the same day in connection with his mother-in-law’s treatment. On his first visit, Kuldip Singh was at AIIMS from 10.00 am to 11.30 am, roughly the time when a team of doctors was working on the bullet-ridden body of Indira Gandhi, on the eighth floor of the same building. Kuldip Singh revisited AIIMS at about 4.00 pm, even after learning that Indira Gandhi was dead, and that her body was still in the hospital. Referring to the huge crowd he found on his second visit, Kuldip Singh said, ‘There were many sardars (Sikhs) also in the crowd.’ The Sikhs, identifiable as they were from their turbans, began to melt away after those sudden attacks on the Sikh president. That is how the handiwork of a small section of the crowd gathered around AIIMS, triggered attacks on Sikhs in general. Police records, however, mention neither of the attacks on the president. This is despite, or perhaps because of the fact that his cavalcade was attacked on the very day that the prime minister was assassinated. The then commissioner of Delhi Police, Subhash Tandan, was crossexamined on this lapse eighteen years later, on 23 April 2002, before the Nanavati Commission. He passed the buck to one of his subordinates, Chandra Prakash, who was directly in charge of the district in which AIIMS was located. Since he did not himself witness the attack on the president, Tandan said that he had instructed Prakash to look into it. But then he added, ‘I did not inquire from him thereafter as to who the assailants were.’ Little wonder then that the only official acknowledgement of the mob attack on the president is in the form of cursory references in the reports of the two judicial inquiries: While relating the events of 31 October, the Misra Commission said: ‘The presidential cavalcade appears to have been attacked by some persons out of the angry mob still waiting at the AIIMS and some of the vehicles were damaged by throw of stones (sic).’ The Nanavati Commission, on its part, cited the affidavit of Jagjit Singh to say that Zail Singh’s cavalcade was stoned by a mob near AIIMS. Without

making any comment, the Nanavati report also recorded Jagjit Singh’s disclosure that a little before the attack on the president, several leaders of the ruling Congress Party in Delhi such as HKL Bhagat, Lalit Maken, Sajjan Kumar, Dharam Dass Shastri, and Arjan Dass, left the hospital in quick succession in a span of ten minutes. If the police did not take cognizance of the attacks on President Zail Singh, what chance did lesser Sikhs have of being protected from rioters? Joseph Maliakan, who was present on the spot as a correspondent with The Indian Express, threw light on the frame of mind the police were in, during that crucial period. In his affidavit before the Misra Commission, Maliakan narrated his encounter with a senior police officer outside AIIMS after the riots broke out on the evening of 31 October. Maliakan noticed that though the additional commissioner of police, Gautam Kaul, was standing there with a large number of policemen, they did nothing to control the rioting. Asked why he was not intervening, ‘Gautam Kaul replied that he could do nothing.’ Kaul’s plea of helplessness was extraordinary considering that he wielded all the more clout for being a close relative of the deceased prime minister as well as her successor. Even otherwise, Kaul was legally authorized to intervene in the situation. South Delhi, where AIIMS was located, was one of the three districts falling within his remit. The failure of the Delhi authorities to respond to the early signals of trouble contrasted with the alacrity displayed by their counterparts in Kolkata (then called Calcutta). Indira Gandhi’s son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, happened to be on tour near Kolkata when she was assassinated. Significantly, mob violence broke out in Kolkata even before it did in Delhi. The violence, however, fizzled out in Kolkata because at the first sign of attacks on Sikhs, the local government led by communists immediately called in the army to restore law and order. There again, Congress Party workers were the culprits. They ran amok from around 11.00 am, beating up Sikhs in several parts of Kolkata. The army was deployed in Kolkata by 2.30 pm on 31 October. That saved the situation from going out of control. A native of Kolkata, writer Amitav Ghosh, caught a glimpse of the initial phase of the violence in Delhi, as the bus he was travelling on, went past AIIMS. In an essay published in 1995 in The New Yorker, ‘The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi’, Ghosh gave a dramatic account of the manner in which members of the ruling Congress Party instigated attacks on the Sikhs. Ghosh was employed with Delhi University in 1984. On the fateful day, he changed buses at Connaught Place, a commercial hub of Delhi, to go to Safdarjang Enclave, near AIIMS, for personal

work. Here is an excerpt from his essay: Our next bus was not quite full, which was unusual. Just as it was pulling out, a man ran out of the office and jumped on. He was middle-aged and dressed in shirt and trousers, evidently an employee in one of the government buildings. He was a Sikh, but I scarcely noticed this at the time. He probably jumped on without giving the matter any thought, this being his regular, daily bus. But, as it happened, on this day no choice could have been more unfortunate, for the route of the bus went past the hospital where Indira Gandhi’s body then lay. Certain loyalists in her party had begun inciting the crowds gathered there to seek revenge. The motorcade of Giani Zail Singh, the president of the republic, a Sikh, had already been attacked by a mob. None of this was known to us then, and we would never have suspected it: violence had never been directed at the Sikhs in Delhi. As the bus made its way down New Delhi’s broad, tree-lined avenues, official-looking cars, with outriders and escorts, overtook us, speeding toward the hospital. As we drew nearer, it became evident that a large number of people had gathered there. But this was no ordinary crowd: it seemed to consist of red-eyed young men in half-buttoned shirts. It was now that I noticed that my Sikh fellow-passenger was showing signs of anxiety, sometimes standing up to look out, sometimes glancing out of the door. It was too late to get off the bus; thugs were everywhere. The bands of young men grew more and more menacing as we approached the hospital. There was a watchfulness about them; some were armed with steel rods and bicycle chains; others had fanned out across the busy road and were stopping cars and buses. A stout woman in a sari sitting across the aisle from me was the first to understand what was going on. Rising to her feet, she gestured urgently at the Sikh, who was sitting hunched in his seat. She hissed at him in Hindi, telling him to get down and keep out of sight. The man started in surprise and squeezed himself into the narrow foot space between the seats. Minutes later, our bus was intercepted by a group of young men dressed in bright, sharp synthetics. Several had bicycle chains wrapped around their wrists. They ran along beside the bus as it slowed to a halt. We heard them call out to the driver through the open door, asking if there were any Sikhs in the bus. The driver shook his head. No, he said, there were no Sikhs in the bus. A few rows ahead of me, the crouching turbaned figure had gone completely still.

Outside, some of the young men were jumping up to look through the windows, asking if there were any Sikhs in the bus. There was no anger in their voices; that was the most chilling thing of all. No, someone said, and immediately other voices picked up the refrain. Soon all the passengers were shaking their heads and saying, no, no, let us go now, we have to get home. Eventually, the thugs stepped back and waved us through. Nobody said a word as we sped away down Ring Road. Thus, even hours after it became public that Indira had been killed by a couple of Sikhs, the instinctive reaction of co-passengers in Amitav Ghosh’s bus was to protect a Sikh, unknown to any of them. The mob, on its part, could not have stopped the bus with such élan without the blessings of the police deployed in the vicinity of AIIMS. The Delhi Police records also bear out Ghosh’s impression that the violence began to spread from AIIMS after the president’s departure, which was at about 5.15 pm. The first officially acknowledged incident of anti-Sikh violence anywhere in Delhi on 31 October 1984 took place at 5.55 pm. It involved a relatively minor offence. The motorcycle of a Sikh was set ablaze. Not surprisingly, it happened within the range of a kilometre from the AIIMS intersection, on that crucial stretch of Aurobindo Marg connecting AIIMS to the seat of India’s government, including the official residences of the president and the prime minister. The motorcycle was burnt in the jurisdiction of Vinay Nagar police station, which was to the west of AIIMS. Though it was shown to have occurred at 5.55 pm, the crime was recorded in the daily diary of Vinay Nagar police station, as a preliminary entry, almost six hours later, at 11.40 pm. The actual case, technically called the first information report (FIR), was filed even later, in the wee hours of 1 November. Moreover, FIR No 600/84 turned out to be an omnibus report which purportedly covered the burning of the motorcycle, and a whole lot of other such attacks on Sikhs, in the jurisdiction of Vinay Nagar police station. Thanks to the inordinate delay in its registration, FIR No 600/84 of Vinay Nagar police station was not the first case to be filed on the anti-Sikh violence that erupted on 31 October. Sabzi Mandi police station, which is about ten kilometres to the north of AIIMS, earned the distinction of registering the first case of anti-Sikh violence that day. It was perhaps no coincidence that the police station that took initiative in this regard was headed by a Sikh, and that his immediate superior too was a

Sikh. Acting in tandem, Assistant Commissioner Kewal Singh and Inspector Gurmail Singh registered FIR No 633 at 8.10 pm after rounding up ninety rioters in the vicinity of a wholesale vegetable market, which gave the name ‘Sabzi Mandi’ to the police station. The registration of the FIR, and arrests of so many miscreants in Sabzi Mandi, constituted the first effective action taken by the police anywhere in Delhi to stop the attacks on the Sikhs. And for a minority community under attack, it was the first sign of the rule of law on that fateful day, in the capital of ‘the world’s largest democracy’. But the exertions of Kewal Singh and Gurmail Singh in Sabzi Mandi were clearly at odds with the tacit policy under which their counterparts in other police stations took little or no action to check the violence against the Sikhs. Sure enough, the system hit back at those two Sikh officials for stepping out of line. Both were pulled out of action the same night, before they could do any further damage to the morale of the mobs. Again, it was no coincidence that the only two police officials who tried to enforce the rule of law on the evening of 31 October were the only ones found to be unfit for duty that fateful day. This bizarre turn of events was triggered by a wireless message sent by the Sabzi Mandi police station at 8.32 pm seeking shoot-at-sight orders. The message alerted their superiors to the fact that the police in Sabzi Mandi, unlike in other localities, was taking on the mobs. Kewal Singh and Gurmail Singh, needless to say, did not get a clearance to clamp down a curfew. Instead, within a couple of hours of their wireless message, they were visited by Additional Commissioner Hukum Chand Jatav, an officer from the second highest rung of the police hierarchy in Delhi Jatav promptly took them off duty. ‘It almost seems that they were removed as a punishment for making large-scale arrests of miscreants,’ concluded an administrative inquiry conducted by retired bureaucrat, Kusum Lata Mittal, into the role of Delhi Police during the 1984 violence. Even more ironical is the fact that Mittal found that Jatav, while deposing before the Misra Commission on 24 April 1986, stated that Kewal Singh and Gurmail Singh were ‘guilty of abandoning their positions of duty during the riots.’ Prior to Jatav’s visit to Sabzi Mandi, there was another documentary evidence of disapproval of the wireless message sent by that police station at 8.32 pm seeking shoot-at-sight orders. Jatav’s deputy, SK Singh, who was directly in charge of the north district, ordered at 9.22 pm that all messages meant for Kewal Singh be redirected to an officer at the district headquarters. This clearly

showed, as the Mittal report said, that Kewal Singh had ‘for all practical purposes been relieved of the charge’ within an hour of the wireless message. The Mittal report, which came out in 1990, concluded that ‘the only reason’ for the removal of Kewal Singh and Gurmail Singh from their posts on 31 October was that they had ‘wanted to use force to save the situation and the additional commissioner of police was not inclined to let this happen.’ On the basis of affidavits filed by victims from Sabzi Mandi, the Mittal report added that Jatav had set ‘an unwise trend’ on the night of 31 October, by letting off some of the miscreants apprehended by the local people. The prompt and clear expression of no-confidence in them served the intended purpose of deterring their counterparts in other police stations from following the example of Kewal Singh and Gurmail Singh. In another significant indicator, out of the seventy-six police stations that were there in Delhi, only five bothered to record cases of anti-Sikh violence on 31 October. Besides Vinay Nagar and Sabzi Mandi, they were the Defence Colony, Hauz Khas and Shakarpur police stations. Further, the number of cases registered by each of those five police stations were not more than one or two, which purportedly covered all the incidents that took place that evening in that territory. But even those few FIRs, such as they were, were sufficient to throw up patterns of violence on the first day. Three of the five police stations that registered cases of violence against the Sikhs were located in the vicinity of AIIMS. The territories of the Defence Colony, Vinay Nagar and Hauz Khas police stations, in fact, encircled AIIMS. This indicates that, following the attacks on the president’s cavalcade, mobs went on a rampage on the four roads diverging from the AIIMS crossroads. The pattern of the FIRs registered by the police also tallies with the records of the fire department, which show that arson cases reported on the evening of 31 October were initially concentrated on the four roads emerging from the AIIMS intersection. The second significant pattern emerging from police records is that the FIRs filed on 31 October relate mainly to arson. They talk of mobs burning properties of the Sikhs – movable (motorcycles, cars and trucks), as well as immovable (shops, houses and gurdwaras). As for attacks on person, they were limited to turbans being pulled down and burnt, or Sikhs being dragged out of vehicles and beaten up. Significantly, none of the FIRs related to the mass violence of 31 October refers to murder. The killings began only the next morning. In the massacre of 2,733 Sikhs (official estimate) over three days in the capital, the first recorded murder took place at Shahdara in east Delhi in the wee

hours of 1 November. The Misra Commission noted that its victim was a truck driver who was dragged from his vehicle near a petrol pump. The third significant pattern is that the five police stations that had registered cases of anti-Sikh violence on the evening of 31 October by and large receded into the background when the killings began the next morning. The killings were concentrated in areas where the poorest of the Sikhs lived. It was the outlying police stations of Kalyanpuri, Mongolpuri, Sultanpuri, and Delhi Cantonment that witnessed mass murders on an unprecedented scale. President Zail Singh, meanwhile, did little on 31 October to stop the attacks on his community. One mitigating circumstance for his omission on 31 October was that he was preoccupied with matters of the state. He had to attend to the urgent task of filling the administrative void left by Indira Gandhi’s death. There were a couple of precedents in India, of a prime minister dying in office. The first was Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira’s father and India’s first prime minister, who passed away in 1964. The second was Lal Bahadur Shastri, Nehru’s successor, who suffered a fatal heart attack shortly after signing a postwar accord with Pakistan in 1966. On both occasions, a senior minister, Gulzarilal Nanda, served as acting prime minister for less than a month each until the Congress Party chose a new leader. Thus, the clear option before Zail Singh was to swear an acting prime minister in, to head an interim government. The two obvious candidates for that temporary post were ministers Pranab Mukherjee and PV Narasimha Rao. But Zail Singh could not adopt the course of appointing an acting prime minister, as top leaders of the Congress Party, in their confabulations right at AIIMS, chose to depart from the norm. Unlike on the two previous occasions, there was evidently no debate in 1984 over who should be the next prime minister. The leaders were unanimous that it should be Indira’s son, Rajiv Gandhi, even though he had never even been a minister, and had entered politics just four years earlier. The decision to dispense with an acting prime minister, and straightaway swear Rajiv Gandhi in as his mother’s successor, was conveyed to Zail Singh soon after his arrival from Yemen. Consider the manner in which Narasimha Rao, who was successively home minister in the governments of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi during that crucial period, described the political drama in his testimony before the Nanavati Commission in 2002. Like Rajiv Gandhi and several other key players, Rao happened to be out of the capital when Indira Gandhi was shot on the morning of 31 October 1984. He reached Delhi around 4.00 pm and drove straight from the airport to AIIMS. He said: ‘At the hospital, the first person I met was Dr PC Alexander, principal secretary to the prime minister, from whom I learnt that all was over.

There was no time even to grieve. A duty lay ahead. There were some other colleagues in an adjoining room and the decision to get Rajiv Gandhi sworn in as prime minister emerged… ‘Meanwhile, Rajiv Gandhi hurried in and I met him. The others joined and Rajiv was told about the decision, and I drove straight to 1, Akbar Road (Indira Gandhi’s office) where the Congress Parliamentary Board was to meet and complete the necessary formalities. Other members present in Delhi were asked to come there… ‘First we passed a condolence resolution, and next was the decision to recommend to the president to swear in Rajiv Gandhi as prime minister. The letter to the president was duly drafted. Meanwhile, Giani Zail Singh had returned, visited the hospital and agreed to swear in the new prime minister at around 6.00 pm the same evening.’ As a result, Rajiv Gandhi, a former commercial pilot, came to be sworn in as prime minister at the age of forty. Rao and three others were sworn in as ministers by Zail Singh at the same function in Rashtrapati Bhawan. Despite his bereavement, and inexperience in governance, Rajiv Gandhi could not have missed the ominous signs of mass violence on the road he traversed from AIIMS to Rashtrapati Bhawan. Aurobindo Marg was, in fact, the first road to be ravaged by anti-Sikh violence. As reported by The Indian Express, ‘a vehicle was seen burning every 50 yards’ all along that stretch. Given the ominous signs of violence in the immediate vicinity, there was no way the outbreak of anti-Sikh violence could not have figured in the first cabinet meeting that was held in Rashtrapati Bhawan. It took place within minutes of the swearing-in of the Rajiv Gandhi government. PV Narasimha Rao confirmed in his testimony to the Nanavati Commission that the cabinet did discuss the issue of anti-Sikh violence and clear a range of measures to deal with it. He stated: ‘The cabinet gave general clearance to the steps that would need to be taken, including imposition of curfew, deployment of police personnel and also using army units in whatever manner it was required.’ The general clearance applied to Rao himself, as law and order in the capital fell directly under his charge. As home minister, Rao could well have immediately called for reinforcements from the army and paramilitary forces, and deployed them alongside the police at the earliest. Had there been any such clear signal from Rao to do whatever it took to protect the Sikhs, the top brass of Delhi Police would not have, for instance, ignored the plea of the Sabzi Mandi police station to clamp a curfew on the evening of 31 October. The two police officials who had asked for such permission, were instead, pulled out of action. Though curfew was declared on 1

November, there was a lapse of another 48 hours before it was enforced. By then 2,733 Sikhs are officially estimated to have perished (while the death toll arrived at by the Citizens Justice Committee was 3,870). Though he was himself legally responsible to implement the cabinet’s decisions on public order in Delhi, Rao, in his three-page written testimony, skirted the issue of his failure to pay heed to the forebodings of 31 October and pre-empt the massacre that began the next morning. Senior advocate and political leader, Ram Jethmalani, was among the few from outside the ruling circles to have met Rao during that critical period. In his deposition before the Nanavati Commission, Jethmalani said that he met Rao in his house on the evening of 31 October, and urged him to call the army immediately. Jethmalani found his response ‘indifferent’. Without spelling out details, Rao apparently assured Jethmalani that he would take ‘adequate steps’. Throughout the thirty-minute meeting that took place while Delhi was burning, Jethmalani was struck by the fact that the home minister was not in contact with any of his officers, whether on the telephone or in person. The situation on the evening of 31 October 1984 was, thus, much like the one Rao found himself in as prime minister eight years later, on the afternoon of 6 December 1992, when Hindu zealots began to demolish a medieval mosque in a town called Ayodhya. Both situations called for a quick and forceful intervention. And Rao failed to intervene on both occasions. One difference, however, was that in 1984, he was merely home minister, and therefore, the buck did not stop with him for failing to protect the Sikhs. Another big difference was that in 1984, the scene of violence was right where Rao himself was located. On the evening of 31 October, violence spread to many parts of Delhi, including Lutyens’ Delhi, where the ruling elite of India lived. Risking his career as a civil servant, Ashok Jaitly filed an affidavit before the Misra Commission on incidents witnessed by him on the evening of 31 October in Lutyens’ Delhi. Relating a shocking example of neglect of duty by the police, Jaitly said that when he complained about a gang of youths stoning cars, a police officer standing near Safdarjang Road replied, ‘Don’t worry. They are only after sardars.’ Drawing upon his own six-year experience as a district magistrate handling law and order problems, Jaitly vouched: ‘I have no hesitation in stating that the small mob on Lodhi Road that evening could have been dispersed by a few lathiwielding policemen with no difficulty.’ Such was the assessment of the 31 October disturbances by an officer who went on to serve as chief secretary of a sensitive state such as Jammu and Kashmir. Author Khushwant Singh gave a similar account of police apathy in another

part of Lutyens’ Delhi, Khan Market. As it happened, he had journalist MJ Akbar over for dinner on the evening of 31 October. Khushwant first saw a mob looting shops belonging to the Sikhs in Khan Market, under the benign gaze of about twenty policemen who made no attempt to stop or disperse the miscreants. And then he saw the mob burn down an entire taxi stand, along with cars, owned by a Sikh, again in the presence of policemen who were ‘simply watching the incident’. The police, incidentally, did not register cases related to any of the incidents witnessed by Ashok Jaitly or Khushwant Singh. In fact, not a single case of antiSikh violence was registered that day throughout Lutyens’ Delhi. It was in such a climate of impunity that 3,000 Sikhs were killed across Delhi over the next three days.

Disarming Tactics their inability to muster resources to defend themselves, the poor are Given generally more vulnerable to eruptions of mass violence. But the Sikhs living in Block 11 of Kalyanpuri in east Delhi in 1984 were an exception. For despite their poverty, a lot of them owned firearms, complete with licence and ammunition. Those Sikhs belonged to a little-known section called Sikligar. While the Sikh mainstream originated from Punjab, Sikligar Sikhs were traditional ironsmiths, tracing their roots to the Marwar region of Rajasthan. Guru Gobind Singh, the prophet who imparted a martial character to Sikhism about 300 years ago, is said to have entrusted Sikligar Sikhs with the responsibility of manufacturing and maintaining weapons for Sikh armies. Over a period, it was but natural for Sikligar Sikhs to develop a tradition of having their own swords and firearms, regardless of their economic status. Dr Ashok Gupta, who represented Kalyanpuri in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, was unaware of, or more likely, had overlooked this peculiarity when he led a mob to Block 11 of Kalyanpuri on the morning of 1 November 1984, to attack the Sikhs. In keeping with the pattern displayed then by its counterparts across Delhi, the mob that descended on Block 11 of Kalyanpuri was armed with no more than wooden staffs, steel rods, kerosene cans, tyres and the like. Those crude implements, however, turned out to be inadequate in the case of Block 11, as some of its Sikh residents greeted the mob with gunfire. And that was more than what the mob could take, especially because of another rare factor in Delhi: Sikhs happened to be in majority in that block. It was virtually a Sikh ghetto. The mob, despite its frenzied slogans to avenge Indira Gandhi’s murder, beat a hasty retreat. It was a tactical retreat, though. Within minutes, the police entered the same neighbourhood. But their intention was not to save the Sikhs from further attacks. It was just the opposite; to disarm the besieged community. Flanked by armed constables, the chief of the Kalyanpuri police station, Soor Veer Singh Tyagi, read out from a list he had brought with him, of licensed weapon holders. On the pretext of defusing tension in Block 11, Tyagi ordered all the Sikhs figuring in that list, to surrender their weapons, saying that the police were there anyway, to provide security. Most of the Sikhs were not taken in by that ploy. So, taking recourse to coercion, Tyagi threatened them at gunpoint, insisting that they part with their weapons.

After seizing a cache of licensed weapons in that manner, the police left the Sikhs of Block 11 at the mercy of the bloodthirsty mob waiting outside. Sure enough, Dr Ashok Gupta and his armed followers re-entered the block and resumed their attack even as some of the policemen lingered in the background. The hardy ironsmiths still managed to put up a stiff resistance, improvising weapons from the tools of their trade. The impasse that followed compelled the police to intervene again, this time, to take away all those who were getting in the way of the mob. That was how Kalyanpuri police station arrested as many as twenty-five Sikhs from Block 11 on 1 November 1984. They were mostly those who had been divested of their weapons that very day. Completing the travesty of the rule of law, the police registered a case of rioting against them – FIR No 424/84 of the Kalyanpuri police station. After spending the night at the police station, those twenty-five Sikhs were sent to Tihar Jail where they were detained for over a fortnight. Thus, far from booking the aggressors, the police cracked down on the victims – the Sikhs who had been exercising their right of self-defence at home, against a mob that had come from elsewhere. Apart from another member of their community from a nearby locality called Seelampur, those twenty-five Sikhs from Block 11 of Kalyanpuri turned out to be the only persons to have been arrested in east Delhi on the first – and by far the worst – day of the massacre. Another way of putting it in perspective would be to take the aid of the official death toll. Out of the 2,733 Sikhs killed in Delhi in the first week of November 1984, 1,234 were killed in east Delhi alone. Though more than half of those killings took place on 1 November, only twenty-six people were arrested in east Delhi on that fateful day, and all of them were Sikhs, that is, members of the very community that was being massacred. As for members of the marauding mobs, Kalyanpuri police police station began to apprehend them only from the evening of 2 November, by the end of the second day of the massacre, well after most of the killings had already taken place. Even then, that belated action against miscreants was taken, thanks to the discovery by journalists (as narrated in the next chapter), of a particularly shocking massacre that had taken place in Block 32 of Trilokpuri, a locality that fell within the remit of the Kalyanpuri police station. Such is the record of the police station that was, by all accounts, the worst affected in the whole of Delhi during the 1984 massacre. Out of the 2,733 officially acknowledged to have been killed in Delhi, almost half – 1,234 – were in east Delhi. And, out of the 1,234 admitted to have been killed in east Delhi,

almost half – 610 – were in the jurisdiction of the Kalyanpuri police station alone. In the course of the two judicial inquiries, appointed by the government and separated by almost two decades, several witnesses, including some of the twentyfive Sikhs arrested on 1 November, shed light on the bizarre sequence of events in Block 11 of Kalyanpuri. Here’s a sample: Ram Singh testified that the police seized his gun saying that if the Sikhs did not hand over their weapons, they should expect no help. But then, after taking away their guns, Inspector Tyagi, according to Ram Singh, signalled to the mob to attack the gurdwara in Block 11. Lachhman Singh deposed that Tyagi, while directing him to surrender his licensed weapon, a 12-bore double barrel breach-loading (DBBL) gun, said that the police, in turn, were acting on orders from above. Soon after Lachhman Singh gave up his gun, the mob reappeared and started looting and killing. Santa Singh, however, disobeyed Tyagi even when the officer said that he had orders from higher-ups to seize all weapons. Tyagi responded by taking out his revolver and pointing it at Santa Singh. The victim surrendered his gun, sword and hatchet. Then the mob violence followed. Though they were not among the twenty-five Sikhs to have been formally arrested, Santa Singh and his son were taken to the police station the same evening, and released the next morning, by when their house had been burnt down. Kabool Singh and Shobha Singh were disarmed in the morning by Tyagi’s team. Later, the police searched their houses and took them to Kalyanpuri police station, saying that other persons found with guns were also there. Kabool Singh and Shobha Singh found themselves in the police lock-up as part of the group of twenty-five Sikhs arrested from their neighbourhood. Taking cognizance of these and other such affidavits, the second judicial inquiry conducted by former Supreme Court judge, GT Nanavati, gave a specific finding in 2005, that Tyagi and his men had ‘unreasonably deprived the Sikhs of their weapons with which they were trying to defend themselves against violent attacks’. Besides indicting Dr Ashok Gupta for taking ‘active part’ in the violence, the commission also recorded the telltale circumstance that the mob attacked the Sikhs ‘soon after’ they had been disarmed by the police. The high-level probe by the Nanavati Commission has, in effect, confirmed similar findings given in the early 1990s by two lesser but more specialized inquiries into different aspects of the rule of law. The inquiry by retired civil servant, Kusum Lata Mittal, studied the lapses committed by the police real time while dealing with the mass violence in 1984. The other was by a committee consisting of retired High Court judge JD Jain

and former police chief, DK Aggarwal, which probed the lapses committed by the police and prosecution in the aftermath while booking and following up cases related to the same massacre. Though they approached it from different angles, the two inquiries appointed by the government came to much the same conclusions on the issue of disarming of the Sikhs. The Mittal report held that the weapons of the Sikhs in Block 11 of Kalyanpuri had been ‘systematically and forcibly taken away, thus ensuring that the Sikhs would no longer be in a position to defend themselves.’ The Jain-Aggarwal committee, on its part, said that Tyagi and his men ‘played foul in disarming the Sikhs on the basis of a solemn assurance that the police would protect their life and property,’ for, ‘instead of fulfilling their assurance,’ the police ‘actually sided with the mob and themselves participated in the attacks on the Sikhs.’ The essence of all the findings on the Block 11 events of Kalyanpuri is unmistakable: that the police colluded with a mob led by a local ruling party leader to kill members of a minority community. Had those findings not been given by government-appointed inquiries, it would perhaps have been hard to believe that such a collusion could have taken place in the capital of India, thirtyseven years after it attained independence and launched its much acclaimed project of democracy. It would have been equally hard to believe that at the height of the carnage, namely, the first two days of the three-day massacre of Sikhs, the majority of the persons arrested by the police were Sikhs themselves. Take the record of the police in east and west Delhi, the two worst affected districts, in that order. The police in east Delhi altogether arrested twenty-six Sikhs, and four members of the mobs, on 1 and 2 November. The corresponding figures for west Delhi are forty Sikhs, and thirty-one members of the mobs. The official findings and statistics on the pattern of arrests fly in the face of Rajiv Gandhi’s suggestion that the killings were entirely spontaneous.

Block 32

I t was about 2.00 in the afternoon on 2 November 1984. Following a tip-off, three journalists arrived at the entrance of Trilokpuri, a congested, low-income colony in east Delhi. They found the road partially blocked by concrete pipes and tree trunks. Men armed with sticks stood guard at the entrance. The car carrying Rahul Bedi and Joseph Maliakan of The Indian Express, and Alok Tomar of Jansatta, ran into a more formidable barrier as they approached Block 32 of Trilokpuri. A mob of hundreds of people blocked the route to Block 32, which was a Sikh pocket. Before the journalists could reach the mob, two policemen riding a motorcycle, burst through the crowd from the direction of Block 32. Flagging down the motorcycle to a halt, Rahul Bedi asked the policemen whether any killings had taken place in Block 32. The senior of the two policemen replied that there was ‘shanti’ (peace) in Block 32. On further probing, he admitted that ‘only’ two people had been killed, no more. Saying this, the policemen sped away. Soon after the policemen left, the mob blocking the path advanced towards the journalists and started stoning their car. The leader of the mob, dressed in a white kurta and pyjama, threatened the journalists with dire consequences if they did not get the message and leave immediately. All this only strengthened their suspicion that, even while the whole city was in the grip of mass killings, there was something exceptionally dreadful about the plight of Block 32, Trilokpuri. The journalists were pursuing a tip-off from a resident of Block 32, Mohan Singh, who had escaped the previous night from a rampaging mob, and after being rebuffed by the police, had reached their newspaper office in the morning. Having been prevented by the mob from entering Block 32, the journalists went straight to Kalyanpuri police station, which had jurisdiction over Trilokpuri. But, like the two motorcycle-borne policemen, the duty officer at the Kalyanpuri police station made light of their fears of a calamity in Block 32. No deaths, he said, had been reported, not only in Trilokpuri but also in the entire area covered by his police station. According to the official Kusum Lata Mittal inquiry report, the duty officer’s claim to the journalists that there were no deaths in Trilokpuri, was actually consistent with what his superior, Station House Officer Soor Veer Singh Tyagi, had already told an army officer earlier in the day when he had visited the police station along with his soldiers to enquire if their help was required in that area.

On their way out, the journalists noticed that a truck parked nearby was attracting flies. On closer inspection, they found the back of the truck littered with three bodies, charred beyond recognition, and a half-charred, barely alive Sikh youth lying atop them. In his semi-conscious condition, the victim told the journalists that he was from Punjab, and had come visiting relatives in Trilokpuri. In the early hours of the same morning, a rampaging mob, he said, had killed his hosts and set him on fire after dousing him with kerosene. He was dumped with the corpses in the truck, and had been lying there for four hours. When the bodies in the truck were pointed out to the duty officer, he denied all knowledge of them, saying that only the station house officer, Soor Veer Singh Tyagi, could talk about them. But then, Tyagi was nowhere in sight. Not giving up, the journalists approached the next police station, which was at Shakarpur. Again, they drew a blank, this time because of the technicality of jurisdiction. Trilokpuri fell under Kalyanpuri police station; so there was nothing the Shakarpur police station could do about whatever was happening in Block 32. But the visit to the Shakarpur police station was not entirely in vain. It brought them in contact with an army patrol that was passing by. The patrol commander, Colonel PPS Bains, assured them that he would send help to the beleaguered Block 32 in Trilokpuri. Around 4.00 pm, Bedi, Maliakan and Tomar made their second visit to Trilokpuri, only to find that the promised army patrol was yet to arrive. If anything, the situation seemed worse, as an armed mob did not let the journalists even enter Trilokpuri, let alone reach Block 32 inside the colony. The journalists then headed towards the ITO Bridge, which is the main link over the Yamuna, between east Delhi and the rest of the city. There they came across an air force contingent led by a squadron leader. The officer, however, declined to help, saying that he was preoccupied with making preparations for a then expected (but subsequently cancelled) visit by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to another riot-affected locality called Shahdara. The air force officer pointed out an army truck full of troops, to the journalists. The officer in charge of those troops had his own reason for pleading helplessness: he had lost his formation. All he could do was to advise the journalists to go to the other end of the ITO Bridge where the army had posted a wireless lookout. The second lieutenant manning the wireless post also pleaded helplessness, as he too had lost his formation somewhere in north Delhi. He advised the journalists to go to the nearby police headquarters. When they reached the police headquarters around 5.00 pm, the determined

trio of journalists went straight to the office of the commissioner, Subhash Tandan. There they found another senior officer, Additional Commissioner Nikhil Kumar, manning the telephones, along with a clutch of officers. But Kumar, who became a Congress MP years later, reacted incredulously to the account of their failed attempts to enter Block 32 of Trilokpuri. While wondering whether the ‘press fellows’ were exaggerating the situation, he said that he was anyway a ‘guest artiste’ as he had only recently been posted out from Delhi. The maximum he was prepared to do was to inform the police control room. The journalists were back in Trilokpuri by about 6.00 pm, when it was getting dark. Luckily for them, their third attempt to enter Block 32 coincided with the arrival of Soor Veer Singh Tyagi, the elusive station house officer of the Kalyanpuri police station. Tyagi had no option but to let the visiting journalists accompany him inside, to an area that had for so many hours, been out of bounds to everybody other than mobsters and policemen. That was how, thanks to the courage and tenacity displayed by three journalists, the largest ever massacre in a single block in any city in post-Independence India, finally came to light. It was a massacre that had taken place, and remained under wraps, for over two days, even though Block 32, Trilokpuri, is barely ten kilometres from the police headquarters of India’s capital. Going by the official death toll calculated by the RK Ahooja Committee three years after the carnage, about 400 Sikhs were killed in Block 32 alone. The finding recorded on Block 32 by the Nanavati Commission in 2005 was that ‘almost all Sikh males were killed.’ Not surprisingly, the three journalists who discovered the massacre, saw, as Rahul Bedi put it, ‘a sea of charred and mutilated bodies.’ When he deposed before the Nanavati Commission on 23 May 2001, Bedi said that the street of Block 32 was ‘littered with limbs of human bodies, hairs and charred bodies. It was not even possible to walk without stepping upon those limbs of dead bodies.’ What made walking harder was an electricity breakdown. The only source of light available in Block 32 was the police vehicle. As they picked their way through the smouldering remnants of the massacre, Tyagi told the journalists that he had already informed his superiors about the crisis in Block 32. On seeing the journalists, frightened women and children came out of hiding and poured out their tales of woe. When the journalists prepared to leave after a while, the victims begged them to stay to deter the mobs from indulging in further violence. Going beyond the call of their duty, one of the journalists, Joseph Maliakan, stayed back, while the other two rushed to the police headquarters to bring help. Nikhil Kumar was still manning the telephones in the commissioner’s office.

On receiving a first-hand report from Rahul Bedi and Alok Tomar on the Block 32 massacre, the ‘guest artiste’ maintained that he had done his job by alerting the control room about it. Another senior police officer, Hukam Chand Jatav, walked into the room at that point, saying that he had just returned from a tour of east Delhi, which happened to be one of the three districts under his jurisdiction. ‘Shanti’ prevailed in the whole of east Delhi, Jatav claimed, adding for good measure, ‘particularly Trilokpuri.’ But Jatav could not persist with his claim when Bedi and Tomar countered him with their first-hand account of the situation in Block 32, Trilokpuri. Turning to Nikhil Kumar, Jatav asked why he had not been alerted about the massacre although he had been very much in his office on the floor above when Bedi and company first brought the information about Trilokpuri a couple of hours earlier. That provoked an altercation between the two senior police officers right in the presence of Bedi and Tomar as well as other journalists who had gathered there for information. Nikhil Kumar maintained that it was not his duty to alert Jatav. As far as Nikhil Kumar was concerned, he had done his duty by informing the control room and it was up to the junior staffers there to follow up that lead. Years later, the Mittal report disclosed that, contrary to his claim of ignorance, Jatav did, in fact, receive a wireless message from the control room, on the basis of Nikhil Kumar’s information. In the event, Jatav finally visited Block 32 around 7.00 pm. His next in command, Deputy Commissioner Sewa Dass, who was directly in charge of east Delhi, beat him to it but by a few minutes. Journalist Joseph Maliakan, who had stayed back in Block 32 at the insistence of victims, was witness to the visits of both the officers. In fact, during their successive visits, Sewa Dass and Jatav happened to be guided around the ravaged block by Maliakan rather than any of the local policemen. To a query from Jatav, Maliakan suggested that they walk down the lane littered with burning bodies. After taking a few steps, Jatav turned back and called for reinforcements to evacuate the survivors. In an obvious face-saver, Jatav also ordered the arrest of Soor Veer Singh Tyagi, head of the Kalyanpuri police station, for negligence of duty, including his alleged failure to inform his superiors about the gravity of the situation. But there was little change on the ground. Killings continued even after the change of guard at the Kalyanpuri police station. According to the Mittal report, about thirty more Sikhs were murdered in its territory in the night between 2 and 3 November. Clearly, the Block 32 massacre was not the handiwork of a mere station house officer. The official inquiries held subsequently yielded

evidence against senior officers as well. Take, for instance, the logbooks of wireless messages produced for the first time before the Nanavati Commission seventeen years later. The logbooks revealed that, contrary to his claims of innocence, Sewa Dass had been officially informed about the Block 32 massacre a whole day before the three vigilant journalists brought it to the notice of the police headquarters. Confronted with this documentary evidence, Sewa Dass admitted in writing to the Nanavati Commission in 2002, ‘I had received a message from SHO, police station Kalyanpuri, at about 1510 hours on 1.11.84 that looting and killing was going on in Block 32 of Trilokpuri.’ Equally significant was the fact, Sewa Dass admitted, again in the face of documentary evidence, that even though he visited the Kalyanpuri police station on the evening of 1 November 1984, he steered clear of Trilokpuri. Read with the police records, the affidavits filed by victims shed light on the manner in which the massacre was organized by Congress leaders and then executed with the collusion of the police. The evidence on the issue of organized violence is the eyewitness accounts of a series of meetings of Congress workers held in and around Trilokpuri on the night of 31 October, and morning of 1 November. HKL Bhagat, who was then MP of east Delhi and uncrowned king of the Congress in Delhi, attended some of the meetings, including the one held in the house of Rampal Saroj, president of the Congress Party’s Trilokpuri unit. It was against the backdrop of such meetings that a mob of 400 men, armed with iron rods, wooden sticks and kerosene tins, descended on Block 32 of Trilokpuri at around 10.00 am. Even so, the Sikh residents could initially put up a stout defence. They converged in their gurdwara, and using their collective strength, put their ‘kirpans’ (swords) and other small arms to good use to keep the mob at bay. The situation changed for the worse, ironically, with the arrival of the police. Soor Veer Singh Tyagi himself rushed to the spot with armed policemen But, rather than dispersing the miscreants, Tyagi ordered the Sikhs to return to their homes, saying that it was his responsibility to protect them. The Sikhs were reluctant to leave the gurdwara for fear of turning into easy targets in their homes. Tyagi fired in the air and frightened them into obeying his order. The moment the Sikhs dispersed, the mob led by local Congress leaders Rampal Saroj and Dr Ashok Gupta broke into smaller groups and pounced on their houses. The police withdrew from the scene, giving the rioters a free hand to kill or rape the Sikhs. The carnage went on the whole day, and there was no let up even at night. A few Sikhs, like Mohan Singh, managed to escape under the cover of darkness.

The daybreak of 2 November made little difference to the intensity of the violence. So much so, that by the time the three journalists entered Block 32 around 6.00 pm, they could not find a single male Sikh alive and well. It is remarkable that, even in a country inured to mass violence, the worst ever massacre in a single block or colony anywhere in India should take place right in its capital. Yet, the Indian state has little to show by way of enforcing the rule of law for a crime of such magnitude. The police registered just one case on 3 November for the entire Trilokpuri massacre, covering all the murders that had taken place over three days. The omnibus case made little progress for over a decade till a conscientious trial judge, SN Dhingra, split it into seventy cases in 1995, in an abortive attempt to uphold the majesty of the law. None of the police officers accountable for the Block 32 massacre – Tyagi, Sewa Dass and Jatav – was penalized, whether in criminal cases or through departmental proceedings. All of them went on to get their promotions, more than once, in their careers. Their crowning glory was that the Nanavati Commission did not indict any of the police personnel associated with east Delhi, despite being the worst affected district in the carnage. As a result, Sewa Dass retired ‘honourably’ as special commissioner of Delhi Police, almost at the top of the hierarchy, within three months of the publication of the Nanavati report. As for the politicians involved in the Block 32 massacre, the Nanavati Commission indicted them in 2005: ‘It appears that Shri Bhagat, Rampal Saroj and Dr Ashok, who were local Congress(I) leaders, had taken active part in the anti-Sikh riots in this area.’ But since they had all been ‘acquitted in the criminal cases filed against them, the Commission does not recommend any further action against them, including Mr Bhagat in view of his physical and mental condition.’ The paper work was complete even if all the big culprits got away.

Plight of a War Hero

One was a political leader, while the other, a fighter pilot. Indira Gandhi and Manmohan Bir Singh Talwar might have had little in common. But, as fate would have it, their lives were intertwined in a rather uncanny manner. The 1971 war with Pakistan, leading to the liberation of Bangladesh, was by all accounts, Indira Gandhi’s finest moment as the prime minister of India. It fetched her Bharat Ratna, the nation’s highest civilian award. The same war turned out to be the high point of Talwar’s career too, as it brought him the second highest gallantry award, the Mahavir Chakra. Talwar was honoured specifically for the manner in which he had responded to a Pakistani air strike late at night on 3 December 1971. As the commander of a bomber squadron based in Agra, home to the fabled Taj Mahal, he was able to repel the sudden attack with minimal damage to the runway. More importantly, Talwar and his men were resilient enough to begin their retaliatory measures against Pakistan within an hour of the air strike on Agra. According to the citation of his award, Talwar led five missions deep inside Pakistan, extensively damaging installations at the Sargodha air force base. The next day, he led an attack on four gun positions and succeeded in silencing three of them, thereby facilitating the advance of the Indian army in the inhospitable Chamb region. While conferring the Mahavir Chakra on him, the Indira Gandhi government acknowledged that Talwar’s ‘bold leadership, tenacity of purpose and flying skills’ were largely responsible for the achievements of his squadron. About a decade later, the assassination of Indira Gandhi on 31 October 1984, wreaked tragedy on Talwar’s life too. In the carnage that followed the assassination, Talwar, a Sikh, was arrested and thrown into prison for a fortnight, as a common criminal, that too for firing in self-defence, from his house. He had by then retired from the Indian Air Force as a group captain and, at fifty-four, was settled in his new career as a businessman. Talwar was running a garment showroom in the front portion of his house, which was located on the main road of West Patel Nagar in central Delhi. His heart-rending account came to light thanks to an affidavit submitted by Talwar before the Misra Commission, the first judicial inquiry that was set up six months after the carnage. The three-day carnage across Delhi began on the morning of 1 November. The first sign of violence on Talwar’s premises occurred at 9.30 am. A mob started pelting stones at his showroom, though it was shut like any other shop in the area, as a mark of respect to the deceased prime minister. The mob broke windowpanes, showroom windows, and neon glow signs.

Some of the miscreants entered the front yard and tried to set the shop and house, on fire. Talwar, with the help of his wife and two sons, doused the flames. They were thus left to their own devices though the Patel Nagar police station was located on the same road, less than half a kilometre from Talwar’s house. Since the police did not respond to his repeated calls, the war hero came out with his family at about 10.00 am to plead with the mob. ‘I had my 12-bore licensed gun in my hand and my sons had hockey sticks. We did not fight with the mob, but with folded hands, requested them to leave our house. I explained to them that I was a retired defence services officer. I had fought against Pakistan in the 1971 war, and I had been awarded the Mahavir Chakra,’ Talwar revealed in his affidavit before the Misra Commission. But, unlike that fateful night in 1971, Talwar failed to repel the enemy attack in 1984. The mob left his home only after his Hindu neighbours intervened. The relief, however, proved short-lived, as the mob returned by 11.30 am. After setting fire to a furniture shop across the road, the mob turned its attention to Talwar’s shop. The rioters broke its shutter and set fire to Talwar’s shop for the second time. The flames were again extinguished by him and his family. The sight of the gun-toting owner deterred the miscreants from looting the showroom. Talwar, on his part, refrained from using the gun even when some of the rioters dared him to do so. ‘I explained to them that I had no enmity with them and that I would (fire at them) only if my own life or that of any of my family members was in danger.’ Luckily for him, the neighbours again prevailed over the mob, and compelled them to go away. Since the police had still not appeared on the scene, the neighbours took turns to guard Talwar’s gate. The third and final attack on Talwar’s premises started at about 2.30 pm when two government-run public transport buses were suddenly parked in front of the gate. A whole lot of people disembarked from those buses, armed with iron rods and incendiary material, and shouting even more inflammatory slogans. In no time, they mobilized a mob, bigger and more frenzied than the earlier ones. A handful of determined neighbours still managed to keep the mob at bay. By 4.00 pm, the mob had grown exponentially, with estimates ranging from 2,000 (of the local station house officer) to 5,000 (of Talwar himself ). The situation was turning out of control as the slogans grew more hostile, and the crowd more restive. In the stone throwing that followed, the mob injured one of the neighbours standing guard. Not surprisingly, the feeble wall of protection provided by unarmed neighbours crumbled under the onslaught of the mob. Once it broke the locks on the outer gate, a part of the mob started looting the shop, while the rest spread out in the house in search of its inhabitants. Talwar and his family, meanwhile, hid in the rear portion of the building, hoping desperately that the mob would loot the shop and leave.

In the event, the assailants were not content with the looting. They set the shop on fire, and thick smoke billowed inside the house. Worse, after breaking the rear door, the mob traced the owners to their hiding place. One of the assailants hit Talwar on his face with a steel rod, breaking a tooth and cutting his lips. It was in such circumstances, as the last resort to save himself and his family from a murderous mob, that Talwar finally pulled the trigger. The gunshot seemed to have had an immediate impact. Panic-stricken, the miscreants fled from Talwar’s premises. But that was only to regroup on the road. And it was then, at least eight hours after the mob attacks started on his property, that Talwar, for the first time, saw a sign of police on the scene. But their arrival, however late, seemed to make little difference to the mob. The sprinkling of men dressed in khaki clothes, presumably police personnel, made no effort to disperse the crowd. Instead, they seemed to merge with it. Worse, those uniformed men provided the mob with the firepower it needed to counter Talwar’s gunshot. They fired at Talwar’s house again and again. Their support emboldened the mob to stay on even as Talwar returned fire from the first floor of his house. A section of the mob subsequently climbed the rooftops of neighbouring buildings and threw fireballs at Talwar’s house. At some point, his barsati (lone room on the terrace) caught fire. Taking advantage of that distraction, the mob made fresh attempts to re-enter Talwar’s premises. In the ensuing shoot-out, three members of the mob were killed on the spot, and two of the seven injured died in hospital. The casualties suffered by the mob in front of Talwar’s residence sent shock waves across the police force, bringing two of the senior-most officers to the spot, in quick succession. First, it was the police officer in charge of the central district of Delhi, Amod Kanth. And then Police Commissioner Subhash Tandan himself rushed there. In his written testimony before two judicial inquiries, Tandan disclosed that he had got a report of the trouble at West Patel Nagar when he was about to go to a meeting called by Home Minister PV Narasimha Rao at 5.30 pm at the Cabinet Secretariat. Deputing one of his officers to attend the home minister’s meeting on his behalf, Tandan himself rushed to Talwar’s place as the report said that ‘a Sikh had opened fire from the first floor of his house on a crowd which had set the ground floor on fire.’ The arrival of the highest ranked police officer on the spot, however, gave little cause for concern to the mob baying for Talwar’s blood. The police still made no effort to nab any miscreant, or disperse the unlawful assembly. Their focus was entirely on disarming Talwar rather than enforcing the rule of law. The police did not take on the mob even after an army unit, led by a major,

was inducted into the operation. The arrival of the army, which is reputed to command awe as the ultimate safeguard of public order, made little difference to the mob attacking a war hero. The irony seemed to be lost on everybody. The shoot-out ended after deputy commissioner of police, Amod Kanth, standing on the terrace of a neighbouring building, negotiated with Talwar over a loudspeaker, and persuaded him to surrender. Talwar gave himself up, along with his gun, and sixty rounds of ammunition, relying on Kanth’s word that the police would protect him and his family. Kanth, however, reneged on his promise. Instead of taking Talwar for what he was, a victim who had fired in self-defence from his own besieged house, the police made him out to be the aggressor in the whole episode and actually booked him for murder. That was, in fact, the first case to be registered at Patel Nagar police station on 1 November, a murder case against a Sikh, on the very day when, ironically, he and thousands of others from his community were under attack across the capital. Since the first information report recorded by them put the blame squarely on Talwar, the police took no action against any member of the mob. Despite the presence of senior police officers, they did not try to enforce the curfew either. Talwar’s military credentials could not help him get the deference that was due to him even as a murder-accused. The police confiscated his air force identity card and threw him into a police lock-up. He was formally arrested on 3 November and detained in Tihar Jail for a fortnight. Despite his disclosure to the authorities concerned that he had a Master of Arts degree, and had retired as a decorated and high-ranking air force officer, Talwar was kept with C class prisoners who were generally poor and illiterate. Another riot victim who was in Tihar Jail around the same time, Narender Singh, while deposing in 2001 before the second judicial inquiry, divulged that the authorities there had forced Talwar ‘to clean the latrines of prisoners’. Though Talwar’s case figured in both judicial inquiries held for the 1984 carnage, the police never came clean on why they made him a scapegoat, and why they took no action against any of the miscreants available on the spot. Commissioner Tandan passed the buck to his deputy, Amod Kanth. In his written deposition in 2004 before the second judicial inquiry, Tandan claimed that he had directed Kanth to provide protection to Group Captain Talwar ‘since he was obviously exercising the right of private defence’. The action they took against Talwar conformed to a larger pattern of what police personnel, at all levels, did across Delhi on 1 November 1984, to disarm the Sikhs. Colluding with the mobs, the police spared no efforts to snuff out whatever little resistance

the Sikhs had put up here and there. Since the evening of 31 October, the police had by and large remained passive spectators to attacks on the Sikhs, starting with the one on President Zail Singh when he was on his way to the hospital where the body of the assassinated prime minister lay. When those attacks took the form of killings the next morning, the police did finally intervene – but, as demonstrated in Talwar’s case, or in Kalyanpuri and Trilokpuri – it was only to abet the mass crime.

A Tale of Two Gurdwaras

For Sikhs, they are by far the two most historic shrines in Delhi. Both happen to be linked with the martyrdom of the ninth of the ten prophets of the Sikhs, Guru Teg Bahadur. Sis Ganj Gurdwara, located close to the seat of the Mughal Empire, Red Fort, marks the spot where Teg Bahadur was beheaded, over three centuries ago, on the orders of Emperor Aurangzeb. Rakab Ganj Gurdwara, standing right next to Parliament House, commemorates the spot where the guru’s decapitated body was secretly cremated by one of his devoted followers. Though history is witness to the persecution of religious figures around the world, Teg Bahadur’s sacrifice is probably without a parallel, for he is the only religious leader known to have laid down his life, not so much for espousing his religion as for upholding the freedom of others to follow their own. Teg Bahadur’s execution was the culmination of a series of events triggered by Aurangzeb’s drive to convert all his subjects to Islam. One of the affected sections was the Kashmiri Pundits, who were in a peculiar situation. Though they were Brahmins and therefore belonged to the top layer in the caste hierarchy, Kashmiri Pundits were about the only Hindus residing in the Muslimdominated valley of Kashmir. In a bid to escape conversion at sword-point, a deputation of Kashmiri Pundits travelled all the way to Anandpur Sahib in Punjab and requested Teg Bahadur to help them. Moved by their plight, the guru agreed to intervene despite the obvious risk of incurring the wrath of the emperor. On his advice, the Pundits met the emperor and told him that they were all prepared to embrace Islam if he succeeded in converting the guru himself. Accepting the challenge, Aurangzeb summoned Teg Bahadur to Delhi’s Red Fort. When the two came face-to-face, the guru said that though he believed neither in Hinduism nor in the supremacy of Brahmins, he would stand up for the right of Hindus to practise their faith. Aurangzeb, in turn, offered him a choice between converting to Islam and performing a miracle to justify his claim to being a guru. When Teg Bahadur refused to do either, the emperor condemned him to death for his act of defiance. That is how on 11 November 1675, an unyielding Teg Bahadur came to be beheaded in public, at the very spot where his followers subsequently built Sis Ganj Gurdwara. The name they chose for the shrine refers to his head. On the stormy night following his execution, one of his followers, Lakhi Banjara, whisked away the guru’s headless body in a cart to his own house at

Raisina in Delhi. Since soldiers had fanned out in search of the missing body, Banjara hurriedly cremated it by setting his whole house on fire. That is how Rakab Ganj Gurdwara came to be built where Banjara is believed to have cremated the guru’s decapitated body in such dramatic circumstances. The fact that Guru Teg Bahadur had sacrificed his life for the sake of the Hindus, was evidently lost on the predominantly Hindu mobs that sought to attack the Sis Ganj and Rakab Ganj Gurdwaras a day after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Yet, thanks to the intervention of a Christian police officer, Sis Ganj Gurdwara, located in the far more vulnerable walled city, escaped unscathed, while Rakab Ganj Gurdwara, despite being across the street from Parliament House, was subjected to a prolonged siege in which its periphery was damaged, and two Sikhs were roasted alive. The attack on Rakab Ganj Gurdwara was also remarkable for the fact that it was probably the first, and so far, the only instance in the history of mass violence in India, where a political leader admitted to being on the spot. And such an instance ironically occurred in the immediate vicinity of India’s parliament. The leader in question was Kamal Nath, who was at the time of the 1984 carnage, an up and coming Congress MP from Madhya Pradesh, and is now a cabinet minister holding a key economic portfolio in the Manmohan Singh government. In a siege that lasted over five hours, Kamal Nath is said to have been there for about two hours. Given the strategic location of Rakab Ganj Gurdwara, Kamal Nath’s presence at the site of violence was confirmed by two of the senior-most police officers, Commissioner Subhash Tandan, and Additional Commissioner Gautam Kaul, as also by an independent source, The Indian Express reporter, Sanjay Suri. This is more than what could be said about any of the Congress MPs from Delhi, whether HKL Bhagat, Jagdish Tytler, Sajjan Kumar or Dharam Dass Shastri, as the charge of their complicity was based entirely on the testimony of victims. If at all there was any independent evidence against those four MPs from Delhi, it was only about attempts made by two of them, Tytler and Shastri, in the aftermath of the violence, to secure the release of their followers. In separate incidents, journalists saw Tytler and Shastri barging into the presence of senior police officers and trying to browbeat them into releasing Congress Party workers who had been arrested. The situation was explosive by the time Maxwell Pareira, the number two police officer of the north Delhi district, reached Sis Ganj Gurdwara on the morning of 1 November 1984. He found that about 200 Sikhs had descended on the road, and displaying naked swords and spears, were doing ‘a war dance’ in the famous Chandni

Chowk market. The provocation obviously was the mobs closing in on the gurdwara from both directions, shouting aggressive slogans. Unlike his counterparts in other parts of Delhi, Pareira did not disarm the Sikhs and leave them at the mercy of the mobs. Instead, he persuaded them to go inside the gurdwara by promising to provide them security. He kept his word and dealt with the mobs sternly despite having a meagre force at his command. To be sure, it took a lot of courage and ingenuity to do so. Once he got the Sikhs to go indoors, the mobs from both directions were emboldened to pelt stones with greater vigour. All that Pareira and his men could do in return was threaten to fire with their revolvers. In a gritty display of policing, they managed to keep the crowd at a safe distance from the gurdwara till a small reinforcement came along with tear smoke ammunition. The tear gas firing that ensued helped the police chase the crowd away from the gurdwara on the Chandni Chowk road in both directions. The team that had chased the crowd right up to Town Hall reported to Pareira on the wireless that some of the miscreants, having been prevented from attacking Sis Ganj Gurdwara, had turned their attention to shops owned by Sikhs. The mob indulged in looting and arson. On rushing to the fresh flashpoint, Pareira saw that a Sikh-owned shop, Amrit Watch Company, had already been set on fire. He warned the crowd to disperse. It had little effect. That is when Pareira took the next logical step to enforce law and order, something that no other officer did anywhere in Delhi on 1 November, the first and worst day of the carnage. Pareira ordered firing. He got his men to open fire on the miscreants who were looting a shoe shop owned by Sikhs. Constable Shiv Prashan of Kotwali police station opened fire on his order. Shiv Prashan fired three rounds, shooting one person dead in full view of the rioters. Driving home the rule of law, Pareira announced then and there, a reward of Rs 200 to the constable, making sure the reward was heard by everyone as he announced it on a loud-hailer. The firing and the reward had the desired – and expected – effect. Sis Ganj Gurdwara was saved as the mobs melted away. An administrative inquiry conducted by retired bureaucrat, Kusum Lata Mittal, rightly concluded: ‘This resolute and firm stand of Shri Pareira had an instant impact and the mob dispersed. Thereafter, there was no serious incident (in that area) during the entire period of riots. This incident proves beyond doubt that where the police officers showed the strength and the determination to check the riots, they could be really effective with little force too.’ There was unfortunately no such ‘resolute and firm’ action in the face of a similar threat to Rakab Ganj Gurdwara, the other great holy shrine for Sikhs in Delhi, around the same time. Police Commissioner Subhash Tandan, and

Additional Commissioner Gautam Kaul, despite being superior in rank, showed none of Pareira’s will to check the breakdown of law and order. They did not even cane the mob, let alone resorting to tear gas or firing. Emboldened by the police’s obvious reluctance to take any action against miscreants, the mob at Rakab Ganj Gurdwara laid siege to it for at least five hours, indulging in various forms of violence. It pelted stones at the Sikhs inside the gurdwara. It flung burning rags doused with petrol. Jumping over the compound wall, it transgressed into the gurdwara again and again. On one occasion, it tried to break the gurdwara’s main door and when that proved too strong to break, it set the door on fire. On another occasion, the mob attacked an employee’s house inside the complex and set it on fire. In what was the worst of all its crimes on the spot, the mob killed two Sikhs. The Nanavati Commission relied on the affidavit of Mukhtiar Singh, a resident of Rakab Ganj Gurdwara, to record the circumstances in which the two Sikhs were roasted alive in front of the gurdwara’s gate. It happened around noon when the mob made its first foray into the complex. Armed with swords, priests and staff members put up a stiff resistance and pushed the mob out. In a bid to end the face-off, an elderly Sikh went close to the mob with folded hands and begged the miscreants to go away. The mob, however, pounced on him and dragged him out of the gate. Under the benign gaze of the police already stationed there, the aged Sikh was then battered by the mob. After beating him senseless, the mob at Rakab Ganj, like its counterparts elsewhere in Delhi, sprinkled some inflammable substance on his body and set it on fire. Unable to bear the sight of his father in such pain, the old man’s son ran out of the gurdwara, in a desperate bid to save him. The mob caught hold of the son too, and subjected him to the same treatment. Subsequently, Mukhtiar Singh, who filed an affidavit before the Nanavati Commission, and other Sikhs, succeeded in bringing those two semi-burnt bodies, inside the gurdwara. On discovering that those two were still alive, Mukhtiar Singh and his group pleaded with the police to rush them to hospital. The police, however, could not be bothered about providing such humanitarian aid. Within a few hours, the old Sikh and his son succumbed to their injuries, due to sheer neglect. As if their failure to act against the mob was not bad enough, the police actually opened fire at the Sikhs who were defending themselves and their gurdwara. What made the firing on Sikhs all the more unwarranted was that, much like the mob, the police too moved in and out of the gurdwara premises in the course of the prolonged siege. Further, in keeping with the general pattern of their behaviour across Delhi, the police records show that, rather than rounding up members of the mob, they arrested a Sikh from inside the gurdwara. Kanwarjit Singh was accused of murdering a member of the mob, although he had only fired in self-defence from his licensed weapon. The murder case against Kanwarjit Singh was dropped after four years as part of a policy decision taken

by the Rajiv Gandhi government to withdraw the cases that had been foisted on Sikhs during the 1984 carnage. But one factor that set apart the mob attack on Rakab Ganj Gurdwara from other instances of mass violence in 1984 was its sheer location. It was an attack that took place right next to Parliament House in Lutyens’ Delhi, which is a high-security VIP zone, and therefore, saw the least incidence of violence during the carnage. While other districts of Delhi were taken over by armed mobs, the New Delhi district was overrun by crowds heading to – or returning from – Teen Murti Bhawan, where Indira Gandhi lay in state. In fact, the crowd that surrounded Rakab Ganj Gurdwara was said to have been returning from Teen Murti Bhawan. They collected around the gurdwara (the crowd was estimated by the press to have swollen to 4,000) because they were, by all accounts, enraged by a rumour that Hindus had been dragged inside Rakab Ganj Gurdwara and held hostage. The rumour caused such a commotion that the police commissioner himself ‘jumped’ inside the gurdwara along with two other officers to check whether any Hindus were actually detained by Sikhs. The only Hindus found in the complex turned out to be six of its employees, who said that they were there on their own volition. In his deposition before the two commissions, Tandan claimed to have taken those Hindu employees outside to show to the mob that they were safe. That act, he added, contributed to dispersing the mob after the prolonged siege. Another distinguishing feature of the Rakab Ganj episode was the evidence of political complicity: the presence of Congress MP Kamal Nath on the spot for a major part of the siege. That he was there at all, for whatever reason, was extraordinary, given that the other Congress leaders were discreet enough not to hobnob with mobs in places where they were liable to be noticed by journalists. Leaders like HKL Bhagat and Sajjan Kumar, who were far more involved in the carnage, instigated mobs in remote localities inhabited by poor people. So the evidence that came to light against them before the inquiry commissions was only from impoverished victims. Since Kamal Nath spent about two hours in front of Rakab Ganj Gurdwara on 1 November, The Indian Express reported the next day that he had led the mob. The inference of his complicity was no reflex reaction, as made clear by journalist, Sanjay Suri, in his report, as also in his affidavit before the Misra Commission, and oral deposition before the Nanavati Commission. Suri found that Kamal Nath was ‘controlling the crowd’ which he said was’looking to him for directions.’ Though he could not vouch for what exactly Kamal Nath had told the crowd, Suri said that ‘some mobs had charged at the gurdwara’ in the Congress leader’s presence. Equally significant, he testified that while all that drama was going on, the bodies of those Sikhs were ‘still burning on the roadside.’

Thus, the Rakab Ganj Gurdwara episode provided the first and perhaps the only contemporaneous report of a Congress leader’s involvement in the carnage. A day later, on 3 November, The Statesman referred to Kamal Nath’s presence at Rakab Ganj while analysing the carnage: ‘Policemen criticized the role of politicians too. Several councillors, they alleged, interceded on behalf of violent mobs when policemen tried to stop arson. Officers wondered what Mr Kamal Nath was doing at Rakab Ganj.’ Such public exposure of Kamal Nath ensured that Tandan and Kaul had no option but to admit his presence at Rakab Ganj, in their reports, which were placed before the two judicial inquiries. Incidentally, Kaul disclosed that Kamal Nath had turned up at Rakab Ganj saying that he had been sent by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. And when Kamal Nath himself was served a notice by the Nanavati Commission almost two decades later, by when he had become commerce minister in the Manmohan Singh government, he too acknowledged his presence at the scene of crime. But Kamal Nath, of course, denied the allegations of journalist Sanjay Suri; and victim, Mukhtiar Singh, that he had led the mob or had any control over it. The Nanavati Commission on its part held that Kamal Nath’s reply was ‘vague’. The Congress MP was unable to explain why he was in front of the gurdwara for about two hours, which, as the commission said, was ‘quite a long time’. The commission also found it ‘a little strange that he left the place abruptly without even contacting the police officers who had come there.’ If he still escaped indictment, and the Manmohan Singh government averted a major embarrassment, they should consider themselves lucky. Reversing a principle of accountability, the commission chose to limit the blame for the entire Rakab Ganj episode to the junior-most police officer on the spot, Sub-Inspector Hoshiar Singh, and his constables. The commission did not deign to explain how the buck stopped with the lowly sub-inspector, when the two senior-most officers of Delhi Police, Tandan and Kaul, were directly involved in an operation in which the siege went on for five hours, the gurdwara was damaged, and two Sikhs were killed, and yet, no action was taken against any member of the mob. But then, had it extended the responsibility to those senior officers, as was logically expected of it, the commission could not possibly have spared Kamal Nath either. To be fair, the commission did not quite exonerate Kamal Nath. ‘In (the) absence of better evidence,’ it said, ‘it is not possible for the commission to say that he had in any manner instigated the mob or that he was involved in the attack on the gurdwara.’ In other words, it only gave him the benefit of the doubt. And it did so mainly on two grounds. Since he was called upon to explain his conduct at Rakab Ganj Gurdwara after a gap of about twenty years, the commission felt that ‘probably for that reason he was not able to give more details as regards when and how he went there and what he did’. But then, by

that logic, the commission could well have let off other leaders too, which it did not. The likes of Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar cannot be blamed if they felt that the commerce minister got preferential treatment although the evidence against him was stronger. The other major ground cited by the Nanavati Commission to let him off was, ironically, the very testimony that damned him the most: namely, the evidence adduced by journalist Sanjay Suri. The independent witness who corroborated the allegation of victims that Kamal Nath had led the mob at Rakabganj was also found to have said a thing or two in his favour. The commission held that it would ‘not be proper’ to come to any conclusion against the MP since ‘Shri Suri has said that Shri Kamal Nath had tried to persuade the mob to disperse and the mob had retreated for some time.’ That was, however, a selective reading of Suri’s evidence. He did say in his affidavit of 1985 that he had seen Kamal Nath keeping some of the members of the crowd ‘under some control’ when they made ‘weak attempts’ to enter the gurdwara. But the same affidavit disclosed that what he had seen outside the gurdwara was ‘a crowd of about 4,000 men led by Congress-I leader Kamal Nath.’ Further, when he deposed orally in 2001 before the Nanavati Commission, Suri said that Kamal Nath ‘was controlling the crowd and the crowd was looking to him for directions’ and that even in the leader’s presence ‘some mobs had charged at the gurdwara.’ On balance, there was enough evidence before the commission to recommend a CBI probe into his role. Having spent two hours with the mob in front of Rakabganj Gurdwara, having done nothing to help the two Sikhs lying in a critical condition, having allowed the mob and the police to carry on with their hostilities against the targeted community, Kamal Nath was clearly part of the problem, not the solution. The unanswered questions about his role in the Rakabganj Gurdwara episode might well hold the key to uncovering the highlevel conspiracy behind the 1984 carnage.

Masterly Inaction

O n the morning of 1 November 1984, when the killing of Sikhs began, about 5,000 army officers and soldiers were available in Delhi. Had they been deployed without delay, the position, the Justice Ranganath Misra Commission conceded ‘would certainly not have been as bad as it turned out to be’. It estimated that the soldiers could have averted the killing of ‘at least 2,000 people’. Its ballpark figure of the lives that could have been saved turned out to be more than two-thirds of the official death toll of 2,733 that was subsequently announced in 1988. Since the government’s estimates of the killings were less in 1986, at the time Justice Misra submitted his report, it is reasonable to infer that he was suggesting that most of those who died in the 1984 carnage could well have been rescued had the army been deployed on the morning of 1 November. The needless delay of a few hours did make all the difference to the scale of the massacre, which was over in a matter of seventy-two hours, and which saw the bulk of the killings on the very first day. Given such a damning finding of omission against the state, the question that logically arose was whether the delay in calling the army was part of a larger conspiracy to teach the Sikhs a lesson. The question assumed all the more significance because even after the army had been deployed in stages from the evening of 1 November, they were, somehow or the other, ineffective till the latter half of 3 November, reinforcing a widespread perception come what may that the attacks on Sikhs were meant to go on unchecked for three days. But the Misra Commission, too, committed an omission by skirting this whole issue, although it purportedly examined whether the violence in Delhi had been ‘organized’. It took, at face value, the government’s claim that Rajiv Gandhi, within minutes of his fortuitous elevation to the office of prime minister on the evening of 31 October 1984, had issued instructions that the army ‘be alerted and, if necessary, called in.’ Commending Rajiv Gandhi for anticipating violence in Delhi in the wake of his mother’s assassination, the Misra Commission blamed authorities below him for failing to follow up on his instructions: ‘Since the government had already alerted the army, the lieutenant governor and police commissioner should have called in the army and asked them to patrol during the 31st evening and night in sensitive localities.’ And even for the failure of those two dignitaries, it sought to close the issue with a pat explanation: the army was called late simply because ‘there was no feedback of incidents by the station house officers.’ Such facile reasoning brought the Misra report the odium of doing a whitewash. The second judicial inquiry, conducted almost two decades later to redress

the lapses of the first, failed to shed light on this crucial aspect of the 1984 carnage. The Justice GT Nanavati Commission did not do any better than its predecessor despite conducting a more transparent inquiry in which it publicly recorded the testimonies of a range of persons who had dealt with the deployment of the army in 1984. They included the then lieutenant governor of Delhi, PG Gavai; the then police commissioner, SC Tandan; the then home minister, PV Narasimha Rao; the then principal secretary to prime minister, PC Alexander; and the then general-officer-commanding of Delhi area, Major General JS Jamwal. After recording their varying and often conflicting versions on why there was a delay in deploying the army in aid of the civil authorities, the Nanavati Commission proved unequal to the task of determining the exact sequence of events that led to the unpardonable lapse in which hundreds of citizens were slaughtered in the capital even where the army was at hand to intervene. The Nanavati Commission instead took the easy way out – reiterating its predecessor’s specious finding that while the Rajiv Gandhi government was blameless, Gavai and Tandan, both non-political appointees of the centre, were alone responsible for the delayed reaction to the breakdown of law and order in the union territory of Delhi. It is just as well that, while speaking on the Nanavati report in the parliament in 2005, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh admitted, ‘We all know that we still do not know the truth.’ Whatever he might have had in his mind when he said so, one key aspect of the carnage that has remained uncovered because of the cop-out by two judicial inquiries is the truth behind the delayed deployment of the army. The saving grace, however, was that the Nanavati Commission’s approach of holding the inquiry in public at least brought out shocking discrepancies in the versions of the various state actors. ON THE EVENTS OF 31 OCTOBER Major General Jamwal’s version: He said that within hours of the attack on Indira Gandhi on the morning of 31 October, he was asked by the army headquarters ‘to be ready’ in view of the incidents of violence in Delhi. In a bid to establish contact with the civil authorities, he tried to call Police Commissioner Tandan. Though he ‘started ringing up right from 5 o’clock onwards,’ Jamwal wastold that Tandan was unavailable, as he was in the field. Tandan returned the call only around 11.30 pm when he told Jamwal that ‘the situation had become very bad but now it was under control.’ Tandan’s version: While he was moving near AIIMS at 10.30 am, he received a message that Jamwal wished to talk to him. On reaching the police headquarters, he returned Jamwal’s call at 11.30 am and ‘requested him to alert his troops and keep them at “stand-to”.’ He denied having any conversation with Jamwal at 11.30 pm. He said that Jamwal’s claim to have tried calling him in the evening

was ‘incorrect and contrary to record’. ON THE EVENTS OF 1 NOVEMBER Lieutenant Governor PG Gavai’s version: He said that at about7.30 am, he went to the prime minister’s house where he met Tandan whom he ‘had already telephoned.’ He said, ‘I had told Mr Tandan clearly that the army would have to be called. The police commissioner confirmed to me that he had taken the suggestion that the LG had ordered the army to be called.’ Tandan’s version: The initiative was actually his. ‘I requested the LG to seek the help of the army.’ Gavai accordingly contacted Jamwal, who ‘declined’ to visit the police commissioner’s office and instead said that he would be at the lieutenant governor’s office at1.00 pm. Gavai’s version: At 11.00 am, he attended a meeting at Alexander’s office. It was presided over by Alexander, and attended, among others, by Narasimha Rao, and army chief General AS Vaidya. Gavai stressed at the meeting that the army should be called ‘at once, without waiting even for a moment.’ But Alexander ‘ruled’ that Tandan and the army authorities should meet at the police headquarters at 5.00 pm. At about 2.00 pm, he received a phone call from Jamwal saying that he wanted to see the lieutenant governor immediately. ‘I told him that waste of time till 5.00 pm was bad enough, and he should start acting rather than wasting precious time to drive to my house.’ But Jamwal insisted on meeting him, and told him that ‘he would not like to meet the police commissioner.’ Principal secretary Alexander’s version: He denied that he had called, much less presided over, any meeting attended by Rao, Vaidya and Gavai. He said that it would have been against protocol to call the home minister to his office, and for himself to preside over such a meeting. He also denied receiving any proposal from Gavai about calling the army in, since the lieutenant governor anyway did not need anybody’s permission to take the army’s help. In the event, the directive to call in the army was given by Rajiv Gandhi at 1.30 pm through Alexander and the cabinet secretary. Jamwal’s version: At about 11.00 am, he received a message from Vaidya’s staff that he should be ready if any request was received for help from the civil authorities. He therefore contacted Gavai and told him about the army’s readiness to provide help. Gavai replied that Tandan would get in touch with him. At 12.30 pm, Jamwal received a message from the lieutenant governor’s office asking him to be there at 1.30 pm. When he reached Raj Bhawan, he was made to wait for about twenty minutes till the other officers arrived. At the meeting that ensued, he said that as more reinforcements were still on their way, the army could initially cover only two of the six police districts of Delhi. After Tandan chose south and central districts, Jamwal flashed a message to his troops at 2.02 pm.

From the discrepancies in the versions of the various authorities, it is hard to make out who spoke the truth about the cavalier manner in which the army was deployed later rather than sooner. For all their differences, the four civil and military administrators converged on one issue: that they all wanted the army to be called in at the earliest. Each of them could have claimed so just to save his skin. Equally, if those four did want the army to be deployed without delay, there must have been some force in the government beyond their control that delayed the process, with tragic consequences. Such a force, if any, could only have been the political leadership of the government. The evidence that emerged against the then home minister, PV Narasimha Rao, raises serious questions about the role played by the political component of the government. Since Delhi was a union territory, its law and order was directly Rao’s responsibility. Yet, throughout the carnage, Rao did not bother to visit any of the affected areas in the capital. The closest he came to demonstrating his concern about the violence was by visiting a relief camp, and talking to affected persons who had been sheltered there. In his submission before the Nanavati Commission, Rao gave no explanation for not visiting a single affected area. One small mercy is that he allowed a succession of prominent citizens to meet him during the carnage. Those meetings provided clues to how the political executive had reacted real time to the massacre of a minority community in the capital. Take the meeting Rao had at 3.00 pm on 1 November with historian Patwant Singh, political leader IK Gujral, and Lieutenant General JS Aurora. In their affidavits to the Nanavati Commission, all three of them expressed shock at what they had seen of the home minister during their hour-long meeting with him. Here’s how Patwant Singh put it: ‘We were surprised to see that there was absolutely no activity at the home minister’s house. PV Narasimha Rao was looking impassive and seemingly without a care. The atmosphere at the home minister’s house did not show at all that there was any crisis in the country, and in the very capital around the home minister’s own house. When we asked whether the army was being called, he replied, “It will be here in the evening.” When asked by Lieutenant General Aurora how it was being deployed, Home Minister replied: ‘The area commander will meet the Lieutenant Governor for this purpose.’ Lieutenant General Aurora suggested that a joint control room be set up to coordinate the police and army as was done during the British rule in 1947, for the viceroy to monitor the situation. Similarly, Mr Rao should monitor events from hour to hour. The home minister replied, “We will see when the army arrives.” The approach of the home minister was so casual that it clearly gave an impression that he was totally unconcerned.’ While Aurora confirmed Patwant Singh’s account of their meeting with Rao, IK Gujral (who, like Rao, went on to become prime minister) deposed that the

home minister seemed distracted by his additional charge as foreign minister. ‘During my talk with the home minister, I could notice that he did not know many details about what was happening in the city. He told us that since many VVIPs from foreign countries were likely to attend the funeral of Mrs Indira Gandhi, he spent much of his time in receiving them and making arrangements for them. ’Former law minister, Shanti Bhushan, got yet another unflattering impression of Rao when he met the home minister separately on 1 November. Since he saw Rao making calls to authorities concerned about the ongoing carnage, Bhushan did not think he was indifferent as much as he was being ineffective despite his efforts. ‘Even though I could not hear what was being said by the persons whom he had called, I got the distinct impression that his telephone calls were not having much effect. Narasimha Rao had a very worried and disturbed look on his face and appeared to be quite unhappy. I, however, got the impression that while he was trying to do his best, he was not proving/being effective.’ In his testimony before the Nanavati Commission, Rao vehemently denied the insinuations that, on the fateful day of 1 November 1984, he was either indifferent or ineffective. Such a denial was of course only to be expected from a person in the dock. But, to be fair to Rao, the impressions conveyed about him were contradictory. He could have been either indifferent because of a political conspiracy (as alleged by Patwant Singh), or ineffective despite his best efforts (as alleged by Shanti Bhushan). Either way, the evidence was damaging not just to Rao but to the Rajiv Gandhi government as such. Since Rao was in charge of internal security in Rajiv Gandhi’s cabinet, any finding against Rao would cast a shadow on Rajiv Gandhi as well. By the time the Nanavati Commission gave its report, the Congress Party was back in power, and Rajiv Gandhi’s widow, Sonia Gandhi, was its president. Even if there was no more love lost between Sonia Gandhi and Rao (who died a month before the submission of the report), the honour of the Rajiv Gandhi regime hinged precariously on the finding on its home minister. In an anticlimax, the Nanavati Commission, however, gave short shrift to what was perceived as the most politically sensitive issue before it. After recording the allegations against Rao in detail, the report gave him a clean chit which raised more questions than it answered. It made a bald assertion that ‘there was no delay or indifference at the level of the home minister’. For all its significance, the commission did not give a shred of explanation for its exoneration of Rao. There was no attempt to justify its conclusion that for the delay in calling in the army, the buck should stop with the lieutenant governor of Delhi. Why was the agent (lieutenant governor) indicted, and the principal (home minister) exonerated, when both were present in the affected city? What was the principle on which Rao was exempted from bearing responsibility for the

massacre of the Sikhs right in the capital? As regards the allegations made by those who had met him during the carnage, all that the Nanavati Commission said was: ‘Though some prominent members who had met him during those days carried an impression that the home minister was not that much responsive and sensitive as demanded by the situation, it appears that they carried that impression because of the style of functioning of the home minister.’ So, it was just his style of functioning! But, again, the Nanavati Commission gave no explanation for reducing the whole issue of responsiveness to Rao’s body language or something to that effect. Clearly, had it not been so laconic about its findings on Narasimha Rao, the Nanavati Commission would have been hard pressed to justify its clean chit to him. And that would in turn have brought the Rajiv Gandhi government into question, an eventuality that could have embarrassed the Congress-led government of Manmohan Singh, to which the report had been submitted.

Rape in the Time of Mourning the catalogue of crimes committed on the Sikhs in the first week of I n November 1984, the one that got the least attention was something that would ordinarily have stirred up a sensation: rape. Even as they went about raising slogans mourning Indira Gandhi’s death, the mobs in several places were aroused enough – sexually, that is – to rape female Sikhs. In contemporaneous press reports focusing on murder, loot and arson, there were fleeting references to complaints of rape. An otherwise candid study released a fortnight after the carnage, ‘Who are the Guilty?’ by human rights groups People’s Union for Democratic Rights, and People’s Union for Civil Liberties, said somewhat tentatively: ‘We also came across reports of gang-rape of women.’ If there was a veil of silence over the rape cases, it was partly because of the social stigma attached to the victims involved, and partly because they had, at the same time, been orphaned or widowed, and rendered homeless – tragedies that overshadowed their sexual trauma. The most glaring example was Trilokpuri, which grabbed the headlines when the Block 32 massacre was discovered. In the shocking details that emerged about the mass murder committed with the complicity of Congress Party members and the police, people lost sight of the fact that about thirty female Sikhs had been abducted and held captive for over twenty-four hours at the nearby Chilla village. Whatever the reason for it, the general reticence to talk about the sexual aspect of the orgy of violence in Delhi worked to the advantage of the rulers of the day. Had rape complaints received the attention they warranted, they would have had a shock value of their own. Then, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, for instance, would have perhaps found it difficult to come up with his infamous justification within a fortnight of the carnage,‘But, when a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little.’ Given his not-so-subtle attempt to play down its significance, he would have been hard pressed to explain how the violence meant to avenge his mother’s murder, had taken a carnal turn. While the falling of the tree was an allusion to Indira Gandhi’s murder, the shaking of the earth denoted the massacre of the Sikhs that followed in its wake. When Rajiv Gandhi suggested, however indirectly, that the massacre was bound to follow the assassination, he was clearly overstating his case. It’s not easy to pass off gang-rape as a spontaneous expression of krodh (intense anger), as he put it in the rally he addressed at Boat Club on 19 November 1984. There were, of course, other indications too that the course of violence had more to do with an organized move to teach the Sikhs a lesson, than an inevitable outburst of grief

and anger. Had the police not looked the other way, or colluded with the miscreants, the scale of the killings, for instance, was unlikely to have been so colossal. The rape angle also fitted in with the allegation made by the victims in their affidavits from across Delhi that there was little sign of grief over Indira Gandhi’s death among the rampaging mobs. The picture that emerges from eyewitness accounts of victims and others is that mobs were gleefully making obscene gestures, and laughing away, as they looted the Sikhs or watched them burning with tyres round their bodies. The Rajiv Gandhi government actually took umbrage at the insinuation of the victims that the miscreants were not in mourning. In its written arguments before the Misra Commission filed on 31 May 1986, the Rajiv Gandhi government asserted that ‘even when a baby or a cow is killed in an accident, the anguish of the mob is discernible. How is it that the mob was joyous? Such facts have been engineered to creep into affidavits due to political motives and propaganda purposes.’ Such exertions on the part of a government to legitimize the actions of the mobs would have seemed comical had the consequences not been so tragic. The glossing over of rape allegations by all concerned, including the Citizens Justice Committee, had two legal repercussions. Nobody was ever tried, let alone convicted, for committing rape during the carnage, whether as a separate offence or along with other offences. Secondly, as a corollary, no victim of the carnage has been paid compensation for being raped. The compensation package that was announced in three rounds over the years never mentioned rape. Victims of the carnage were compensated for death, injury, and loss of property or business. Renowned feminist, Madhu Kishwar, perhaps anticipated the pitfalls of being squeamish about rape allegations. She blew the whistle on this subject in her highly respected but small-circulation magazine called Manushi. In a special issue of Manushi brought out in the wake of the carnage, Kishwar, defying all traditional restraints, put a captioned picture of a rape victim on the cover, and published her first person account. Since Gurdip Kaur was a survivor of the massacre in Block 32, Trilokpuri, Kishwar could not have chosen a more representative victim. A middle-aged mother, Gurdip Kaur might have broken the silence because her entire family had anyway been wiped out. But, unfortunately, her heart-rending story remained unnoticed as the mainstream media continued to keep off this sensitive subject. Two decades later, Gurdip Kaur’s account of her gang-rape was placed on official records when Kishwar filed an affidavit before the Nanavati Commission, reproducing excerpts from her Manushi article. Here’s the tale that was originally recorded within days of the carnage: Gurdip Kaur, a 45-year-old woman from Block 32, Trilokpuri, told a

typical story. Her husband and three sons were brutally murdered in front of her. Her husband used to run a small shop in the locality. Her eldest son, Bhajan Singh, worked at the railway station; the second, in a radio repair shop; and the third, as a scooter driver. She says, ‘On the morning of 1 November, when Indira Mata’s body was brought to Teen Murti, everyone was watching television. Since 8.00 am, they were showing the homage being paid to her dead body. At about noon, my children said, “Mother, please make some food. We are hungry.”I had not cooked that day, and I said, “Son, everyone is mourning. She was our mother too. She helped us to settle here. So I don’t feel like lighting the fire today.” ‘Soon after this, the attack started. Three of the men ran out, and were set on fire. My youngest son stayed in the house with me. He shaved off his beard and cut his hair. But they came into the house. Those young boys, 14 and 16 years old, began to drag my son out even though he was hiding behind me. ‘They tore my clothes and stripped me naked in front of my son. My son cried, “Elder brothers, don’t do this. She is your mother just as she is my mother.” But they raped me right there, in front of my son, in my own house. They were young boys, maybe eight of them. When one of them raped me, I said, “My child, never mind. Do what you like. But remember, I have given birth to children. This child came into the world by this same path.” ‘After they had taken my honour, they left. I took my son out with me, and made him sit among the women, but they came and dragged him away. They took him to the street corner, hit him with lathis, sprinkled kerosene over him, and burnt him alive. ‘I tried to save him but they struck me with knives and broke my arm. At that time, I was completely naked. If I had even one piece of clothing on my body, I would have gone and thrown myself over my son and tried to save him. I would have done anything to save at least one young man of my family. Not one of the four is left.’ For all the courage Gurdip Kaur showed in 1984 in baring her soul to the world, the Nanavati Commission could not get itself to touch upon the rape issue in its report submitted in 2005. This is despite the fact that Madhu Kishwar followed up her affidavit with an oral testimony before the commission on 22 May 2001, reaffirming that Gurdip Kaur was among the ‘many women’ who complained to her in tape-recorded statements that they had been ‘gang-raped’ during the carnage. Since it was mandated to conduct a fresh inquiry into the 1984 carnage, the

Nanavati Commission could well have seized upon Madhu Kishwar’s deposition to explore a dimension that had not been touched by the earlier probe. In the event, the rape issue has remained under wraps. The closest the Nanavati Commission came to touching upon the subject of rape in its report was where it paraphrased the affidavit of a widow from Sultanpuri in west Delhi, Padmi Kaur. Since the R word is not mentioned in the affidavit, the Nanavati Commission conveniently pretended not to have understood the implication of what Padmi Kaur had disclosed about her daughter, Maina Kaur. The same affidavit was cited by its predecessor, the Ranganath Misra Commission, which quoted it extensively in its report. Neither of the Supreme Court judges, who inquired into the 1984 carnage, displayed enough gender sensitivity to react to the unspoken acts of barbarity suffered by Maina Kaur on the eve of what was to be her wedding. This is how Padmi Kaur, in her affidavit of 1985, narrated the tragedy that befell her daughter: On 1 November 1984, we were sitting in our house. Our relatives had also come because of the wedding of my daughter Maina Kaur. When we were taking tea, the police announced that all the sardars should remain confined to their houses and nothing would happen. We got frightened. After some time the mob arrived, broke open our door and came inside. They caught hold of Maina Kaur forcibly, and started tearing her clothes. In her self-defence my daughter also tore their clothes and hit them. They tried to criminally assault my daughter. My husband begged them to let her go. The mob said that they would kill him, ‘Koyi bhi Sikh ka bacha nahin bachega’ (No Sikh son would be spared). They broke the hands and feet of my daughter and kidnapped her. They confined her in their home for three days… Now my daughter Maina Kaur has fallen ill and has become like a mad girl. In keeping with the general pattern of the 1984 carnage, the mob attacked all the male Sikhs in sight. Since she had guests at home ahead of her daughter’s wedding, the mob found plenty of prey in Padmi Kaur’s house. ‘The mob attacked my husband Charan Singh, son Ashok Singh, neighbour Balinder Singh, brothers Inder Singh and Dalip Singh, nephew Bhajan Singh, brothersin-law, Prem Singh and Dharam Singh and Dharam Singh’s son Anil Singh,’ Padmi Kaur, who was then forty, said in her affidavit, adding, ‘The mob hit them on their heads with lathis and set them on fire after pouring kerosene over them. All of them died there. Then Omi (one of the miscreants) came in a Tempo at night, loaded the dead bodies and took them away.’ Since many members of the mob were from her neighbourhood, Padmi Kaur gave a long list of assailants in her affidavit. The most prominent member of the mob she mentioned in the context of Maina Kaur’s abduction was Brahmanand

Gupta, a kerosene dealer and a close associate of local MP, Sajjan Kumar. Incidentally, Brahmanand Gupta and Sajjan Kumar feature together in many of the affidavits related to the killings in Sultanpuri. It was on a writ petition filed by Brahmanand Gupta in 1987 that the Delhi High Court stayed the functioning, and later quashed the very appointment of an administrative committee set up to redress the grievance of victims that many cases had either not been registered or not been investigated. Though they have been tried for murder in some cases, it is a commentary on the rule of law in India that it has so far not been able to punish either of them. Just as it is a commentary on the Indian democracy that Sajjan Kumar, who has been accused of leading mobs during the carnage in the most number of affidavits, secured the maximum votes in the whole country – 8,55,543 – when he won from his outer Delhi constituency in the last Lok Sabha election in 2004.

Under the Army’s Nose

T he excerpt runs over 600 words. No other affidavit got as much space in the report of the Justice Ranganath Misra Commission. Quoting it extensively, the commission cited carnage widow Joginder Kaur’s affidavit as ‘an illustrative instance of the humane attitude of some of the police officers during the riots’. There’s no denying that some of the police officers did display a ‘humane attitude’, while a majority of their colleagues abdicated their responsibilities, or worse, connived with the mobs. This is evident from Joginder Kaur’s own example as she lost her husband, a government employee, and the eldest of her three sons, in the carnage. Her other sons, too, would have probably been killed had three policemen, bucking the trend, not come to their rescue and threatened to fire at the mob. Much as the conduct of those three policemen was creditable, Joginder Kaur’s affidavit disclosed issues of far greater significance, which were either glossed over, or even suppressed, by the Misra Commission. How the commission played with evidence bears scrutiny. This is how it reproduced Joginder Kaur’s narrative from 3 November, by when she and two of her sons had got separated from her husband and eldest son, while they were all on the run: On 3 November 1984 when we were hiding in the bushes, the mob came towards that side. They had torches and lights with them. They spotted us in the bushes and caught hold of us. I told them that we were Hindus but they saw the turban marks on the heads of my sons. They said: `You are sardars. You have got your hair cut just now.’ The mob started beating both my sons. I said in Hindi: ‘We are Hindus, do not beat us.’ Thereupon, one person came out of the mob and said, `Listen to them carefully. Don’t say them anything.’ He asked the other men to take us to the Mandir (referring to a nearby temple) and keep us there. When we were being taken to the Mandir, some people tried to hit my sons with sword and iron rods but I came forward and thus rescued my sons. The sword hit my leg which started bleeding profusely. In the Mandir, to save us, the Pujari sent us inside the Mandir and locked the gate from outside. The Pujari asked us to sit there and that he will send us to Gurudwara when the curfew is lifted. This was the Shiv Mandir of Sagarpur. Outside the Mandir, the mob was shouting at Pujari and threatened to break open the lock. They even tried to break open the lock. This continued for a long time and in the meantime many more persons joined the mob. Then somebody shouted that the Mandir be set on fire if the Pujari did not open the lock. When they poured kerosene

from the grill of the Mandir and tried to set it on fire, I dashed my forehead at the feet of Devi and prayed to Her to appear and save us. My sons started weeping loudly along with me. At that time, one person who had wrapped a blanket around himself came forward and asked the mob not to set the Mandir on fire. That man asked, ‘Sister, where have you to go?’ I told him that we had to go to Maharani Bagh. He said that he is also from that side and he would save us. But I did not believe him. He told me that he has the key of the back door and that he is a police inspector and has also a revolver with him. He removed his blanket and showed me the revolver. He was wearing a police uniform. He showed me his identity card also and upon this I believed him. Then he made an announcement at the loudspeaker of the Mandir, `Extremists have arrived towards the Railway line. Run for your lives.’ Many from the mob ran towards the line and he made us come out from the back gate. He called 5-6 more persons and instructed them that we have to be saved. Hardly had he taken us for some distance than the mob returned and surrounded us. Some people in the mob enquired from the police inspector as to why he was taking the two sardar children and thereby putting them to a loss of Rs 500 each. The mob told the inspector that they would not allow the sardar children to go. At this the inspector drew out his revolver and one more man drew out his revolver and threatened the mob that they would shoot anybody who came forward. The mob retreated and they took us out from that place. On the way, two persons accompanying the inspector also removed their blankets. Both were in police uniforms. One of them was a police inspector and he told me that he was a police inspector. They accompanied us up to and left us at Gurdwara Sadar Cantonment. After recounting such a dramatic episode, pregnant with significance, all that the Misra Commission said was that it had made a ‘serious attempt to identify’ the police officer, who, putting his life on the line, had rescued Joginder Kaur and two of her sons. Its curiosity was limited, by its own admission, to finding out why that officer and his colleagues had ‘covered themselves with blankets in the manner described’. Furthermore, the commission itself speculated whether they might have wanted to conceal their identity as police officers, for their own security, since they were outnumbered by the mob. For all its curiosity to know why the policemen had covered themselves with blankets, the Misra Commission failed to notice in that very excerpt a disclosure of far greater evidentiary value. Joginder Kaur saw members of the mob remonstrating with the police inspector that, by shielding her two sons, he was’putting them to a loss of Rs 500 each’. A loss of Rs 500 each! They were so upset about their monetary loss that, at that point, the policemen had to draw

out their revolvers and threaten to fire at the mob. It was a telltale evidence, preciously scarce, of the manner in which the violence had been organized. Rioters were paid, and they were paid in proportion to the number of Sikhs killed by them. The pay-offs issue reinforced the allegation that the violence, far from being spontaneous, was the outcome of a high-level conspiracy. Yet, the Misra Commission glossed over it lest it contradicted its big finding that the violence had begun spontaneously, and that whatever organisation had come into play at a later stage was confined to unnamed ‘anti-social elements’ and Congress Party workers. Had it taken cognizance of Joginder Kaur’s revelation about payments to the killers, the commission would have had to probe whether, in the circumstances, any organization other than the Congress Party could have funded the violence and got away with it. In retrospect, it is just as well that Justice Ranganath Misra overlooked the revelation about the pay-offs. He might otherwise have deleted it from the excerpt, just the way he did away with another inconvenient sentence from the same excerpt. The excised portion related to the conversation the policemen had with Joginder Kaur, as they escorted her to Gurdwara Sadar Cantonment. Her affidavit said: ‘On the way, they told us that they did not know how they took pity on us as they were otherwise apprehending and killing sardars.’ In other words, the policemen admitted that their force was very much involved in the violence, yet another indication of the large scale of the organization. In Joginder Kaur’s affidavit, this crucial sentence disclosing the confession of a policeman about police complicity in the killings figures just before the last sentence of the excerpt (‘They accompanied us …’), reproduced in the commission’s report. The deletion of the sentence suggests that Justice Misra, then a sitting judge of the Supreme Court, had no qualms about tailoring his evidence to fit his findings. That he consciously deleted the damaging sentence is all the more evident from the fact that Joginder Kaur happened to be questioned about the very same sentence by the counsel for Delhi Administration, RK Anand, when she appeared before the Misra Commission on 31 January 1986. According to the record of her cross-examination, she reiterated her conversation with the police inspector in this manner, ‘On the way, when the policemen were escorting me out, the police inspector told me that for some unknown (reason) he developed pity for us; otherwise sardars were to be apprehended and killed.’ Equally signficant, the Misra Commission glossed over the fact that Joginder Kaur’s husband and eldest son were killed more than a day after the army had been deployed in that area. She was then a resident of Palam Colony, which is strategically located in the vicinity of the airport and the cantonment area. It fell in the jurisdiction of the south police district, where the army is officially admitted to have been deployed by 4.00 pm on 1 November. But it made little impact on the rampaging mobs in Palam Colony, despite being right under the

army’s nose. Consider the sequence of events disclosed in Joginder Kaur’s affidavit: On the morning of 1 November, her house, like those of thousands of other Sikhs across Delhi, was looted and set on fire. She and her family members escaped by the skin of their teeth as a kindly Hindu neighbour allowed them to hide in his house. But the mob launched a fresh attack around 6.00 pm, a good two hours after the deployment of the army in the district. Since the mob threatened to search their benefactor’s house, Joginder Kaur and her family shifted to the house of another Hindu neighbour. About twenty-four hours later, even as Palam Colony remained in the grip of violence, the second neighbour forced them out of his house on the evening of 2 November. Out of desperation, they took refuge in a house under construction. It was when they fled from that doorless house, on being discovered by the mob, that Joginder Kaur and her two younger sons got separated from her husband and eldest son, who were killed at some point after the evening of 2 November. Meanwhile, in the course of their stealthy movements, Joginder Kaur and her two sons came across a policeman for the first time since the outbreak of the violence. When she begged him for help, he said, ‘Do not talk to us. We will shoot you.’ The group of three victims spent the night hiding in the bushes. The next day, 3 November, saw the drama which the Misra Commission selectively quoted in its report, keeping out, of course, the devastating revelation that the police inspector who had saved them admitted to her that they were otherwise ‘apprehending and killing sardars’’ Incidentally, the admission made by her saviour on 3 November tallied with the threat issued by another policeman the previous evening when he said, as mentioned earlier, that he would shoot her if she pleaded with him for help. Such was the state of lawlessness in Palam Colony for as long as forty-eight hours after the army, the last bastion of security, was said to have been in operation to aid the civil powers. Palam Colony fell in the jurisdiction of the Delhi Cantonment police station, which, despite the relative advantage of having the cover of the army right from the evening of 1 November, went on to become one of the worst affected areas in the capital. The official death toll in the jurisdiction of the Delhi Cantonment police station was 341. It was the only one among the worst affected police stations in Delhi, which included Kalyanpuri, Sultanpuri, and Mongolpuri, to have had the army’s help from the first day of the carnage. Given its ineffectiveness till the carnage ran its course on the evening of 3 November, there is hardly any reference to the army’s role during that period in the affidavits filed by the victims from that area. Joginder Kaur is but a case in point. These anomalies about the Delhi Cantonment police station put the whole deployment of the army in perspective. If Kolkata could resort to the army on 31 October and nip the violence in the bud, Delhi had greater reason to do the same that day because of the larger scale of violence. And if the authorities in the

nation’s capital dithered for several hours even after the killings began on the morning of 1 November, the delayed deployment of the army betrayed a reluctance to interfere with the course of the carnage. So, even when the army was said to be in operation, it was evident that its deployment was more in letter than in spirit. The army deployment turned out to be as farcical as the other measures that were taken for record, such as the announcement of a curfew that was never enforced, and the appeals for peace that were issued by the very leaders who had overtly or covertly engineered the violence. Unlike a lot of other developing countries, India has never faced any uncertainty about whether the army is under civilian control. Much as it is an essential feature of any democracy, civilian control over the Indian army has, however, been prone to abuse. That there was such an abuse in Delhi in 1984 is evident from a comparison with Kanpur, which was, by a wide margin, the next most affected city in that carnage. In Kanpur, the civilian authorities requisitioned the army’s help at 9.35 am on 1 November, and the first column moved in within ten minutes of the request. Though the incidence of violence was many times greater in Delhi, the deployment of the army began there about six hours later. Though its district magistrate, Brijendra Yadav, was himself accused of complicity, the Kanpur administration immediately set up a joint police and army control room at one Kotwali police station. There was no such coordination in Delhi. The army resorted to firing in Kanpur around midnight on 1 November, and killed two rioters. In Delhi, the army started firing at mobs only on 3 November. Since the army can open fire only with the written clearance of an executive magistrate, the Kanpur administration provided a magistrate to each army unit right on the first day. For the same to happen in Delhi, there was a delay of more than a day on the pretext that the police officers in the commissionerate system had executive powers. The report of the Misra Commission also brought out a rare example from Kanpur of an army officer seeking to enforce the rule of law in the teeth of opposition from a civil authority. Leading a platoon, Captain B Bareth of Maratha Light Infantry was moving around a locality of Kanpur in the company of district magistrate, Brijendra Yadav, and another executive magistrate on the morning of 1 November when they came across the house of a Sikh that was being attacked by a huge mob. In his testimony before the commission, Captain Bareth said that he proposed to Yadav that they needed to disperse the crowd immediately, or at least, push it back by 500 yards before his soldiers could rescue the beleaguered Sikhs: ‘Leaving the discussion with us at that point, the district magistrate started talking to a few of the people from the crowd. What he talked, I do not know, since we were away from him at that point. He asked the police who were around to fire a few shots. When the

crowd did not leave and no sign of improvement in the situation was visible, I filled up the requisition form IAFD 908 which authorizes, on the requisition of a magistrate, use of force including firing, depending on the situation.’ In the event, Brijendra Yadav did not sign the requisition, and forbade the other magistrate to do the necessary paperwork. Instead, he told Captain Bareth to go elsewhere as he would himself deal with the situation on the spot. A little later, the house was attacked by the mob. Apart from one widow, all the members of the two families living there were put to death. The property was looted, and the house was set on fire. After his face-off with Captain Bareth, Yadav probably regretted that he had to go through the motion of calling in the army. If the Kanpur administration was bad, the Delhi administration was worse. But from the available material, it seems that, unlike Captain Bareth, none of the army officers deployed in Delhi in1984 stood up to the abuse of civilian control over them. The tragedies that befell Joginder Kaur and hundreds of other victims like her despite the deployment of the army, suggest that the officers in olive combat dress preferred ‘discipline’ – or whatever passed for it – over the rule of law.

False Hero

T hough the army was deployed in phases throughout Delhi from the evening of 1 November to the evening of 2 November, there was no let-up in the mass killings till the evening of 3 November. Armed mobs then made themselves scarce as suddenly as they had appeared three days earlier. It was as if somebody had pulled the plug on mass killings. Security forces across Delhi came into their own as they rediscovered their abilities and controlled stray incidents of violence, which occurred for some more days. It was in such circumstances, after the carnage had all but subsided, that the army and the police mounted a joint operation at Paharganj in central Delhi on the evening of 5 November. It was, all the same, their most touted joint operation, for which one soldier (posthumously), and two police officers, were given gallantry awards. Those were, incidentally, the only awards given to security forces in connection with the massacre of 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi. Oddly enough, the joint operation was neither about taking action against the mobs nor, for that matter, about rescuing the Sikhs. In keeping with the pattern displayed by the police at the height of violence, the joint operation of 5 November was targeted at victims rather than culprits. It was, in fact, led by the chief of Delhi’s central district police, Amod Kanth, the very officer who was involved in the arrest of war hero, Manmohan Bir Singh Talwar, at Patel Nagar on 1 November, as described in an earlier chapter. It was, therefore, no mere coincidence that the 5 November joint operation at Paharganj dealt severely with a Sikh joint family, although its members had fired in self-defence from their home, at a mob that had killed the head of the family, Amir Singh. The family had licensed firearms because hunting had been one of its hobbies from the days of Amir Singh’s father. The combined might of the police and the army was used to arrest sixteen members of the Sikh family, including six women and five children. Policemen beat them with lathis, bundled them into a truck, and kept them in the custody of Daryaganj police station through the night, without giving them food. The next morning, Amir Singh’s family was sent to Tihar Jail where all its members were detained for another eight days. Although their relative, Narinder Singh, was arrested along with the family, he escaped such detention thanks to a bullet injury sustained by him during the shoot-out with the police and the army. Narinder Singh was taken to a hospital, where he died on 23 November. The arrest and detention of Amir Singh’s family was in connection with a murder case booked against it, as there were two casualties on the other side too. A rioter, Mangal Dass, and a soldier, Kishan Bahadur Gurang, were killed in the shoot-out at Paharganj. The whole episode was splashed in the press the next

day, as Amod Kanth, the senior police officer who had led the joint operation, gave a heroic spin to the role of security forces, particularly to himself and his lieutenant, SS Manan. Citing the death of soldier Gurang in the operation, it was made out that Kanth and Manan had, putting their lives in danger, preempted a retaliatory strike by the Sikhs. And on that basis, the police and the army recommended gallantry medals to each other’s personnel. In June 1985, the Rajiv Gandhi government conferred gallantry awards on Amod Kanth, Manan, and the deceased soldier. The citation of the awards said that Amod Kanth and Manan had ‘displayed conspicuous gallantry, courage and devotion to duty of a high order’. They did so when, according to the citation, ‘some miscreants started indiscriminate firing’ from that Paharganj house. And when those ‘shooters’ realized that they had been ‘overpowered’, they ‘decided to surrender’ and, that is how, ‘sixteen persons were taken into custody’. The citation, however, glossed over inconvenient facts: that the sixteen arrested persons were predominantly women and children, that all the so-called shooters were members of one joint family, and that they had fired in self-defence from their own home against the backdrop of the massacre of fellow Sikhs. About three years later, the Rajiv Gandhi government set the record straight, however partially, when it took the policy decision of dropping all the cases foisted on the Sikhs during the 1984 carnage. The issue of malicious prosecution was tacitly acknowledged by the Rajiv Gandhi government in 1987 after obtaining a clean chit from the Misra Commission for its role in the1984 carnage. While seeking withdrawal of the murder proceedings against Amir Singh’s family, the prosecution relied on a ballistic report from the Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL) which could not give a definitive finding on whether the bullets that killed the soldier and rioter in Paharganj, were from any of the firearms recovered from Amir Singh’s family. On the contrary, the ballistic report hinted at the possibility of the bullets having been fired from a .303 rifle, which is normally used by the police. Thus, the CFSL report leaned towards the Sikh family’s defence that the soldier and rioter had been killed in the cross firing between the police and the army. Accordingly, in December 1988, additional sessions judge, SP Singh Chaudhuri, acquitted all the members of Amir Singh’s family of the murder charge. The acquittal order said: Public prosecutor moved an application on 28.7.87 (stating) that the Delhi Administration has decided to withdraw from the prosecution on the ground that the CFSL report does not support the prosecution case; that as per the opinion of the expert, the bullets recovered from the bodies of the deceased Mangal Dass and Krishan Bahadur were not fired from the arms recovered from the accused; that this report has ruled out the injuries

being caused to the deceased by bullets fired from the arms recovered from the accused persons. Much as their acquittal was long overdue, it did not automatically entitle them to compensation that was due to families of the Sikhs found to have been killed by mobs in the carnage. Since Amir Singh had been portrayed as an offender in the police gallantry story, he did not figure in the official list of ‘victims’. His family had to struggle for another decade before the government classified Amir Singh as a victim, and paid compensation on that basis. The vindication of the family honour emboldened Amir Singh’s son, Trilok Singh, to file an affidavit attacking the police, before a fresh judicial inquiry set up in 2000. Recalling the machinations made by Amod Kanth for his personal glory at the expense of a victim’s family, Trilok Singh requested the Justice Nanavati Commission to recommend that the officer be stripped of his award. The Indian Express reported Trilok Singh’s disclosures with a banner headline: ‘Amod Kanth’s gallantry medal is a badge of shame.’ By issuing notices to Amod Kanth and Manan to explain their conduct, the Nanavati Commission did take cognizance of the Paharganj shoot-out. But when it came to giving its findings in 2005, the commission seemed to have missed the wood for the trees. Far from addressing the incongruity of police officers getting gallantry awards for arresting a Sikh family in the context of a massacre of Sikhs, the commission took pains to determine that the besieged family had indulged in ‘indiscriminate firing’. It also rejected the allegation against Amod Kanth that, rather than taking action against the rioting mob, he was ‘strict with the persons who were defending themselves’. In a bid to buttress its finding that he did not display any ‘anti-Sikh attitude’ at Paharganj, the commission went out of its way to cite an unrelated instance where Amod Kanth reportedly resisted pressure from a superior officer (HC Jatav), and a Congress leader (Dharam Dass Shastri), when they wanted him to release rioters who had looted Sikhs. At the same time, the commission did not say a word about a more relevant issue – that even if the Paharganj family had crossed the limits of self-defence and shot two persons dead – didn’t the Rajiv Gandhi government add insult to injury by giving gallantry awards for the arrest of a besieged Sikh family in the context of the 1984 carnage? Though the commission ducked this crucial question, the affected family has not given up its quest for an answer. In 2007, one of the family members, Amrik Singh, filed a writ petition before Delhi High Court to ascertain the exact basis on which the gallantry awards were given to Amod Kanth and Manan. He made a strong case for judicial intervention by recounting the devastation caused to his family by those award-hungry officers. Two of the minors, a boy and a girl, never recovered from the trauma of detention and died within a few years. In keeping with the spirit of the newly enacted right to information, the High

Court summoned the original file on which the Rajiv Gandhi government had recommended to President Zail Singh that these two officers be given gallantry awards. The petitioner sought to know, among other things, whether the file had disclosed to the president that the so-called ‘indiscriminate shooters’ arrested from a Paharganj house were actually sixteen members of a joint family residing there, and that the arrested persons included six women and five children. As they say, the devil is in the details.

PART – II THE STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE: AN INSIDE ACCOUNT

Personal Fallout

T he date was 31 October 1984. It took more than an hour for word to reach Delhi High Court. Even so, the first information sketchy. Indira Gandhi had been shot. No details about who pulled the trigger, but the bullets had injured her seriously. Before I could recover from that shocking news, fellow lawyers were buzzing with accounts of how Mrs Gandhi had been shot that morning in her residence by a couple of her own guards. The identity of the assailants was not yet clear, except that their names ended with Singh. Given the shadow cast by Operation Bluestar in June 1984 – when the army stormed the Golden Temple, the holiest Sikh shrine, killing scores of militants as well as innocent pilgrims – I instinctively feared that there could be a Sikh angle to the attack on Mrs Gandhi. Since I am a Sikh myself, a colleague tried to allay my anxiety. ‘Singh does not necessarily mean they are Sikhs,’ he said. True, Singh is a common enough surname in north India. But then, while all Singhs are not Sikhs, all Sikhs are Singhs. The speculation ended before long. The government-controlled All India Radio confirmed that both assailants were Sikhs. Newspapers followed with special afternoon editions confirming the worst about Mrs Gandhi’s condition. The judges in the High Court adjourned all proceedings for the day. Expecting a similar disruption of schedule at my wife’s workplace, I drove my motorcycle to Naraina in west Delhi to pick her up. But on reaching the office of the company where she was working as a food technologist, I was told, to my surprise, that it would close at the usual time, 5.30 pm. I should perhaps have called her up before starting from the High Court. Making phone calls in those pre-mobile days was, however, not so easy. Public telephone booths, too, were few and far between. The landline was still a scarce commodity. You needed to wait for years, or bribe, or pull strings to get a telephone connection. Though I had been practising as a lawyer for three years, I did not have a telephone at home, or in my tiny practice chamber, which I had improvised in an old building located in what was then the commercial hub of Delhi, Connaught Place. While I was hanging around in the vicinity of my wife’s office, I noticed that it was life as usual in a nearby market despite the news of Mrs Gandhi’s death. When Maninder finally emerged from her office at 5.30 pm, I took her straight to my chamber in Connaught Place. My sole employee, a peon, informed me that I had narrowly missed two Sikh visitors from Punjab. They were, in fact,

guests in our house. Apparently, they waited in my chamber to tell me that, in the wake of Mrs Gandhi’s murder, they had decided to cut their visit short and return to Punjab. I reacted to their decision to leave Delhi, with horror. In my ignorance, I imagined that Delhi was a safer bet for Sikhs than taking the risk of travelling through Haryana to reach Punjab, in such circumstances. What influenced me to think so was that only a few months earlier, the insurgency in Punjab had provoked the Hindus living in Haryana to pull the Sikhs out of their vehicles and beat them up. So, Maninder and I decided to rush home in a bid to dissuade our guests from leaving Delhi. It was just past 7.00 pm when we reached the intersection of Rajpath and Janpath, the two most prominent roads of the imperial capital, built by the British Raj. The traffic signal was red. Typical of a two-wheeler driver, I would often manoeuvre through the waiting traffic to reach the head so that I could take off the moment the signal turned green. But that day, I did not have the confidence to perform my customary manoeuvre. And even when the signal turned green, I started moving hesitantly. Though it was getting dark, I could see somebody waving at me frantically from inside a car coming from the opposite side. He clearly wanted me to stop. I turned to the left and halted my motorcycle, thinking that he was one of our acquaintances. He turned out to be a stranger, a young Hindu, who was playing a Good Samaritan. He came running out of his car to warn me about the trouble that awaited all turbaned people down that road. ‘Brother, do not go ahead,’ he said, adding that he had seen a mob beating Sikhs at the junction of Aurangzeb Road and Tughlak Road. It sent a shiver down my spine. That was indeed the first inkling I got of violence targeting the Sikhs, right in the capital. Thanking the kind stranger, I changed the direction of my motorcycle and took a more circuitous route to my house in Amrit Nagar, behind the posh neighbourhood of South Extension Part I. On the way, I stopped three other Sikhs on two-wheelers and conveyed the warning I had received about the danger zone. With every passing minute, Maninder and I were becoming frenzied. We could not get over the shock of discovering that Sikhs were in danger even in Delhi. After all, we had set out to persuade our guests to remain in Delhi on the basis of our conviction that they would be safer in the capital than on the Haryana highways. In the final stretch to our home, we drove through the narrow and congested Kotla Mubarakpur Road. We were in such panic that we did not even notice that a gurdwara we crossed everyday in that area had been set on fire. We saw the flames only after reaching home, that too because our Hindu landlord and his family, the Bahris, pointed out the gurdwara to us.

The gurdwara was barely 400 metres from our house. The Bahris were standing on the road outside. They expressed surprise and relief at seeing us safe. They did have reason to be surprised at our safety because of the extent of rioting that was already happening in our neighbourhood, which included the South Extension market falling directly on the way of the mobs emerging from what was the origin of the violence on 31 October: All India Institute of Medical Sciences, where Mrs Gandhi’s bullet-ridden body lay for several hours. Little wonder then that the Bahris had wanted to tell us to remain wherever we were, and not risk entering an area engulfed by violence. The only reason they could not forewarn me was because I did not have any contact number. We enquired from the Bahris about our guests. We learnt that our friends from Punjab had already left with their luggage. We had mixed feelings about that since we were not sure any more whether they would have been safer in our house. The noise of rioting could be heard from all sides. The landlord asked us to get inside our apartment on the first floor. Our apartment was actually sandwiched between the two floors on which the landlord’s family lived. The landlord and his wife, their younger son, and daughter-in-law, lived on the ground floor, while their elder son, and daughterin-law stayed on the second floor. We were cautioned not to switch on the lights in our apartment. Besides, they took the precaution of locking the main gate as well as the door leading to the staircase. That is how we spent a tense and traumatic night, thinking that we were caught in an isolated pocket of violence. That impression was dispelled the next morning on 1 November when I rang up an uncle of mine, Tej Partap Singh. I called from the landlord’s telephone on the ground floor. The uncle I contacted was my only relative in Delhi, and in more than one way, my benefactor. He was the one who had persuaded me to set up practice in Delhi immediately after finishing my LLB in Chandigarh. Whatever little income I had also came mostly from him, as he had quite a few cases related to his enormous estate. In fact, my chamber was in one of his buildings. He had allowed me to set it up, without charging any rent.

Arun Nehru, a close relative of Rajiv Gandhi and a key playerin the installation of his government, escorting President ZailSingh at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) inNew Delhi where Indira Gandhi’s body lay.

At the swearing-in at Rashtrapati Bhawan, Rajiv Gandhi sitting withhis four Cabinet colleagues and Delhi Congress leader HKL Bhagat. Bottom: A damaged limousine from the cavalcade of President ZailSingh, a casualty of the first major attack on Sikhs in the wake ofIndira Gandhi’s assassination.

A motorcycle burning in the vicinity of AIIMS, the first attack on Sikhsrecorded by the police on 31 October 1984. Bottom: Sikh vehicles attacked in an avenue in Lutyens’ Delhi even afterthe declaration of curfew on 1 November 1984.

In my ignorance and anxiety, I requested my uncle, influential that he was, to get the police to rescue us from our home. I was shocked to hear him say that it was beyond his capability. He said that the police were looking the other way as armed goons went after the Sikhs everywhere. That was when it dawned upon me that violence had gripped the whole city, not just my neighbourhood. More importantly, my uncle’s admission of his inability to rescue me was the first indication I got of the police complicity in the violence. My uncle suggested that if Maninder and I could somehow manage to reach his more centrally located house on our own, we would at least have the solace of being together in the hour of crisis. True, but then, there was no way I could think of reaching my uncle’s home safely. I had no option but to stay put in my house, hoping against hope that I would remain unnoticed. Luckily for us, the landlord and his family were willing to shelter us even as they were worried about the possibility of an attack on their property. They locked us up in our apartment so that they would be able to claim to

the rioters that we were away. As a result, we were cut off from the world the whole day and the following night. Come to think of it, we did not even have a television for diversion. Maybe that was a blessing in disguise. We were spared the trauma of seeing people raise provocative slogans at Teen Murti Bhawan, where Indira Gandhi’s mortal remains lay in state. I dread to imagine how we would have felt watching Doordarshan – the only channel available then, and notorious for being unabashedly the government’s mouthpiece – telecast this blatant exhortation to murder: ‘Khoon ka badla khoon se lenge’ (We’ll avenge murder with murder). Whether it was due to the telecast or not, that incendiary slogan caught on in our neighbourhood the next morning on 2 November. All of a sudden, around 11.00 am, we heard it being shouted loud and clear, again and again, right next to our house. Khoon ka badla khoon se lenge. It was more than just a chilling slogan. My blood was indeed close to being shed to avenge Indira Gandhi’s murder. The situation was grim. The very next house, where a Sikh family lived, was set on fire. The mob seemed to know the exact location of every Sikh household in the area. Inevitably, they zeroed in on our apartment as well. They pelted stones at our windows, and some of the glass panes broke. We could hear Bahri senior remonstrating with the mob not to attack the apartment, claiming that its Sikh residents had already fled. But the miscreants showed no sign of relenting. Bahri’s elder daughter-in-law , a German, who lived on the floor above ours, came running down to our apartment and unlocked the door. She asked us to rush to her apartment upstairs and hide there, as the mob was trying to break the door leading to the staircase. There, from the second floor, we saw further evidence of the risk the Bahris were taking when it was an open season to kill the Sikhs. Our Sikh neighbours slipped into our landlord’s house from the rear door. The Bahris gave shelter to them after they escaped from their burning house. This happened in the backyard even as the mob was threatening to break into the building. We heard a rioter shouting that they wanted to check for themselves whether any Sikh was hiding in the house. Our rescuer’s response to that threat was to hide us in her loft, a tiny, closed space where they stored quilts. Since she was four months pregnant, Maninder had great difficulty in climbing up to the loft. And we barely had any space to move in the loft which was dark and stuffy. Given her delicate condition, I was naturally worried about Maninder, and our unborn child. But she was more worried about me because, with my turban and other visible signs of being a Sikh, I was more likely to be attacked. We were cooped up inside the loft for over an hour. The German daughter-in-law of the Bahris finally opened the door when the army arrived on the scene and the mob fled. She said, ‘Now you can escape. The

army will take care of you.’ As we got out of the loft in a hurry, Maninder had to jump from a height of at least four feet. We saw three army trucks and a few soldiers. They were there because of the exertions of a Hindu who ran a small garment factory in our neighbourhood. Worried that the fire in the Sikh neighbour’s house might spread to his garment factory, he ran to the Ring Road (Mahatma Gandhi Marg) about a kilometre away and called the army trucks which happened to be passing by. On arriving at the spot, the army men apparently announced that the Sikhs could get into their trucks which were heading to relief camps. The neighbours who were hiding in our landlord’s house made a dash for the trucks. As we followed suit, I noticed that I was without my turban, but Maninder did not let me retrace my steps to bring one. She couldn’t wait a moment longer to get into the safety of an army truck. One of the soldiers on the spot was a Sikh. His blazing eyes testified to his helplessness. As I gathered later, the army everywhere was under strict instructions that day to limit their actions to rescuing the Sikhs, and not to touch any rioters. For all our anxiety to get into an army truck, we did not actually get to sit in one because of Maninder’s inability, in her pregnant condition, to climb up. Our landlord’s family again came to our rescue. His younger son, and daughter-inlaw, drove us in their car, following the army convoy. But after driving on the Ring Road for a while, they broke off from the army convoy and went into the campus of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), as two of their family members were doctors staying there. The doctor couple was kind enough to offer shelter to us. But, sensing danger to their house, they suggested that I cut my hair and shave off my beard. Since I was unprepared to make such a sacrifice, it was clear that I would have to go elsewhere. Maninder and I felt that we would perhaps have been better off going to a relief camp in the army convoy. She hit upon the idea of calling one of my Hindu friends who was an Indian Airlines pilot, Captain Davinder Singh Giare. She thought of him because we had met a paramilitary commando at a gathering in Giare’s house. We were hoping that Giare would come to rescue us with security guards. But as his commando contacts were then unavailable, Giare came with a common friend and another commercial pilot, Captain AS Malli, who was also a Sikh although a clean-shaven one. Maninder was unsure whether Giare and Malli constituted sufficient security for us to venture out. That led to a bit of melodrama. Our two friends promised Maninder that they would rather give up their own lives than let any rioter lay his hands on me. Maninder realized that that was the most she could have asked for in the circumstances. I lay on the floor of the car, and was covered with a quilt. Giare and Malli lived in Saket which was about seven kilometres from AIIMS. Giare, who was at the wheel, did not, however, take the straight route. While drivng to the AIIMS campus, he had

carefully surveyed the route to note the points where the mobs were operating, and searching vehicles for Sikhs. So he took us through all sorts of lanes and bylanes to avoid those mobs. The car did come across one all the same, but Giare pressed the accelerator and sped past the rioters, giving them no chance to discover me. At Giare’s house, his wife, Vijay, told us about the plight of their Sikh neighbour, a retired colonel. They had earlier given us a glowing account of that Sikh officer’s newly built house and its beautiful interior. But tragically, the house was gutted the previous day. The mob had looted everything and, as Vijay put it, ‘did not leave even a spoon behind’. The victims were lucky to flee from the rear door and find refuge in Giare’s house. When Giare returned from his flight on the morning of 2 November, he was upset that he could not save his neighbour’s house. Giare was confident that he would have been able to prevent the mob attack if he had been around. His conviction was based on the belief that rioters were basically cowards. It didn’t take more than a single person, he asserted, ‘to scare the hell out of them’. As he went out to patrol the area with nothing more than a stick, Giare told us, ‘Let me see how anyone would now dare to touch a single house in my lane.’ Giare got to test his theory the same night in the course of his patrolling. He took a break in between to come home and tell us that, for all the care he had taken, he found a mob inside a house at the corner of the street. It was, needless to add, a Sikh’s house, and they were looting every valuable item in sight. A sixfooter with broad shoulders, Giare shouted at them to get out – but to little avail. Then, when he saw an army jeep passing by, Giare ran out and stopped it. He asked the officer who emerged from it, a young captain, to open fire. The captain, however, pleaded helplessness, saying that he had no orders to open fire. Giare taunted him, ‘What kind of orders are you waiting for when you see this happening?’ That apparently awakened the soldier within him. The captain fired two rounds in the air. That was enough to cause a stampede as scores of people who had gathered there ran for their lives. Sure enough, no rioter entered that lane even after the captain’s exit. We remained there for two days, by when the army was finally allowed the freedom to quell the violence. They did not have much to do anywhere to end the madness that had gripped the capital. Indeed, Giare’s formula seemed to work everywhere. The slightest indication from the army that they were not going to be passive spectators anymore had a dramatic effect on the mobs. They would run for their lives, forgetting all about their apparent resolve to avenge Mrs Gandhi’s murder by killing the Sikhs, looting their properties, and raping their women. On the morning of 5 November, Giare had to resume his flight duties. Since

the violence had just about subsided, he was reluctant to leave Maninder and me at home. We suggested that he should help us catch the earliest flight to Chandigarh, the capital of Punjab, our home state. Giare took us in his company’s car to the Delhi airport. To our shock, it looked more like a refugee camp, with scores of Sikhs lying on the floor, waiting to board the flight to Punjab. We had no money as we had fled from our home empty-handed. Giare paid for our tickets. He used his clout to get tickets for us even after the flight was fully booked. He told the staff that, come what may, he was determined to take us in that flight. His plan was to accommodate us on a spare seat in the cockpit. A young lady on duty said that it was not permissible to let any passenger sit in the cockpit. Giare flared up saying, ‘Is what is happening outside allowed? You are talking about rules at a time like this!’ He finally had his way and we flew in his aircraft, with Maninder and I sharing that extra seat in the cockpit. We ended up spending two weeks in Punjab. The pressure from our families, understandably, was to wind up our affairs in Delhi and shift to Chandigarh. Other than my uncle, Tej Partap Singh, we had no relatives in Delhi anyway . After much dithering, we decided to move back to Punjab. And we gave ourselves two to three months to make the necessary arrangements. We flew to Delhi on 20 November, trusting that law and order had by then been restored in the nation’s capital. We incurred the expense of flying, as we still did not feel secure enough to travel on land. We caught a taxi at the airport and went straight to Maninder’s office. After she got off there, I took the taxi to my uncle’s house on Barakambha Road. But, on arriving there, the driver refused to take the taxi inside the bungalow. Instead, he demanded that I pay five times the taxi fare. When I demurred, he got down from the taxi, and wagging his finger at me, said, ‘Are you paying, or shall I create a scene?’ Sensing trouble for me and my uncle, I asked him to drop me at the High Court, where I thought I would have enough non-Sikh friends to save me from that extortion. The taxi driver refused to budge. ‘Give me the money right now. Otherwise, you will see what happens.’ It dawned on me that the killings might have ended, but looting was still going on, however subtly. It would have been foolhardy on my part to challenge the taxi driver’s bravado. One shout from him might have indeed provoked the bystanders to lynch me or that is how I felt in what was clearly an environment that was still violently hostile to the Sikhs. Another major shock awaited us in the evening when we reached home. We had been evicted in absentia, and that too without notice. The Bahris had entered our home in our absence, packed all our luggage and furniture, and stacked them all in one room on the ground floor. The younger son had since shifted into our apartment.

Without a word of explanation about the sudden eviction, the Bahris told me matter-of-factly that our belongings were safe, and that we could take them any time we wanted to. But then, we had nowhere to go. It seemed impossible for a Sikh to get a house on rent in Delhi. My uncle came to our rescue once again by giving us the rear portion of his house. The two traumatic experiences with non-Sikhs on 20 November strengthened our resolve to wind up fast and move out of Delhi. Incidentally, we suffered those experiences just a day after Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi justified the carnage at a Boat Club rally with his infamous metaphor of a big tree falling and shaking the earth. His speech reinforced the public perception that the carnage was the outcome of a policy decision taken at the highest level in the ruling establishment to teach Sikhs a lesson. That seemed to have emboldened the taxi driver to behave so brazenly with me. He knew he could get away with any misbehaviour with the Sikhs. The increasingly obvious state complicity in the violence against the Sikhs seemed to have made even decent citizens like the Bahris turn against me. In fact, it seemed to me a perverse demonstration of ‘Yatha Raja Thatha Praja’ (The king sets the example, and his subjects follow him). After all that they had done to save our lives during the carnage, and after all the risk they underwent in doing so, the Bahris seemed to have changed their whole attitude to us in a matter of a few days. Given the fact that we were away in Punjab, we could not possibly have done anything ourselves to provoke such a change. Perhaps in the early stages of the carnage, the Bahris behaved so decently with us because they did not realize then that their conduct was out of tune with the tacit state policy. In their innocence, they believed that the crimes were being propagated only by antisocial elements. The various acts of omission and commission by the Rajiv Gandhi government conveyed to them that the carnage was engineered by people at high places. That, in turn, meant that they should keep away from the Sikhs lest they incurred the wrath of local Congress leaders. This is the only plausible reason I can think of to make sense of why those who sheltered us from the night of31 October to the morning of 2 November, at the height of violence, discarded us so summarily on 20 November.

The Beginning of the Struggle to the traumatic experiences I suffered on 20 November 1984 on T hanks returning from Punjab, I decided to move out of Delhi earlier than I had originally meant to. And I would probably have done so but for a fortuitous visit I made to a relief camp on the third or fourth day of my return from Punjab. It set off a chain of events that changed the course of my life. An acquaintance at the bar had suggested that I visit any of the relief camps, as the victims staying there were badly in need of legal aid. He got me in touch with a senior advocate in the Supreme Court, Hardev Singh, a public-spirited person associated with the communist movement in India. Hardev, in turn, sent me to the relief camp at Farash Bazar in east Delhi, the worst riot-affected district. When I went to the Farash Bazar relief camp, I discovered that it was overflowing with thousands of victims living in subhuman conditions. Most of them were from Trilokpuri, a resettlement colony in east Delhi which saw the highest incidence of killings – over 400 in a single locality. The victims I found there were essentially widows and children. Besides them, I saw a few volunteers of Nagrik Ekta Manch, a relief forum that had came into existence in the wake of the carnage. The Nagrik Ekta Manch members were mainly engaged in providing food, clothes, blankets and other such neccessities to victims. Since there was no lawyer there, there was nobody to attend to their equally pressing legal needs. They needed help to fill in their forms for claims, prepare their affidavits, or write their applications. Their need for a lawyer was so evident that I changed my mind then and there about quitting Delhi. Fortunately for me, when I told Maninder that evening about what I saw in the Farash Bazar relief camp, she was more convinced than me that we should stay back and help out people whose suffering was incomparably greater than ours. Thus, my association with the struggle for justice to carnage victims began at the Farash Bazar relief camp. Taking time off from my fledgling practice, I went there frequently. About a week later, an old man called Laxman Singh sought my help to get custody of his four grandchildren, minor girls who were orphaned during the carnage. The circumstances in which they had landed up in a Nari Niketan, a reform centre for women and children, and the legal battle I had to wage to help their grandfather get their custody, strengthened my belief that I did the right thing by hitching my life to a cause far larger than my own personal problems, which seemed so petty in comparison. That was, in fact, the first of what turned out to be a succession of carnage-

related cases I fought in courts. Laxman Singh had come to Delhi all the way from Alwar in Rajasthan, looking for survivors in his daughter’s family which lived in Nand Nagri, an east Delhi colony. After several days of searching, he was able to trace four granddaughters – 13-year-old Satpal, and her three younger sisters. The rest of their family, including their mother (who was Laxman Singh’s daughter), were killed. Laxman Singh made many requests to the officials of the Social Welfare Department to let him take his granddaughters away. The officials, however, insisted that they could not hand over the custody without court orders. But the idea of approaching the court was beyond the means of this peasant. Laxman Singh had already exhausted the little money he had brought from his village. In sheer desperation, he went to Delhi High Court in search of any Sikh lawyer who might be prepared to take up his case gratis. That was how some lawyer referred him to me since I was already doing the rounds of the relief camps. I filed a habeas corpus petition on his behalf before the High Court for the custody of his granddaughters. The bench that dealt with the case consisted of the chief justice of the High Court, Justice Prakash Narain, and Justice BN Kirpal who went on to become the chief justice of India. The judges were moved by the plight of the orphaned girls. I was called to the chamber of Justice Narain, and there the two judges told me that they proposed to keep the property of the children in the custody of the court so that it was not frittered away by their relatives. I readily agreed to their proposal. Thus, while shifting their property to its own custody, the court directed the custody of the four girls to be handed over to their maternal grandfather. After Laxman Singh’s matter was settled, I followed each and every carnagerelated case that came up in Delhi High Court, regardless of whether I was a counsel in it or not. They included three petitions of Public Interest Litigation. One was a petition filed by a journalist from The Indian Express, Rahul Bedi, seeking action against a senior police officer, HC Jatav, for his inaction in relation to the massacre in Trilokpuri. The second was to prevent the government from shutting down the relief camps prematurely. The most important Public Interest Litigation (PIL), filed by a human rights organization called People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR), asked the High Court, in the face of the government’s intransigence, to help institute a judicial inquiry into the carnage. Despite the very obvious public interest involved in those petitions, the High Court dismissed each of them in quick succession. Though the wounds inflicted by the carnage were still so fresh, the court took recourse to some technicality or the other, often at the instance of the government, to dismiss the PILs. The government’s success in shielding the guilty in each instance made me feel that the ruling party members and other powerful people were acting in

concert. That, in turn, convinced me that we, too, needed to pool our resources and make equally concerted efforts to espouse the cause of the victims. After all, human rights defenders had by then come up with a succession of inquiry reports on the carnage: ‘Who are the guilty?’ by People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) and People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL); ‘Truth about Delhi Violence: Report to the Nation’ by Justice VM Tarkunde’s Citizens for Democracy; and ‘Report of the Citizens’ Commission’ headed by former chief justice of India, SM Sikri. Given the evidence brought out by each of those reports on the complicity of the government and the ruling party, I could see the need for a joint forum for human rights defenders, senior advocates, Sikh leaders, and whoever else was concerned about bringing the guilty to book. Joint action would obviously make for better coordination and strategy. That was how the idea of forming the Citizens Justice Committee (CJC) was born, bringing together several eminent persons from diverse fields, under one umbrella. The idea received an impetus when the Rajiv Gandhi government, rather belatedly, agreed to the demand for a judicial inquiry into the carnage. There was still a long gestation period before the CJC actually came into existence. The fact that the idea for creating such a body came from me, an unknown junior advocate, and not from any of the eminent persons who could more easily have mobilized support for its formation, was part of the reason for the long gestation. The situation was, however, too grim for me to let my modest abilities come in the way of pursuing the ambitious plan. I first broached the subject with Senior Advocate Hardev Singh, who liked the idea but had doubts about its feasibility. Then I sounded out Gyan Singh Vohra, another senior advocate, whose reaction was similar to Hardev Singh’s, except that Vohra was more vocal about the fact that the hardest part would be to persuade senior advocates and human rights groups to operate through a common forum. Happily, Vohra’s fears of internecine rivalries turned out to be exaggerated if not entirely misplaced. It was perhaps the enormity of the crime that made those eminent persons set aside personal issues, if any. I took Vohra’s apprehension seriously, however, especially because I didn’t want to commit any indiscretion that might endanger the whole project. I proposed asking somebody like Lieutenant General JS Aurora, the widely admired Bangladesh war hero, to call the meeting. Vohra agreed with me that not being from the bar or from the field of human rights, Aurora was less likely to provoke resistance from those invited to join the common forum. Since I did not know Aurora at all, I approached him through a retired chief justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, Justice RS Narula, who was practising then as a senior advocate in Delhi. As Narula himself was quite taken up with the idea, he immediately fixed a meeting for me with Aurora. The military man did not need much persuasion either. But, since he never had much

interaction with the bar, or with human rights groups, Aurora was unsure what kind of response his invitation would evoke. I then got the brainwave of approaching renowned author, Khushwant Singh, to call the meeting along with Aurora. Khushwant Singh readily agreed. The venue of the meeting was arranged by Vohra: the famous York Restaurant in Connaught Place. While invitations were being extended, Khushwant took me with him to Soli Sorabjee, a senior advocate with an international standing as a champion of human rights. In what came as a major boost to my morale, Sorabjee not only agreed to join the forum but also volunteered to play an active role in the venture of securing justice to the victims. The meeting was scheduled to take place on 11 May 1985. As luck would have it, just a day earlier, a series of bombs concealed in transistors went off in Delhi, killing several and causing widespread panic. That the bomb blasts had taken place mostly in colonies affected by the carnage indicated the provocation for the attack. The police immediately cracked down on Sikh groups and carried out large-scale arrests. The transistor bombs also raised fears of massive retaliatory killings on the lines of the 1984 carnage. On the morning of 11 May, Vohra called me up, worried by the tenor of newspaper reports. He suggested that we postpone the meeting because of the high alert situation in the country, following the transistor bombs. I was, however, sure that we should go ahead with the meeting, especially because of all the pains we had taken to organize it. The meeting did take place that evening. Vohra kept away from it despite his involvement in choosing the venue. True to his word, Sorabjee played the most active role in the proceedings. Everybody agreed with his suggestion that the proposed umbrella forum should have, besides some prominent citizens, a representative of each of the invited organizations. Though representatives of two political organizations associated with Sikhs, Akali Dal, and Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC), attended the meeting, Sorabjee cautioned us against including them in the CJC in order to retain its political neutrality. The other members agreed with his proposal that we could instead coordinate with those organizations in espousing the common cause. The next meeting of the CJC was called at Soli Sorabjee’s residence. It was attended by the president of PUDR, Gobinda Mukhoty; president of People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), Rajni Kothari; general secretary of Citizens Forum for Democracy (CFD), ND Pancholi; representative of Nagrik Ekta Manch, Dinesh Mohan; and representative of Sparsh, KM Singh. They were inducted as members of the CJC. Other prominent personalities who joined the CJC were Justice VM Tarkunde, Justice RS Narula, Khushwant Singh, Lieutenant General JS Aurora, Jaya Jaitley, Gurbachan Singh, Hardev Singh and

Gyan Singh Vohra. If Sorabjee was the most active member, I was the youngest. I was perhaps made a part of the august gathering as a reward for conceiving and pursuing the idea of the CJC. Sorabjee proposed that Tarkunde be the CJC’s chairman. Tarkunde, however, preferred former Chief Justice of India, SM Sikri over himself. Sikri was subsequently contacted, and he agreed to assume that responsibility. An apt choice, given that he had already chaired a panel of eminent persons, the Citizens Commission, probing the 1984 carnage. As for the post of secretary, the consensus was to request the retired chief of Border Security Force, KF Rustomjee; or former bureaucrat, Saran Singh, to take charge. But as neither was present at the meeting, Sorabjee suggested that I be designated as convenor and asked to handle all office work till a secretary was appointed. As it happened, both Rustomjee and Saran Singh expressed their inability to become secretary, for various personal reasons. So, at the third meeting of the CJC held in July 1985, Sorabjee said that instead of searching any further for a secretary, ‘we should carry on with this young man who is doing such a good job’. The ‘young man’ he pointed to was me. Before I could protest, others welcomed Sorabjee’s suggestion. And that is how the entire responsibility of running this august body comprising legal luminaries and other eminent persons, fell on my shoulders. It was a huge honour for me to be catapulted suddenly to a position of national consequence. I guess they felt that whatever I lacked in experience and knowledge was compensated for by my initiative and commitment. Naturally, I spared no efforts trying to live up to the confidence they reposed in me. It was an extremely instructive experience for me to see such legal luminaries discussing the issues involved, for hours on end. They were among those who commanded the highest fee at the bar. And yet, they not only gave so much of their time gratis, but also often bore the CJC’s expenses from their pocket. On a personal note, I may add that my self-confidence grew as the CJC endorsed many of the strategies framed by me. Most of the meetings took place those days in Justice Tarkunde’s house. But Sorabjee continued to be at the centre of the proceedings. As he told me to update him on a regular basis, there was a phase when I used to meet Sorabjee almost everyday. In fact, he had given standing instructions to his secretary not to keep me waiting. I used to walk into his office without an appointment, and on many occasions, he broke his conference to meet me immediately. Among the many issues that were thus decided by Sorabjee single-handedly was one about the location of the office. For lack of an alternative, our best bet seemed to be any centrally located gurdwara premises offered by the DSGMC.

But Sorabjee was vehemently opposed to the idea of operating the CJC from a gurdwara. He had a good reason to be so particular about the address of the CJC’s office. He did not want the cause of justice for carnage victims to appear as an issue concerning only the Sikhs, but rather an independent initiative on behalf of every law-abiding citizen. Given the paucity of resources, we had to settle for a less than an ideal situation. The CJC’s office was eventually set up in the MP quarters of the Akali Dal leader, Gurcharan Singh Tohra. Sorabjee was absolutely uncompromising when it came to the integrity of the affidavits that the CJC was going to submit before the Misra Commission. He would repeatedly say to me, ‘Go for quality, not quantity.’ He was insistent that while preparing the affidavits of the victims and others, we should ensure that they were packed with facts, stark facts, with no embellishments, and authentic to the last detail. Sorabjee taught us, in effect, to cross-examine our own witness so that we were fully satisfied that he or she was genuine. The idea was to preempt the possibility of any of our witnesses breaking down when the other side would actually cross-examine them before the Misra Commission. The exacting standards set by Sorabjee increased my responsibility manifold. As the CJC’s convenor, it was my task to get affidavits prepared with such rigour. Given the magnitude of the task, it was not possible for me to do it single-handedly. Fortunately, a number of advocates volunteered their services to the CJC for preparing affidavits. But since I was junior to most of them too, the only way I could seek to enforce quality was by invoking Sorabjee’s moral authority. If any shoddy affidavits still got past me, Sorabjee himself was there as the last gatekeeper. This was evident from the very first batch of affidavits I showed to Sorabjee for his approval. The batch consisted of ten affidavits, all prepared by an advocate who was not only senior to me but was also a well-known human rights activist. Yet, Sorabjee threw those affidavits back at me saying, ‘I don’t want crap like this. These affidavits have less facts and more opinions and hearsay.’ In a plaintive tone, I explained to him that I could not correct those affidavits because of the standing of the advocate who had prepared them. Sorabjee thundered: ‘I don’t care. I will hold you responsible even if a single affidavit of this kind is filed.’ All those ten affidavits were discarded by us, and chastened by that experience, I was more rigorous than before in weeding out bad affidavits. Out of some 3,000 affidavits collected by us, I chose only about 550 to be filed before the commission. This means that I selected one in five affidavits. It was on account of such care that every witness produced by us before the Misra Commission withstood the cross-examination despite all the efforts made by the other side to discredit him or her. On the personal front, I had to pay a heavy price for achieving that success.

The CJC’s office had been my daily haunt from the time it was set up in July 1985 till it was wound up in August 1986, when the Misra Commission submitted its report. Throughout those thirteen months, I spent about fourteen hours a day in office. My preoccupation with my role as the CJC’s convenor, inevitably, took a toll on my own legal practice. Despite the added responsibility of becoming a father around the same time, I plunged into the CJC work, without giving a thought to the extent to which it would affect my professional work. It was beyond me to ride two horses. I was in no position to go to the courts at all. Not surprisingly, my clients began to take their briefs elsewhere. What hurt me most was that even my uncle, my biggest and most valued client, also took his cases away from me. Much as he appreciated the work I was doing at the CJC, he said – and rightly so – that he could not afford to lose his cases. He, nevertheless, offered to continue paying me my monthly retainer. At that low point in my legal career, I did not know that I was going to be compensated over the years in unforeseeable ways for the sacrifices I made then. But I will not jump ahead of the story. Let me first narrate disquieting tales about how the Misra Commission, belying our hopes, came to do a whitewash of state complicity in the carnage.

Clubbing the Good with the Bad

W hile we were engaged in collecting affidavits for the Justice Ranganath Misra Commission, I had a bizarre encounter with the policeman in charge of the locality worst affected in the carnage, east Delhi’s Trilokpuri. Soor Veer Singh Tyagi was actually the station house officer of the Kalyanpuri police station, which then had jurisdiction over Trilokpuri as well. I got to meet Tyagi because while I was collecting affidavits from the riot victims, he too was doing the same, except that he was doing it for an entirely different purpose – to save his skin. Tyagi was then under suspension. In a much publicized event, additional commissioner of police, Hukum Chand Jatav, was reported to have suspended Tyagi and booked him for criminal negligence on 2 November 1984, immediately after the massacre in Block 32 of Trilokpuri came to light. Jatav had apparently acted so decisively in the presence of press reporters. Despite his suspension, Tyagi continued to wield enough clout to operate out of his old police station. I came to know this when some of the twenty-five Sikhs who had been arrested in Kalyanpuri on 1 November (oddly enough, for resisting rioters) approached me at the CJC’s office in August 1985 to file affidavits before the Misra Commission. They revealed to me that Tyagi had called them to the Kalyanpuri police station, and using the leverage of the rioting case in which they were being prosecuted, asked them to file affidavits in his favour, before the same commission. I sensed that this was a great opportunity for me to expose the conspiracy to present false evidence in favour of the guilty. With the help of those victims from Kalyanpuri, I hit upon the idea of performing a sting operation on Tyagi. Accordingly, they told Tyagi that they were prepared to give affidavits in his favour, provided that he was willing to meet their lawyer and convince him about it. They made sure that they didn’t give him my full name because I was known, and my name always appeared in the media as HS Phoolka. Expanding my initials, the victims gave my name to Tyagi as Harvinder Singh. Desperate as he was to get the affidavits, Tyagi readily agreed to meet me. Accompanied by the victims, I went to the Kalyanpuri police station with a small tape-recorder hidden in my spectacle case, which was concealed in my breast pocket. The move was risky, more so because of the virulent anti-victim environment generated then by the powers that be. As a precaution, I took two of my team members, BPS Mangat and Commodore JMS Sood, into confidence and placed them outside the police station. It was planned that if anything untoward happened inside the police station, one of the victims would rush out and signal to Mangat and Sood, who would, in turn, alert CJC members such as

Sorabjee and Lieutenant General Aurora. Fortunately, such a contingency did not arise at all. My pretence of being the lawyer of those victims from Kalyanpuri was evidently convincing. Tyagi really opened up to me in a bid to convince me that he had been made a scapegoat. In a sensational disclosure, he said that the massacre was the result of a conspiracy hatched on the evening of 31 October in Bhagat’s house. According to Tyagi, it was a secret meeting attended by senior police officers from east Delhi, including Jatav. The decision conveyed to officials down the line was to let the killings take place and then erase all traces of the crime. Tyagi lamented that though several police stations saw extensive killings, he was the only one to have got into trouble, and that was because of one vital mistake on his part. He failed to dispose off the dead bodies. In other places, most of the corpses were either reduced to ashes or dumped elsewhere. Tyagi’s explanation for allowing bodies to pile up in Block 32 of Trilokpuri was that there were simply too many of them in that locality. When Jatav had told him to dispose off the bodies, Tyagi said that some of the killings would have to be shown because of the sheer scale of the massacre in that locality. His reply, according to Tyagi, annoyed Jatav, who later suspended the SHO. Much as it was bound to be coloured by his own involvement in the mass crime, I found substance in Tyagi’s account, as it tallied with a pattern I was already aware of. While Trilokpuri overflowed with dead bodies, there were hardly any corpses in places like Palam Colony, Sultanpuri and Mongolpuri even though Sikhs were killed in hundreds there as well. Tyagi’s account seemed to have resolved the mystery behind the contrast between Trilokpuri and other riotaffected areas. Having heard all he had to say on the Trilokpuri massacre, I decided that it was a good time to disclose my full name. He was visibly stunned the moment he heard the name Phoolka. I immediately assured him that if he was willing to go public with the truth he had just told me, I would take up the matter with my seniors to try and get him the legal protection due to an ‘approver’. He said he would mull over my offer and we agreed to meet again. As advised by my friend, Commodore Sood, who was a former military intelligence official, I suggested to Tyagi that we should fix code names for each other to talk on the phone. He agreed with my suspicion that my phone was probably being tapped. The same evening, I told Soli Sorabjee about my encounter with Tyagi. Sorabjee was in the first instance upset that I had gone to the police station, that too without telling him. He gave me strict instructions that I should never again undertake such risky adventures, and that I should not go to any such meeting without his permission. As it happened, I got a call from Tyagi two days later. We used our code names in our conversation. I was really looking forward to that meeting as I was hoping to hear him say that he was willing to turn into

some kind of an approver. We met at the well-known Kwality Restaurant in Connaught Place. I did not carry my tape-recorder this time, and instead, kept playing with my spectacle case, opening and shutting it, just to dispel any suspicion he might have about my motives. But, for all the care I took, the meeting turned out to be a dud. Tyagi was nowhere as forthcoming as he had been at the earlier meeting at the Kalyanpuri police station. Rather than giving me material, he was the one who was inquisitive about me and my work. He did not breathe a word about whether he was willing to come clean before the Misra Commission. Later, when I briefed Sorabjee about the meeting with Tyagi, he felt that nothing worthwhile would come out of the exercise. I did not get any call from Tyagi after that. The next time I talked to him was when I bumped into him a few months later at a Delhi court. Tyagi told me that when I had gone for our Connaught place meeting, I was being followed. His seniors had got to know about our meeting, and had given him a dressing-down at the police headquarters. Though my effort to make Tyagi an approver came to nothing, there is ample evidence of his own covert attempts to procure affidavits in his favour from the very residents he had forsaken during the carnage. Some of those victims filed affidavits before the Misra Commission exposing Tyagi’s ploy to get off the hook. The report of the administrative inquiry conducted subsequently by Kusum Lata Mittal listed six such affidavits which complained that Tyagi had obtained affidavits in his favour through ‘threats, deceit and misrepresentation’. One of the complainants, Shobha Singh, had even been examined before the Misra Commission. Yet, the criminal case against Tyagi, as also his suspension, was only eyewash. He was reinstated before long, and in the criminal case, a chargesheet was filed against him without the mandatory sanction from the lieutenant governor. The court discharged Tyagi because of this procedural lapse on the part of the prosecution. Tyagi has since been promoted, and last heard of, he was assistant commissioner of police. A co-accused of Tyagi, Jugti Ram, got away due to the same procedural lapse. But, unlike in Tyagi’s case, I was actually relieved that Jugti Ram had been let off. My reactions to the exoneration of both police officials accused of complicity in the Block 32 massacre was so contrasting because I had, by then, come to realize that Jugti Ram had actually been framed. Far from being negligent, Jugti Ram, who was then a head constable at the Kalyanpuri police station, had tried his best, against all odds, to save as many Sikhs as he could. From the evidence that came to light, I dare say that Jugti Ram could be credited for the rescue of about thirty female Sikhs from Trilokpuri, however belatedly, from the clutches of a mob that had abducted them from Trilokpuri on 1 November. Those girls were taken to the nearby Chilla village, and

subjected to sexual violence. Their relatives pleaded with Jugti Ram to rescue them from Chilla. But Jugti Ram could not get down to doing anything immediately, as he did not have the resources to carry out such a rescue mission. In the midst of the carnage, he got an opportunity to take up the issue of those missing girls almost twenty-four hours later. The opportunity came when he met the police chief of the east district, Sewa Dass, who happened to be visiting the Kalyanpuri police station on the evening of 2 November, following the discovery of the Block 32 massacre by journalists. Jugti Ram informed Sewa Dass about the abduction of the female Sikhs from the same area to Chilla, and asked if he could immediately rush there with men and vehicles, to save them. Shockingly, Sewa Dass declined to spare vehicles on the ground that they were likely to be burnt by the villagers. But, as Jugti Ram continued to remonstrate with him, that too in the presence of press persons, Sewa Dass relented, though on the condition that the head constable would be held personally responsible for any damage to the vehicles. It was only then that Jugti Ram, taking the help of a couple of women from Trilokpuri, could carry out his rescue mission late on 2 November. The operation lasted several hours, since the resources placed at his disposal were too meagre for the number of girls who had been abducted. He rescued the girls from Chilla and left them in a relief camp. There was probably no parallel to what this humble police official achieved almost single-handedly, while his colleagues and superiors across the capital conspicuously lacked the will to do their duty. Jugti Ram was in for a shock when he reported to duty the next day. Far from being commended for his exemplary work, he was told that he had been suspended, and that a case of criminal negligence had been booked against him for the Block 32 massacre. It was a travesty that he had been clubbed with his superior, SHO Soor Veer Singh Tyagi, on the charge of negligence. In reality, Jugti Ram was being subjected to such humiliation for unwittingly exposing the complicity of his colleagues at the police station. In fact, Jugti Ram’s conscientiousness had unwittingly exposed his district chief, Sewa Dass, too. On 1 November 1984, Jugti Ram, as duty officer in Kalyanpuri police station, sent a wireless message to Sewa Dass, informing him about the large-scale killings in Block 32, and duly recorded the same in the logbook. That was again in defiance of the unlawful orders not to record any message related to the killings of the Sikhs. Before he could do any further ‘damage’, he was shunted from the key post of duty officer and sent to the field. When Jugti Ram’s wireless message to Sewa Dass came to light almost two decades later, it constituted one of the most damning pieces of evidence exposing the complicity of senior police officers in the 1984 carnage.

I came to know of Jugti Ram’s exceptional role months later, when I was preparing the affidavits of the victims to be filed before the Misra Commission in 1985. Several Trilokpuri victims recalled Jugti Ram’s contribution with gratitude. Ironically, Jugti Ram was still under suspension, and the criminal case in which he had been falsely implicated, was still pending against him. Approaching me through some of the victims, Jugti Ram requested me to extricate him from that frame-up. As a result, I was in a dilemma. I thought that if I tried to help him, it might weaken the case against Tyagi too. My heart told me to try and save Jugti Ram from being victimized, but my head warned me against the possibility of endangering the case against Tyagi. I preferred to follow my head and sacrifice Jugti Ram at the altar of the larger battle we were engaged in, before the Misra Commission. In retrospect, I proved to be unequal then, as a rookie lawyer, to the challenge of coming up with a strategy to rescue Jugti Ram, without compromising the larger object of securing Tyagi’s conviction. Finding me reluctant to help Jugti Ram, some of my team members took Jugti Ram to Lieutenant General JS Aurora. After hearing Jugti Ram’s story, and verifying the same with victims, Aurora wrote a letter to the then police commissioner, Ved Marwah, to reinstate him, and drop his name from the case of negligence. But nothing came of it. Instead, as mentioned earlier, the police made the abortive move of pressing charges against Jugti Ram and Tyagi. Since the police never really meant to take action against Tyagi, Jugti Ram, too, got the benefit of their failure to obtain the necessary sanction from the government for prosecuting them. Though I feel guilty about my own failure to save Jugti Ram from the stigma of being chargesheeted by the police, my consolation is that, as counsel for the victims, at no point did I pursue any case, or file any affidavit against him. In fact, when the Nanavati Commission issued a notice to him since he was amongst the police officials dealing with the worst-affected part of Delhi, I pleaded for its withdrawal, and suggested that he should instead be commended for his efforts to save the Sikhs against all odds. Another little consolation is that, in a bid to restore his honour, we persuaded the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee in 1999, to confer a saropa (a traditional Sikh honour) on him for rescuing the girls who had been abducted from Trilokpuri.

A Farce of an Inquiry the circumstances in which it was appointed, the Misra Commission Given faced a credibility crisis from its very birth. For almost six months, the government had blatantly stonewalled all demands for an inquiry into the carnage. During that period, the ruling Congress Party won two rounds of elections – the central Lok Sabha elections in December 1984, and the state assembly elections in March 1985 – on an unabashedly negative platform. The tacit but unmistakably clear message of the India-in-danger campaign mounted by the Congress Party was that the carnage unleashed in its reign had taught the Sikhs a lesson. Adding insult to injury, Rajiv Gandhi brushed aside inquiry demands saying, for instance, to India Today in January 1985 that it would only rake up ‘issues that are really dead’. Against such a backdrop, if the same man finally conceded the inquiry demand in April, nobody mistook it for a change of heart. Having flogged the carnage in two rounds of elections, the Rajiv Gandhi regime made no bones about the fact that it had appointed the inquiry merely to pave the way for an accord on the long festering Punjab problem. The inquiry by a sitting Supreme Court judge was a precondition laid down by Akali leader, Sant Longowal, for entering into a dialogue with the government. The appointment of the Misra Commission did not, however, alter the ground reality that those who had wreaked violence in November, were roaming in those very localities, with impunity. Worse, the leaders alleged to have engineered the carnage were either inducted into the government, or promoted. The chilling significance of all this was not lost on the victims spread across Delhi. After all, they were eyewitnesses not just to the carnage, but also to the immunity and clout enjoyed by their tormentors in the aftermath. So, when the Misra Commission got around to issuing a public notice in early July, it received only one affidavit in the one month that was provided to the victims and witnesses to come forward with information. There could not have been a clearer demonstration by the victims of no-confidence in the government’s intentions, despite the appointment of a sitting Supreme Court judge to hold the inquiry. It was as if they knew instinctively that, in the prevailing environment, even a Supreme Court judge could not be trusted to uncover the truth behind the carnage. Misra extended the time for filing affidavits by another month. But that was of little help in making up for the lack of credibility. He needed an intermediary to persuade the victims. Since we had already communicated our desire to participate in the inquiry on behalf of the victims, Misra turned to us for help. The inquiry was indeed in danger of proving to be a non-starter. It was in such

circumstances that Misra held his first meeting on 29 July 1985 with the Citizens Justice Committee, which was represented, besides me, by stalwarts such as Justice VM Tarkunde, Justice RS Narula, and Soli Sorabjee. Misra specifically asked us to try and instill confidence in victims by assuring them that he was determined to secure justice for them, whatever the odds. We took Misra’s word at face value, and having just set up our office, we fanned out our volunteers to convey to the victims, his promise of unearthing the truth about the carnage. Considering that almost all the affidavits filed on behalf of the victims were through us, it is fair to say that we fulfilled the task Misra had entrusted to us. It was a pity that Misra did not honour his part of the deal, which was to conduct the inquiry with the integrity expected of his high office. It must be admitted that, in our anxiety to make a success of the inquiry, we overlooked early signals of the trouble ahead. We perhaps failed to take them seriously because we were conditioned by our training as lawyers to presume that a judge always acted in a bona fide manner. How else can one explain our failure to object to one very dubious decision Misra announced at the very first meeting he had with us on 29 July? While talking about the measures he proposed to take to safeguard the victims, he said that he would conduct the whole inquiry in camera, which implied that the entire inquiry would be shrouded in secrecy. That should have made us see red because he was overturning a universally accepted requisite of a fair trial, that the proceedings should be held in public. But we got taken in by Misra’s ploy to package his departure from the norm as a confidence-building measure. When the proceedings were held in camera, the victims, he said, would be able to depose fearlessly, as their identity would remain secret. The reality could not have been more different, as we learnt to our dismay. There was no way the in camera proceedings could have served the professed purpose of keeping the identity of the witnesses secret. Misra had anyway allowed access to an array of lawyers representing groups that were avowedly anti-victim. Those groups, operating under deceptive names such as Citizens Forum for Truth, Citizens Committee for Peace and Harmony, and Nagrik Suraksha Samiti, took the stand that the massacre of the Sikhs was not organized but rather a spontaneous reaction to the murder of Indira Gandhi and the earlier killings of the Hindus in Punjab. Since they too were permitted to participate in the inquiry, the lawyers representing those anti-victim groups received advance information from the commission about when each victim was due to depose. It became clear before long that those groups were actually proxies for culprits, as they were using that information to try and intimidate the victims just before their deposition. At times, victims received the commission’s summons and the culprits’ threats almost simultaneously. A number of witnesses complained about the threats to

the commission, but to no avail. In some cases, Misra did order security measures, but since the task was assigned (despite our protests) to the same local police, the complainants felt all the more vulnerable. In his report, Misra admitted that ‘on several occasions, the Commission had to direct police protection to be provided to persons who had been or were about to be examined before it.’ Referring to what he called the ‘obsession’ of the victims that ‘the killers were free on the streets,’ Misra agreed that ‘these very villains started threatening the widows and other deponents with dire consequences in case they came forward to file affidavits, give evidence or did any such thing’ against any of the culprits. But he conveniently avoided even speculating, let alone giving a finding, on who could have been leaking the identity of the deponents in advance to those ‘villains’ despite the veil of secrecy over the proceedings. The irony was that, while the rioters and police were being allowed to victimize the Sikhs all over again, the media and other public-spirited citizens interested in the inquiry, were shut out, as the proceedings were purportedly held in camera. This enabled Misra to distort the evidence in his report, and give a clean chit to the Congress Party as well as its leaders, and the government. Thus, the recourse to in camera hearings turned out to be a ploy to prevent the world from coming to know any evidence that might have emerged during the inquiry against the organizers of the carnage. To be sure, such extraordinary partisanship did not go unrewarded. Misra was rewarded twice since he retired as chief justice of India. In 1993, the Congress government of PV Narasimha Rao appointed him as the first chairman of, ironically enough, the National Human Rights Commission. Next, dropping all pretence of impartiality, Misra became a Rajya Sabha member of the Congress Party. Let us see exactly how he served Congress Party interests when he was conducting the carnage inquiry. The most crucial part of any inquiry is the recording of evidence, that is, the examination and cross-examination of witnesses. This stage follows the filing of the affidavits of the witnesses. Despite the poor response at the beginning, the commission attracted as many as 2,905 affidavits in the wake of the CJC’s participation. Oddly enough, more than two-thirds of those were what Misra classified in his report as ‘affidavits against the victims.’ The incongruity of any affidavit blaming the carnage on the victims themselves was apparently lost on Misra. All the same, there was a good reason why Misra categorized them as anti-victim affidavits. They did not just refute that the carnage was organized and insist that it all was a spontaneous backlash to Indira’s murder. They also asserted that the immediate provocation was the sight of the Sikhs celebrating Indira Gandhi’s murder by distributing sweets. That was as close as those deponents could have

come to justifying the massacre. Those who filed such affidavits were, of course, entitled to their view. But there was a serious legal infirmity, which alone would have prompted any judge to dismiss them outright. Most of those 2,200 affidavits were stereotyped. The same set of assertions was repeated in those affidavits in more or less the same language. Rather than narrating the personal experience of each deponent, the affidavits were full of general opinion that the violence was not organized, and that Congress leaders were innocent. The organizers of the carnage seem to have circulated a few templates of affidavits in their favour. The commission was flooded with scores of copies of each template in the guise of affidavits filed by different persons. The pro-victim affidavits, on the other hand, were distinct from each other, as they should have been. They contained specific details of what each deponent personally saw and experienced. Out of the 639 pro-victim affidavits, 550 were, as mentioned earlier, filed by me from those collected by the CJC. Misra classified this category of 639 as ‘affidavits in support of the victims,’ which were sworn to either by the victims themselves or by witnesses sympathetic to them. When Misra was set to record evidence, he fixed a five-day session for the first time, beginning on 27 January 1986. He summoned twenty-five witnesses each day, about half in favour of the victims, and half against. Since none of the antivictim parties appearing before the commission owned up to them, the deponents of the anti-victim affidavits were summoned on behalf of the government. On the first day, all thirteen victims responded to the summons, and appeared before the commission. But from among the twelve anti-victim witnesses summoned for the day, only one turned up. It was a forty-year old Hindu called Faqir Chand whose affidavit generally asserted: ‘There was no organized violence and none of the Congress(I) workers, or councillors incited or instigated people to indulge in violence.’ Our senior advocate, SC Malik, was all set to query the basis on which he had concluded that the Congress leaders had had no hand in the carnage. In the event, Malik never got an opportunity to do so because Faqir Chand’s deposition did not go past the preliminary stage of his affirming his affidavit. When the affidavit was shown to him, he confirmed that it was his. But he could do so only because he recognized his signature, in Hindi, at the end of a statement typed in English. Faqir clarified at the outset that he did not know English, and had signed it at the insistence of somebody, without having a clue about its contents. ‘I do not know the contents of the affidavit and they had not been read over or explained to me,’ Faqir Chand admitted, obviating the need to deal any further with the affidavit that stood in his name. He said that he had signed it simply because two persons he knew had ‘formed a committee’ and were ‘getting affidavits filed’.

That was quite a disastrous beginning for our adversaries. Having filed affidavits that did not even pretend to give any direct evidence on the carnage, the unseen organizers could not produce any of their witnesses to vouch for their sworn statements. Flooding the commission with affidavits in favour of the Congress leaders was the easier part. But there was no way such witnesses could have survived our cross-examination, even though we had been given permission to put questions only through the judge. The only ‘anti-victim’ witness who came on 27 January, turned out to be unworthy of cross-examination, as he had himself disowned the contents of his affidavit. Thus, the cover-up conspiracy was beginning to unravel on the very first day of the recording of evidence. But, thanks to the in camera proceedings, no journalist was present in the court room to report Faqir Chand’s damaging statement. The only way journalists could report the commission’s proceedings was by waiting outside its office and talking to witnesses as and when they came out after their deposition. Luckily for the cover-up conspirators, the reports that appeared the next day made no reference to Faqir Chand, as the journalists had probably missed meeting him. Still, the fact that they reported the proceedings at all was in itself a relief to us. We saw it as a potential check on the massive coverup efforts that were underway. There was, in fact, a lot more to report on the second day. To begin with, in somewhat of a replay of the previous day’s pattern, all the twelve victims who had been summoned were there, and they withstood the cross-examination by the Delhi Administration and centre. On the other hand, out of the thirteen anti-victim witnesses who had been summoned, once again, only one turned up. His name was Ajit Singh and the operative part of his affidavit was: ‘The propaganda that riots were organized or organized by Congress (I) or its leaders is false.’ But when Ajit stood in the witness box, he made an even more damaging disclosure than Faqir Chand had done the previous day. If Faqir Chand revealed that he had unwittingly signed his affidavit, Ajit Singh declared that he had never signed the affidavit that stood in his name, and that the signature on it was actually forged. ‘Shown the affidavit, the witness says that he has not filed any affidavit before the commission,’ the commission recorded. The web of deceit was coming apart faster than we imagined. Left to himself, Misra seemed to be at a loss as to how he should react to Ajit’s repudiation of the signature. Making a ruckus over the forgery, we urged Misra to get to the bottom of the matter, and identify the culprits. The conspirators, or rather, their agents in the courtroom, were understandably, too taken aback by the turn of events to come up with any objection to our proposal. In the end, Misra was forced to refer Ajit’s affidavit to an investigation agency attached to the commission. ‘Independent investigation be carried on immediately to find out as to how this affidavit was filed and if there is any impersonation,’ Misra said in his order the same day. At our instance, he added: ‘The particulars of the Oath Commissioner

(who attested the affidavit) should also be found out.’ All this was too big a development for the press to have missed. Of course, we too did our bit to leak out the scandal that had surfaced behind closed doors. The press went to town on Ajit’s deposition, laying bare the ham-handed attempt to present false evidence in favour of the Congress leaders. In a report headlined ‘Signature forged, says witness in riots case,’ The Indian Express highlighted Ajit’s deposition in the first paragraph saying: ‘The tables were turned on the Delhi Administration and the Congress(I) … when a witness Ajit Singh, appearing before the Commission, alleged that the affidavit purported to have been signed by him had never been filed by him and his signatures had been forged.’ The same day, The Hindustan Times too led its story with Ajit’s revelation: ‘The sole witness who appeared on behalf of the Union of India and the Delhi Administration … denied that he had filed any affidavit before the Commission.’ The game was up, and the conspirators pressed the panic button. They made no secret of the fact that they were more upset about the exposure of the incident in the press than about the incident itself. At the beginning of the third day’s proceedings, the government counsel and the lawyers representing anti-victim groups, were up on their feet protesting against the news stories. Their contention was that since journalists were barred from attending the proceedings, there should not be a word on the subject in the press, no matter what had happened before the commission. They were, in other words, demanding a blanket ban on press coverage. Since freedom of the press has long been regarded as an inviolable feature of India’s constitution, one would not have expected any judge worth his salt to tolerate a gag order plea. But not Misra. He immediately passed a gag order, followed by a press release, warning that the publication of in camera proceedings would amount to breach of the direction of the commission, and would ‘expose the person or organization violating the order to such action as may be considered appropriate.’ In reality, the commission had no power to control the press in that manner or take any action against it. But newspapers complied with the gag order, and from that day onwards, obediently kept away from the Misra Commission’s proceedings. For all the courage they otherwise displayed in dealing with the carnage and its aftermath, none of the newspapers dared to resist when they were challenged themselves. There was probably a limit to which they were willing to take on the Rajiv Gandhi government, which was at the peak of its influence in 1985-86. This cost the cause of justice dearly, and I should share some of the blame for not protesting strongly enough when Justice Misra passed the gag order. I was very much present in the commission when RK Anand, counsel for Delhi

Administration, and Lala Ram Gupta, counsel for the Hindu fundamentalist group, Nagrik Suraksha Samithi (Arya Samaj), launched a scathing attack on media reports of the in camera proceedings. Since those media reports were based on the access I had discreetly provided to witnesses concerned, I was quite rattled by the vehemence of the reaction from the other side. It put my senior, MS Malik, and me, on the defensive at that crucial moment. The callow lawyer that I was, I remember worrying foolishly that if the judge were to pass some order against me for leaking information to the media, it might cause a setback to my professional career. So, rather than being concerned about the dangers of the gag order, I was at that moment relieved that I was not blamed in writing for the leakage. I did not foresee the far-reaching repercussions of the gag order, and neither did I imagine that the press, too, would get intimidated by it. Having made the mistake at the beginning, of agreeing to in camera proceedings all through, we in the CJC could not do much to persuade the press to stand up to Misra’s bullying. Since we felt that public opinion was our greatest safeguard, we tried, in vain, to get the press to report at least basic details such as who had appeared before the commission and who had not. The other side, too, perhaps did not expect the press to cave in so easily. Despite the gag order, the conspirators were reluctant to let their witnesses come forward and give evidence. They took the trouble of contacting each of the antivictim witnesses who had been summoned by the commission, for the remaining three days of the session. Those witnesses were told to ignore the summons and keep away from the commission. But, in spite of all their efforts to dissuade their witnesses, one of them happened to appear on the last day of the session, 31 January 1986. And that led to another round of high drama. Basant Singh seemed to have made it to the witness box only because he happened to meet me accidentally at the commission’s office that morning. He was under the impression that the commission would grant him compensation for the murder of his elder brother, and the destruction of his property, during the carnage. He said that he had come to the commission on the appointed day despite being told by somebody not to do so. I thanked my luck that he had bumped into me rather than any of the lawyers from the other side, as they would have otherwise whisked him away from the commission’s office. As he narrated his experience, it did not take long for me to realize that it was totally at variance with the stereotyped affidavit ascribed to him. Though Basant was from the badly affected east Delhi, his affidavit said: ‘The member of parliament from our area (HKL Bhagat) rendered utmost help and assistance in helping Sikhs in that locality. I want to say further that the local police also helped us and gave us full protection.’ Basant did not know who I was, and neither did I disclose to him the contents of his affidavit. I just cautioned him that when he was called inside, he must tell the true story, whatever it was.

To his credit, Basant Singh did precisely that. He testified that he did file the affidavit, though he was obviously unaware that it was at odds with what actually happened to him. The truth came out in the open when we got our turn to put questions through the judge. Since I had had the benefit of talking to Basant before the hearing, I knew exactly what to put to him. Accordingly, on my suggestion, our senior counsel, SC Malik, began with a deceptively innocuous query. Malik asked: ‘Apka koi nuksan to nahin hua?’ (You have not suffered any loss, have you?) The question shook Basant. How could somebody imagine that he had not suffered any losses during the carnage? An incredulous Basant asked Malik to repeat his question. When Malik did so, the thirty-two-year-old bachelor broke down and started crying like a child in the courtroom. ‘I have lost everything, nothing has survived, and you are asking if I have suffered any losses,’ he said plaintively. That gave Malik the opportunity he was looking for, to bring out the conspiracy hatched by the organizers of the carnage, to falsify evidence before the commission. Malik asked Basant to narrate his whole story. Basant revealed that his ‘dhaba’ (small eating place), his sole source of income, had been burnt during the carnage; his house had been looted; and his elder brother had been killed. Basant added, ‘I had collected certain goods for my own marriage which were also plundered.’ Malik then asked him to explain how he had come to file the affidavit in question. Basant made it clear that he had no clue to its contents. If anything, he was given to understand that it was a claim for compensation. According to the statement recorded by the commission, Basant said, ‘Policemen of my police station approached me and obtained my signature on the affidavit.’ Since he could not read the affidavit written in English, Basant signed it in good faith. The evidence of the collusion between the police and the Congress leaders was there for all to see. The extraordinary lengths to which the two went to doctor evidence before the commission, should have been taken as an indication of their complicity in the carnage. The commission, which had been set up to probe allegations of organized violence, should have seen it as a breakthrough, and followed up on that. Instead, as a damage control measure, Justice Misra declared that for the subsequent rounds of evidence, he would not call any of the anti-victim witnesses, and that he was rejecting all their affidavits. The government and the anti-victim groups remained silent. They were biding their time. The orders passed by Misra during that session directing an inquiry into Ajit Singh’s forged affadavit and rejecting all anti-victim affidavits turned out to be a ruse to lull us into complacency. For the Misra report was completely silent on the Ajit Singh episode, and worse, as described in the next chapter, relied upon

one of those very anti-victim affidavits to exonerate Congress leader HKL Bhagat.

Withdrawal unusual procedure adopted by the commission subserves the purpose of T he those who are interested in shielding the culprits and suppressing the truth.’ Strong words. The allegation was all the more serious because it was made against a commission headed by a sitting judge of the Supreme Court. And it was levelled by a group of eminent persons, headed by a former chief justice of India. The Citizens Justice Committee (CJC), chaired by Justice SM Sikri, had, in effect, accused the Justice Ranganath Misra Commission of whitewashing the role of the Congress leaders in the 1984 carnage. It was an allegation that was made when the inquiry was still going on. That was the main reason why the CJC, after much deliberation, announced its withdrawal from the commission’s proceedings. Given the hopes with which the CJC was set up to secure justice to carnage victims, it was certainly not easy for us to think in terms of withdrawing from the inquiry. If we still did so, it was because we were left with no other option. In retrospect, we should have sensed right at the beginning that Justice Misra could not be trusted to conduct a fair inquiry. The first sign he gave of his dubious intentions, as mentioned in the earlier chapter, was his decision to hold the entire inquiry in camera. Next, we saw that he used the veil of secrecy to hide from the public the flood of identical affidavits claiming that Delhi Congress leader HKL Bhagat, far from organizing the carnage, had helped the Sikhs in their hour of need. But, by the end of the first session of evidence in January 1986, we exposed the unreliability of those ‘anti-victim’ or pro-Congress affidavits, and forced Justice Misra to pass an order discarding them. We shall now see how, despite scoring such a major point in January 1986, we found ourselves withdrawing from the commission’s proceedings within two months; and how those anti-victim affidavits staged a comeback into the inquiry, and served as a major basis for the exoneration of the Congress Party and its leaders. Since the ploy to counter victims with false affidavits came unstuck in the first session of evidence, the second session of evidence held in Delhi in March 1986 was comparatively a tame affair. Having been forced to disregard the antivictim affidavits, he called only our witnesses in the second session. Thus, there wasn’t a single instance of a witness disowning his affidavit. The government and anti-victim groups, of course, spared no efforts to discredit our witnesses during their cross-examination. Even after all these years, I cannot get over the callous manner in which senior advocate, Lala Ram Gupta, representing a group of Hindu fundamentalists calling themselves Nagrik Suraksha Samiti, drove some of the victims to tears by subjecting them to insulting and insensitive questions. For all their mean tactics, our opponents could not impeach the credibility of our witnesses, nor take anything away from our charge that the carnage had been

organized with political complicity. The third session due to begin on 2 April 1986 was meant to be, as Misra put it in his report, ‘the last lap of oral evidence’. The deposition was only meant for our witnesses. In the run-up to that session, we requested the commission to call some officials too, as its own witnesses, and give us an opportunity to crossexamine them. Our application mentioned nine officials, including PG Gavai, who was the lieutenant governor of Delhi during the carnage; MMK Wali, union home secretary who replaced Gavai subsequent to the outbreak of the violence; and Subhash Tandan, who was the police commissioner of the capital during the fateful period. We were keen on cross-examining those dignitaries as that would have really helped us establish our allegation of complicity against the government and the ruling party. But we were in for a big shock as Misra said that he had already examined five of the nine officials sought by us. And we, the main representatives of the victims, had no clue about it at all! That was when it hit us that Misra had not just shut out the public and press. Unknown to us, we had also been excluded from crucial parts of the inquiry. He was not just holding in camera proceedings. In a bizarre innovation, Misra was holding ‘an in camera inquiry within an in camera inquiry.’ When non-officials were in the witness box, it was the in camera proceedings in which the CJC was allowed to participate. But when it came to officials, it was in camera within in camera. Despite being formally allowed to participate in all the proceedings, not only were we kept out of the deposition of officials, but were also kept in the dark about the deposition itself. Even when he informed us that he had already examined five of the officials, he gave no indication of the identity of those witnesses, and even less so about what had emerged from their examination in his chamber. The only consolation we were given was that, ‘if necessary’, the commission would examine the other four officials as well. As regards the opportunity we sought to cross-examine the officials, Misra ordered that to grant such an opportunity to the CJC was ‘not necessary but, if deemed necessary, the same would be given.’ We were stunned by his attitude, by his presumption that he could conduct the inquiry in any way he liked, and that we just had to take it or leave it. I got into a huddle with my group, the team of activists who had been doing all the spadework for the inquiry – Wing Commander RS Chhatwal, Commodore JMS Sood, Jatender Kaur, and Gurvinder Singh. The discovery of the secret examination of officials was the last straw for us. We were already dismayed at Misra’s refusal to show us the documents that had been summoned from the government at our instance. It dawned on us that we were just being taken for a ride. Thanks to the gag order he had passed initially, nothing was being reported in the press on the commission’s proceedings anyway. Misra derived legitimacy from our presence before him. That was because the public was under the

impression that, compensating for the blackout in the media, we were there as watchdogs to ensure that the inquiry was conducted properly. We therefore felt that we should not allow ourselves to be used by Misra any further to advance his personal agenda. The action plan that emerged from all this cogitation was that the CJC should withdraw from the proceedings. That, we felt, would be a dramatic way of alerting the nation to the mischief being played by a Supreme Court judge. The public exposure might, in turn, force Misra to mend his ways, or so we thought. I discussed the idea with SC Malik, who was the senior advocate representing the CJC at every hearing of the commission. Having interacted with him on a daily basis inside and outside the commission, I had by then developed such a close rapport with Malik that we rarely disagreed. This was no exception. Much as we were convinced that there was no alternative to withdrawal, we were unsure how those solid establishment figures who constituted the CJC would react to the rather radical proposal. As its convenor, I called a meeting of the CJC. Many of them had already been briefed about Misra’s dubious moves. Even otherwise, the facts were so glaring that, at the CJC’s meeting, nobody expressed any doubt about the need to protest against the procedure adopted by Misra. The only apprehension was that since the CJC was doing all the work on behalf of the victims, its departure at that late stage could turn out to be a further setback to their interests. Having agonized over it myself, I was ready with a solution to that problem. I said that even after the CJC’s departure, those who had been working fulltime, like me, for the cause of victims, would extend all possible help to the other pro-victim parties in the commission, Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC), and Akali Dal. The CJC had been working in concert with those two bodies for a common cause anyway. With our back-room help, the DSGMC and Akali Dal, I said, would be able to take over the role that was being played by the CJC. This way, we would be able to achieve the twinpurpose of highlighting Misra’s bias through the CJC’s withdrawal, and espousing the cause of victims by acting through the DSGMC and Akali Dal. Since the CJC had eminent persons from various communities, the shock of its withdrawal, I hoped, might also jolt Misra into switching to a procedure that was not so blatantly unfair to the victims. Sensing that I had thought the whole issue through, the CJC gave its approval to the proposal for withdrawal. There was a consensus that we should put on record an elaborate account of how Misra left us with no option but to take that extreme step. That is how the CJC came to file an eighteen-page submission before the commission on 31 March 1986, two days before the commencement of what was then supposed to be the last session of evidence. It was filed by me as the CJC’s convenor, and as they say in legal terms, ‘settled’ by Soli Sorabjee and SC Malik.

In deference to the sensibilities of legal professionals, we did not describe our decision to leave the proceedings with blunt words like ‘boycott’ or ‘withdrawal’. Instead, we understated the reason – that on account of ‘the impossible situation’ the CJC found itself in, ‘it is constrained to come to the conclusion that its further presence in the proceedings … will not serve any useful purpose.’ But when it came to describing how Misra had reduced the inquiry to a farce, we did not pull our punches: Given the manner in which we had been denied access to evidence, we said we were in no position to address our arguments, as directed by the commission, the following month. ‘The CJC is really at a loss as to how it can discharge this duty when it finds that in all vital fields of inquiry, the CJC is being excluded from its course and conduct.’ ‘In fact, we apprehend that although we joined the inquiry with full vigour to participate and render our utmost assistance in its various facets, we have been gradually pushed to its fringe. More than three-fourth of the inquiry and its materials are out of our ken and reach.’ ‘The entire process of collection of basic materials has been kept secret. It is an in camera inquiry within an in camera inquiry and does not measure up to the requirements of fairness and is not in conformity with the provisions of the (Commissions of Inquiry) Act.’ ‘While officials could depose before the commission ‘without any fear of cross-examination which has been acclaimed as a powerful and potent instrument to ascertain the truth,’ it was ‘in sharp contrast’ to the treatment accorded to each victim who was thoroughly cross-examined. ‘The unusual procedure adopted by the Commission subserves the purpose of those who are interested in shielding the culprits and suppressing the truth.’ ‘The CJC submits with respect that to wrap up the whole inquiry behind closed doors, it is inconsistent with the right to information… and is also subversive to the principle of open government, especially in the matter of such public importance.’ Though our motive in writing such a detailed note was to lay bare Misra’s manoeuvers, we did not release it immediately to the press because we wanted to wait for his response. In fact, we did not have to wait long, as I got a call from Misra’s office the very next morning, on April Fool’s Day. It was a call from the secretary to the commission, RL Gupta, who said that the judge wanted to meet me urgently. I found myself being closeted with Misra in his chamber for about two hours. That was a measure of how much he was shaken by our withdrawal letter. He repeatedly urged me to withdraw our letter – ironically enough, our withdrawal letter. I pointed out to him that I could do no such thing without the

instructions of the members of the CJC. We also went over the contents of the letter, and the areas on which the CJC had had differences with the commission. But Misra, unrepentant as ever, denied that his overweening concern for secrecy was loaded in favour of culprits, and unfair to victims. He was full of righteous indignation as he accused us of letting him down on the eve of the last session of evidence, and leaving him no time to make alternative arrangements. I promised to call a meeting of the CJC the same evening and get back to him the next morning. The CJC members found no reason to change their mind about withdrawal. After all, Misra stuck to his position that he would not give us access to government documents or let us cross-examine the officials. Since Malik appeared before the commission the most number of times along with me, Sorabjee asked him what he thought were Misra’s intentions. Malik said something which captured a dilemma that was on everybody’s mind. He said that if he went by Misra’s words, pious and sincere as they sounded, he actually felt guilty about doubting his bona fides. But when he thought of the records, and the orders passed by the commission, he had every reason to doubt what the judge was up to. Others agreed that Malik should go by the records and not by Misra’s verbal assurances. Accordingly, it was decided that I should tell Misra that the CJC’s decision remained unchanged. I requested that I be given something in writing, as I was too junior to cope with one more possible harangue from Misra. Thus, Sikri wrote a small letter reiterating the CJC’s decision to withdraw. But that did not deter Misra from engaging me in another long dialogue the next morning, lasting an hour. Since the letter was clear in its intent, Misra changed his tack. He wanted me to abandon the CJC and appear before the commission in a personal capacity. In a bid to get me over to his side, he complimented me for all the work I had done in the interest of the victims. He said that I should not jeopardize my cause by getting ‘carried away’ by the CJC’s withdrawal. I tried to cut him short by saying that I was very much party to the decision. Misra made a more blatant attempt to co-opt me. He said that if I accepted his offer to participate in the inquiry, he would, in turn, see to it that I was ‘suitably rewarded.’ Much as it was tempting, I did not succumb to his offer. Although Misra mentioned both our meetings in his report, he did not touch upon what transpired in the second. My interaction with Misra thus had an abrupt ending. For the session of evidence that followed our withdrawal, I was confined to doing back-room work. My friend, NS Bawa, took over the responsibility of representing the victims before the commission in his capacity as the DSGMC’s counsel. He had little difficulty in doing so because things had by then fallen into a groove. Bawa did not have to do any cross-examination because the witnesses were all pro-victim. The cross-examination was done only by the counsel representing the union

government, Delhi Administration, and anti-victim groups. Since the witnesses fielded by us were genuine, none faltered during the cross-examination. Just when the session seemed to be coming to a satisfactory conclusion for us, Lala Ram Gupta, a senior advocate representing the Hindu fundamentalist Nagrik Suraksha Samiti (Arya Samaj), got up on the last day, 4 April, and asked for another session so that he could produce his witnesses as well. Given the context in which Misra had stopped considering any of the antivictim affidavits after the fiasco involving them in the first session, he should have straightaway rejected the attempt made on the last day of the last session to bring those witnesses back into the inquiry through the back-door. But, to our surprise, Misra promptly said yes, despite the fact that it would entail holding another session of evidence just to accommodate Gupta’s request. Misra’s ready willingness to revise the schedule of the inquiry so drastically gave us the impression that Gupta’s plea was stage-managed, especially because the judge gave no explanation for reversing his earlier decision that those anti-victim affidavits would not be considered at all. It was in such circumstances that the commission held another session of evidence in the last week of April to record the deposition of anti-victim witnesses. This created one practical problem for us, on the side of the victims. We needed to look for a new senior advocate to cross-examine those anti-victim witnesses. The one who did the cross-examination in the first session of evidence, SC Malik, did so formally on behalf of the CJC. Since the CJC had withdrawn, Malik could not appear for another party any longer. In the circumstances, it was not easy to find another advocate who shared Malik’s commitment as well as his expertise in the art of cross-examination. After a great deal of search, we found an able replacement all the way in Kanpur, SH Niazi, who was engaged to appear for Akali Dal. Since he had appeared before the Misra Commission in the context of the disturbances in Kanpur, Niazi was very well conversant with the issue. Given Misra’s secretive style of inquiry, we had to deal with another major problem at the time of the two-day session. Even though the witnesses who were deposing against the victims obviously faced no threat from culprits, the commission insisted on giving the affidavits to us only the evening before the deposition. On both days, the commission gave the affidavits to us around 5.00 pm. Within an hour, we rushed two teams to survey those far-flung localities where the deponents resided. One team was led by Jatinder Kaur Lal, and another by Gurvinder Pal Singh. Between them, 25-year-old Jatinder was kept more active because being a woman she could make the survey discreetly without arousing suspicion in those communally sensitive areas. She had to move around till late in the night, in an autorickshaw, accompanied by a peon. The two teams used to return around midnight, and brief me at that late hour, with the help of notes and maps. The next morning, I would meet Niazi at his sister’s house in

Panchsheel Park. Besides debriefing him, I would give Niazi maps of various localities to show the extent and nature of the violence that had occurred where those anti-victim affidavits said that nothing much had happened. About thirty anti-victim witnesses were due to give evidence over two days. All of them turned up, unlike in the first session, when only three out of sixty anti-victim witnesses did so. Niazi was successful in punching holes in their claims that the Congress leaders had quelled riots and rescued Sikhs. But that did not stop Misra from citing the affidavits of one of them, Balwinder Singh, to exonerate Congress leader, HKL Bhagat, of the charge of organizing the carnage. In his report submitted in August 1986, Misra recorded that ‘not much of reliance has been placed’ on the hundreds of affidavits that had been filed in favour of Bhagat. In the same breath, he chose to rely on Balwinder Singh’s affidavit, without a hint of explanation, to justify the exception. In the course of his cross-examination by Niazi, Balwinder Singh, who was president of an east Delhi organisation called Jamunapaar Ekta Forum, denied that he had any political link. ‘I have no affiliation with the Congress (I),’ he asserted. But the cat was out of the bag about two years after the Misra probe. In the run-up to the next Lok Sabha election in 1989, Balwinder Singh created a stir by presenting a saropa (traditional Sikh felicitation) to Bhagat. Around the same time, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi issued a statement vouching that senior Congress leaders of Delhi, including Bhagat, could not have been involved in the carnage as they were with him for ‘48 to 72 hours’ after Indira Gandhi’s murder. Balwinder Singh’s son, Arvinder Singh Lovely, is a Congress minister in the Delhi government today, headed by Sheila Dixit. The big picture presented by Misra was that neither the Congress Party nor any of its leaders was involved in organizing the massacre. It was rather the handiwork of unnamed ‘anti-social elements’ in collusion, at worst, with Congress ‘workers’ who were found to have acted on their own. The saving grace was that Misra conceded that the police were accountable for errors of omission and commission. But the upshot of all his exertions to cover up political complicity was that no individual, whether in the police or the ruling party, was indicted for his complicity in the massacre. Even as he maintained that he could not indict any of the culprits, Justice Misra went out of his way to exonerate Bhagat and Rajiv Gandhi. In all this, Misra was economical with facts about the CJC’s withdrawal too. While admitting in his report that its withdrawal created ‘some amount of embarrassment in the working of the Commission,’ Misra recorded his ‘disapproval of the manner in which the CJC withdrew from the proceedings.’ But oddly enough, Misra did not deign to mention a single line from our eighteen-page withdrawal letter dated 31 March 1986. The Misra report just said that most of the facts mentioned in our withdrawal letter were ‘either irrelevant or assumptions without foundation’. That, however, did not stop him from

reproducing the letter I had subsequently given him two days later from our chairman, Justice SM Sikri, stating that the CJC ‘regretfully finds itself unable to alter its previous decision’ to withdraw from the commission’s proceedings. His attraction to the one-page letter dated 2 April1986 was evidently its clarification that our withdrawal did not ‘in any manner imply a lack of personal confidence in Your Lordship or any mark of disrespect for the Commission’. Though it was merely an expression of courtesy from a retired chief justice to a sitting judge, Misra thought it fit to reproduce the 2 April letter in its entirety, that too, not once but twice (the first time in the main body of the report, and the second time, as its very first annexure). While suppressing the contents of our main letter of withdrawal, Misra sought to salvage credibility by clutching on to what was no more than an addendum. Since Justice Sikri had written the 2 April letter at my instance, to help me deal with Misra’s remonstrations, I should perhaps take the blame for providing him an opportunity to pass off an expression of courtesy as a testimonial.

Further Cover-up

Since it did not get down to indicting anybody for the Delhi carnage, the Misra Commission recommended the appointment of two committees for that purpose – one to look into allegations against police officials, and another to follow up on the allegations that cases had either not been registered or not been properly investigated. The latter committee acquired greater political significance as it recommended murder cases, despite heavy odds, against the Congress leaders, Sajjan Kumar and HKL Bhagat. It also became a subject of much controversy and litigation over the years, as the Congress leaders tried hard to stall any action against them on its recommendations. As a result, there were repeated and prolonged interruptions in the functioning of the committee from the time it was set up in February 1987 to when it was finally wound up in August 1993. The composition of the committee, which was meant to consist of a retired High Court judge, and a retired police officer, kept changing. In the beginning, it was the Jain-Banerjee Committee, and then it was the Poti-Rosha Committee; and finally, it was the Jain-Aggarwal Committee (the two Jains being different persons). Even otherwise, the committee took over seven months to make its first recommendation in 1987, because the government had refused to give it access to the affidavits received by the Misra Commission. The committee was forced to invite victims to file affidavits all over again, at that late stage. The game plan obviously was to prevent the Jain-Banerjee Committee from looking at the strong material placed by the Citizens Justice Committee before the Misra Commission. The Rajiv Gandhi government knew that it would be difficult for us to go back to the same victims for more affidavits after the Misra Commission’s whitewash. Secondly, it reckoned that any affidavit taken for the first time from other victims over two and half years after the carnage would let the accused raise the plea of delay. Thus, the Jain-Banerjee Committee had to make do with the affidavits it had received in response to its own notification. In its first recommendation sent on 14 October 1987, the committee asked Delhi Police to register a murder case against Sajjan Kumar and others on the basis of an affidavit given by a widow, Anwar Kaur, who alleged that her husband, Navin Singh, had been killed by a mob led by the Congress leader in Sultanpuri. Two days later, the police wrote back to the committee saying that the 14 October letter should be routed to them through the Delhi Administration. When the committee pointed out on 19 October that it had already been authorized to ‘give instructions’ to the police directly, there was a stalemate as the police continued to sit on the proposed case against Sajjan Kumar. The stalemate was broken the next month when co-author of this book,

Manoj Mitta, brought out into the open the first-ever official indictment of a Congress leader in the 1984 carnage. Mitta’s report in The Times of India on the Jain-Banerjee Committee’s proposal against Sajjan Kumar marked the beginning of a series of investigative stories done by him over the years, exposing the coverup of the 1984 carnage at various stages. It also marked the beginning of our long association in battling all manner of manipulations made by persons in high places to deny justice to victims. Mitta came into the picture only in 1987, as he was still a student far away in Hyderabad when the carnage took place, and got his break as a journalist in Delhi in 1986. Mitta’s story that the government was sitting on the committee’s recommendation against Sajjan Kumar set off a chain reaction to shield him despite the exposure. One of the other persons mentioned in Anwar Kaur’s affidavit, Brahmanand Gupta, filed a writ petition before the Delhi High Court, challenging the legality of the committee itself. Gupta was already facing trial in two murder cases for his alleged involvement in the carnage. He suppressed this material fact in his petition. Yet, on 24 November, a High Court bench headed by acting chief justice, Yogeshwar Dayal, straightaway admitted the petition, and passed a stay order restraining the police from registering not only Anwar Kaur’s case but any case sent by the Jain-Banerjee Committee. Further, the High Court restrained the committee from making any further recommendations pending the disposal of the petition. Dayal’s swift intervention insulating the Congress leaders from any accountability for their complicity rang an alarm in my mind. It reminded me of the commotion raised by the same judge two years earlier over a petition filed by the human rights organization PUDR, seeking a judicial inquiry into the carnage. In February 1985, he had had no hesitation in echoing Rajiv Gandhi’s antipathy to the demand for an inquiry into the carnage. If Rajiv had said that the inquiry would only reopen old wounds, Dayal had gone further and said that it would ‘fan communal riots,’ as reported by The Illustrated Weekly of India on 24 March 1985. He also had no qualms in repeating a rhetorical question commonly raised those days in the Congress circles: ‘What about the Hindus who were being killed in Punjab?’ Dayal’s hostile observations during the court proceedings had reportedly provoked journalists, academics, and human rights activists, to serve defamation notices on him. They had taken offence to his remark that he would not involve thousands of people in litigation based on the reports of ‘wretched journalists’. Reacting to the report brought out by PUCL and PUDR on the carnage, ‘Who are the guilty?’, Justice Dayal had declared, ‘I have no respect for your report … these professors should not investigate.’ Disdainful as he was of the civil society, the judge was unconcerned about the fact that the professors and the like had intervened because the police and the government had abdicated their duty to the rule of law. Besides Dayal’s record in the matter, I was worried about the fact that the

government’s counsel, RK Anand, had made no serious effort to oppose the blanket stay order on the Jain-Banerjee Committee. As its convenor, I reactivated the Citizens Justice Committee (CJC), which had been the premier body representing the victims before the Misra Commission. Since a committee set up on the Misra Commission’s recommendation had been interdicted, the CJC filed an application seeking to be impleaded as a party in the case. Fortunately, the senior advocate who appeared regularly for us before the Misra Commission, SC Malik, was still willing to take up our cause, that too without charging any fee. In fact, he bore a lot of costs from his own pocket. Fortunately, Dayal was no longer posted in Delhi when Brahmanand Gupta’s petition came up for hearing after the stay on 6 May 1988. Because of his seniority, he was due to become a full-fledged chief justice, and in keeping with the general policy of having chief justices from outside the state, Dayal was transferred to Hyderabad. Gupta’s petition went before a bench headed by Justice SB Wad. Malik made a forceful pitch for vacating the stay so that the case against Sajjan Kumar could be registered. Justice Wad quickly saw through the game that had taken place in the case. He agreed with Malik that since Anwar Kaur’s affidavit disclosed a cognizable offence, the police were duty bound to register a case and investigate it. In a roundabout attempt to prevent the law from taking its course, the government counsel, RK Anand, pointed out that the stay order passed by Justice Dayal’s bench restrained the police from acting on any of the recommendations of the Jain-Banerjee Committee. Justice Wad responded that if the stay order was coming in the way, he was prepared to vacate it immediately. This concession should have been welcomed by Anand as Justice Wad was, after all, offering to vacate the stay on a government-appointed committee. But then, the petition was collusive. Our suspicion was confirmed when Anand gave up all pretence of seeking to bring those guilty of the carnage to book. He came out in favour of petitioner-accused Brahmanand Gupta’s contention that no FIR should be registered till the High Court decided his petition on merit. In an obvious recourse to dilatory tactics, Anand sought an adjournment on the pretext of filing additional material. Justice Wad reluctantly agreed to give no more than two weeks for that purpose, and fixed the next hearing for 20 May 1988. Given the no-nonsense attitude displayed by Justice Wad, the government used that two-week respite to pull strings in the judiciary and get that politically sensitive case taken out of his docket. After all, it had succeeded in doing something similar in early 1985 when a bench consisting of Justice Rajinder Sachar and Justice Wad, had admitted the PUDR petition on 11 January, and listed the case for hearing on 22 February. In an unusual sequence of events, the government managed to get the roster changed so that the PUDR case was removed from Justice Sachar’s court and placed before the bench of Justice Dayal

and Justice BN Kirpal. That was when Justice Dayal, echoing the government’s line, lambasted the human rights groups, and the media, for espousing the cause of riot victims. In order to get Gupta’s petition removed from Justice Wad’s bench in the two-week interregnum in May 1988, the government rushed through the formalities of bringing in a new chief justice from Calcutta High Court, Justice RN Pyne. But the move almost came unstuck as the government had run out of time. For all its efforts to fast forward the process, Justice Pyne could not be sworn in earlier than on the morning of 20 May, the very day Justice Wad’s bench was set to vacate the stay on the Jain-Banerjee Committee. That left no room for him to change the roster of the High Court, as he would have had authority over it only after he had formally taken charge. The chief justice-designate called up the registrar of the Delhi High Court from Calcutta (now Kolkata), and throwing all norms to the winds, directed him to list the Brahmanand Gupta petition before his bench on 20 May. It was in such dubious circumstances that a bench headed by Justice Pyne came to deal with the carnage matter on that fateful day, rather than Justice Wad’s bench. Justice RS Narula, whose son-in-law, Justice SS Chadha, was acting chief justice of Delhi High Court before Justice Pyne took over, did great service by exposing these manipulations in the judiciary in his oral deposition before the Justice Nanavati Commission on 9 January 2002. When Gupta’s petition came up before his bench on his very first day in the Delhi High Court, Justice Pyne, sure enough, showed no intention of picking up the threads from where Justice Wad had left. On the contrary, he tolerated no talk of vacating the stay on the Jain-Banerjee committee. Disregarding our protests, Justice Pyne simply adjourned the matter beyond the summer vacation. But the drama didn’t end there. Once the matter was taken up after the summer vacation of 1988, the petitioner and government suddenly seemed to be in a hurry to get it disposed off. Since the following year was an election year, riot-tainted leaders such as HKL Bhagat, Sajjan Kumar, and Jagdish Tytler, wanted the Jain-Banerjee Committee out of their way. They were obviously counting on Justice Pyne to complete the job he had initiated on his arrival at the Delhi High Court, just before the vacation. Our priority was just the opposite. Since we could see that the independence of the High Court had been compromised by Rajiv Gandhi’s dispensation, we wanted the disposal of the petition to be put off till the election due in December 1989. We were, therefore, looking for an opportunity to scuttle the attempt to quash the committee before the election. The opportunity came when Justice GC Jain, who was sitting on the bench with Justice Pyne, performed his daughter’s wedding. One of the guests who attended that wedding was none other than HKL Bhagat. There was scope to see

that as an impropriety, as Bhagat, being similarly located as Sajjan Kumar in the context of the carnage, had a direct and vital interest in the Brahmanand Gupta case pending before the bench of Pyne and Jain. But then I felt guilty about casting any aspersions on Justice Jain because he was known for his uprightness, integrity and honesty. On balance, I felt I could not let go of this opportunity to stall the proceedings. I leaked the information to Mitta who promptly did a story in The Times of India on how Bhagat’s presence at the wedding of Justice Jain’s daughter, raised eyebrows. The story also quoted Justice Jain’s defence saying that he and Bhagat went back a long way. Bhagat used to appear before him as a lawyer when Jain was in the subordinate judiciary. All the same, the story on Bhagat’s presence at the wedding had an immediate fallout. Upset as he was at the story, Justice Jain recused himself from the case. Thus, we succeeded in getting the matter transferred to another bench, thereby delaying it by a few months. The case was heard afresh in early 1989 by a bench comprising Justice BN Kirpal and Justice CL Chaudhary. This time, Kirpal, who went on to become the chief justice of India, raised our hopes because of the way he expressed outrage several times in the court over the failure of the police to book the guilty of the 1984 carnage. We were confident that even if the petition challenging the Jain-Banerjee Committee was not dismissed, the court would ensure that the committee remained in place to redress the long-pending grievance that riot cases were neither registered nor properly investigated. But our optimism turned out to be misplaced. The judgment delivered by Justice Kirpal on 4 October 1989, in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, went out of its way to quash the appointment of the Jain-Banerjee Committee. Brahmanand Gupta’s challenge was limited to one of the four terms of reference: the power conferred on the committee to ‘monitor the investigation’ of cases. Shorn of legalese, the question was whether the committee could only send recommendations to the lieutenant governor of Delhi, or was it also empowered to deal directly with the police. If Kirpal felt that the latter was not permissible in law, there was still no need to quash the whole notification and thereby set the clock back on carnage cases. Whatever the validity of Kirpal’s judgment, it came as a windfall to riottainted leaders on the eve of the elections. The case had been a millstone round the neck for not just Sajjan Kumar, who had been indicted by the committee, but also HKL Bhagat, and Jagdish Tytler. If the High Court had upheld the power of the committee to recommend fresh cases, it would have been difficult for the Congress Party to field any of the three leaders as its candidates in the vastly changed environment of the 1989 election. Sajjan Kumar would have been liable to be booked straightaway on Anwar Kaur’s affidavit. And that would have just been the beginning. The other two leaders, too, could have got into trouble in due course.

To be sure, Kirpal’s judgment quashing the committee was all about hyper technicalities (whether such and such power could be delegated), and nothing to do with anybody’s culpability for the carnage. All the same, it came in handy to Bhagat and Tytler to try and wash away the stain of riots at a time when their perceived complicity could have proved embarrassing to the Congress Party. If Bhagat and Tytler had thrived on the anti-Sikh sentiment whipped up in the 1984 election, they sought to distance themselves from that mass crime in the 1989 election. In the event, the two succeeded once again at the hustings. Ironically, Sajjan Kumar himself got no benefit from the verdict. Like in 1984, he was denied the party ticket again in 1989. It was widely reported on both occasions that Sajjan Kumar was paying for his complicity in the 1984 carnage. From the viewpoint of human rights, there was little reason why the Congress Party should not have imposed the same penalty on Bhagat and Tytler too.

Turning Point Congress Party’s defeat in the 1989 election might have had little to do T he with the unresolved issue of the 1984 carnage. But it promised to make a dramatic difference to our campaign. The new government headed by VP Singh gave positions of high responsibility to some of us. Most importantly, it appointed Soli Sorabjee, a key member of the Citizens Justice Committee, as attorney general for India, the number one law officer in the country. Despite his eminent status, it was the first time the honour of that constitutional office was conferred upon Sorabjee. Another high-profile appointment was of the retired air force chief, Arjan Singh, as lieutenant governor of Delhi, an office that directly dealt with the subject of law and order in the capital. Though Arjan Singh was never part of the CJC, the elevation of a distinguished Sikh to that crucial position was widely seen as a signal from the VP Singh government to redress the grievances of the carnage victims. In a spin-off effect of such major changes, I was appointed as the central government’s standing counsel in the Delhi High Court, which was quite a jump for a lawyer of my age and standing. I desperately needed such a break because, frankly, I could not build much of a practice after suspending it for over a year on account of my full-time engagement with the Misra Commission’s proceedings. And even after that, a major part of my time was consumed by the consequences of Misra’s report. All that did give me a high profile in the media, but I did not get any professional mileage from it. Willy-nilly, I got slotted as a lawyer who only dealt with carnage cases. My appointment to a post much sought after among lawyers was the first reward that came my way for the years of work I had done in connection with the carnage. I owed the opportunity to Sorabjee, and another leading light of the CJC, Lieutenant General JS Aurora, who put in a word for me on their own. The kind of briefs I got to handle as standing counsel helped me tremendously in my professional growth. Fortunately, that growth was in no way at the expense of the cause so dear to my heart. I was permitted to continue appearing in carnage-related cases. Another happy augury was that within a month of VP Singh’s reign, his home minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, met us in his North Block office to discuss the issue of the 1984 carnage. Justice RS Narula, Lieutenant General Aurora, and I, were present at the meeting. It was music to our ears to hear the country’s home minister say that he admired the manner in which we had pursued the cause over the years ‘in such a hostile environment’. The Mufti also assured us that he would take all possible steps to punish the guilty. Given the radically different attitude displayed by the VP Singh government,

we changed our strategy for reviving the committee recommended by the Misra Commission to register fresh cases. The CJC had filed an appeal in the Supreme Court against the Delhi High Court’s judgment quashing the appointment of the Jain-Banerjee Committee. Since the new government was not opposed to the revival of the committee, we felt there was no need to wait till our appeal was decided by the Supreme Court. We impressed upon the government that it could, without further delay, issue a fresh notification, minus the technical flaws pointed out by the High Court. Accepting our suggestion, the government appointed a fresh committee in March 1990, consisting of Justice PS Poti, former chief justice of the Gujarat High Court, and PA Rosha, a retired police chief. That set the stage for a revival of the battle to book Sajjan Kumar, incidentally, again on Anwar Kaur’s affidavit. It was among the first batch of cases recommended by the Poti-Rosha Committee in August 1990. This time the case was, as recommended, registered by the Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s premier investigation agency. On 11 September 1990, early in the morning at 6.45 am, a CBI team arrested Sajjan Kumar from his house in a congested locality called Pashchimpuri in west Delhi. After the arrest, the CBI team started conducting a search of his house. During that period, a large mob collected outside his house and raised provocative slogans against the CBI. In no time, they installed a loudspeaker through which they repeatedly threatened CBI officials with dire consequences if they dared to take Sajjan Kumar away with them. Those officials were in no position to take away the leader as the mob had blocked their exit. While the CBI officials themselves were thus detained, the mob turned violent and damaged the two vehicles in which the team had arrived. The local police failed to respond to any of the frantic messages from the CBI team. The excuse trotted out by the police was that they could not access Sajjan Kumar’s house as the mob had blocked the narrow lane leading to it. The high drama in Sajjan Kumar’s neigbourhood was actually a ploy to gain time and obtain anticipatory bail from the Delhi High Court, which was still being administered by Chief Justice RN Pyne, who had been, as explained in the previous chapter, especially transferred to the capital during Rajiv Gandhi’s reign, to shield Sajjan Kumar. A lawyer mentioned the matter before Justice Pyne, who then directed Justice MK Chawla to hear Sajjan Kumar’s anticipatory bail. There was no question of anticipatory bail at that stage because he had already been arrested early in the morning. But that vital piece of legal information was conveniently held back from the court. On his part, Justice Chawla, too, made no effort to find out Sajjan Kumar’s status at that moment, even after he had been told that the CBI team was already there at the Congress leader’s house. The only use the judge made of that detail was that he got the court registrar to call up Sajjan Kumar’s house and direct the CBI team to release him immediately.

Subsequently, the CBI team could leave Sajjan Kumar’s house safely only after he himself had told his supporters over the loudspeaker about the so-called anticipatory bail. The CBI’s humiliation could not have been greater. In the entire episode, the CBI officials got no aid from the Delhi Police, obviously because many of the police officers themselves were facing allegations of complicity in the carnage. They must have feared that if the VP Singh government was allowed to take action against a political leader, it would not be long before they themselves were held to account for the carnage. Hence, the sabotage of the CBI’s attempt to arrest Sajjan Kumar. Though Rajiv Gandhi had been voted out of power, he seemed to retain a firm grip over the bureaucratic and police machinery. It used to be said those days with a touch of cynicism that if there was any work that Prime Minister VP Singh was unable to extract from the system, Opposition leader, Rajiv Gandhi, would be able to get it done, without any formal powers. The fiasco in Sajjan Kumar’s case emboldened the Congress leaders, bureaucrats, and police officers, to act in tandem and scuttle whatever little effort was being made on the carnage front. The Poti-Rosha Committee itself fell prey to that conspiracy. As it happened, the committee’s term was due to be renewed within ten days of the abortive attempt to arrest Sajjan Kumar. Demoralized and frustrated as they were, Poti and Rosha declined to avail themselves of an extension. The committee, therefore, had to be reconstituted with Justice JD Jain, a former judge of the Delhi High Court, and DK Aggarwal, a former police chief of Uttar Pradesh. Fortunately, Jain and Aggarwal seemed to have a thicker skin. Picking up the threads from where its predecessor had left, the Jain-Aggarwal Committee carried out its work with utmost sincerity despite all odds. It started functioning at a time when the country was going through a phase of cataclysmic events: the Mandal agitation, Advani’s Rath Yatra, and the collapse of the VP Singh government. The new coalition headed by Chandra Shekhar was propped up by the Congress Party. The overthrown VP Singh government, being entirely a nonCongress set-up, had seemed to be our best bet for bringing the Congress leaders to book. And since the Chandra Shekhar government was run with the support of the Congress Party, we had every reason to fear that Jain and Aggarwal would find the system even more hostile than their predecessors had done under VP Singh’s dispensation. Our fears worsened when the Chandra Shekhar government replaced Arjan Singh with a former police officer, Markandey Singh, as lieutenant governor of Delhi. But our suspicion about Markandey Singh as well as Chandra Shekhar turned out to be entirely misplaced. I may add that we still remember the few months that Chandra Shekhar and Markandey Singh were in charge as the golden period of our struggle for justice. In retrospect, we should not have been surprised at the commitment shown by Chandra Shekhar. After all, he was about the only major political leader to

have intervened openly while the carnage was still on. As president of the Janata Party, Chandra Shekhar had participated in a long peace march through Delhi on 2 November 1984. He deserved a great deal of credit for not giving up his concern for the riot victims six years later, even though the Congress Party’s support was indispensable to the government he had formed then. Since we knew comparatively little about the background of Markandey Singh, we could be pardoned for being surprised at the will he displayed as Delhi’s administrator, to enforce the recommendations of the Jain-Aggarwal Committee. Markandey Singh proved to be more effective than Arjan Singh who had become needlessly defensive in the face of deliberate and repeated attacks from Bhagat and company, questioning his impartiality. Despite denials from us, the Congress leaders spread the canard that Arjan Singh was a member of the CJC. They also insinuated that he was taking extraordinary interest in the riot cases because he was a Sikh. Those tactics had the intended effect of neutralizing Arjan Singh. Markandey Singh is an inspiring example of an administrator who, unlike other holders of high office, refused to be party to the cover-up of the carnage, and paid with his job for his principles. I can vouch for this unsung hero, as I was witness to his quiet but resolute efforts to secure justice for the riot victims. His mettle was severely tested in cases involving the likes of Bhagat and Sajjan Kumar. In the early months of its existence, the Jain-Aggarwal Committee received rather discouraging reports from the police, saying that in all the cases recommended by it, witnesses were resiling from their statements. In a bid to verify the police claim, Justice Jain called me and gave me a list of the witnesses who were said to have retracted. He asked me to contact those witnesses and find out from them whether they had backed out on their own, or under duress. I traced those witnesses, and since they were all widows, I took along with me my associate from the days of the Misra Commission, Jatinder Kaur Lal, who had established an excellent rapport with the riot victims all over Delhi. The stories that emerged yet again revealed, in different ways, the unabashed complicity of the police in the cover-up. The first widow we visited, refuted the police claim that she had retracted her statement when they had met her. On my request, she narrated her entire testimony to me and I found that it tallied with the affidavit given to me by Justice Jain. The second widow we visited told us that she had related her entire carnage experience to the sub-inspector who had contacted her. But then she had wanted to know what the police would be able to do if the ‘goondas’ she had named, caused any harm to her only surviving son. The sub-inspector had said callously, ‘What can we do? We will register another case the way we have done regarding

your husband.’ Hearing this, the widow had told him flatly that she did not want to give any evidence. But after a few days, one lady inspector had visited her house and tried to undo the damage caused by her colleague. After persuading her to depose fearlessly, the lady inspector had apparently given her phone number to the widow so that she could call for help ‘even at midnight’ if anybody threatened her or her son. On the strength of this assurance, the widow had agreed to give her evidence. The third widow we met was in a situation similar to the second one. She had backed out because the policeman had told her that none of the widows was prepared to give evidence out of concern for the safety of their families. Her daughter and son-in-law happened to be visiting her at the time we met her. Both started quarrelling with her as they felt that she had succumbed to the police pressure and retracted her evidence on her husband’s murder. Thus, in the course of our visit, she was persuaded by her family to stick to her affidavit so that the police had no excuse for their inaction. I reported my findings to Justice Jain, who, in turn, apprised Markandey Singh of the situation at their next meeting. In a prompt corrective, Markandey Singh attached an independent police team to the Jain-Aggarwal Committee, and authorized the panel to start summoning the victims to its office so that it could verify their affidavits directly, rather than depending on Delhi Police. The change in procedure produced a dramatically different picture, as most widows reaffirmed the contents of their affidavits. That was how the Jain-Aggarwal Committee came to recommend the registration of several cases, including those against the Congress leaders, Bhagat, and Sajjan Kumar. Markandey Singh accepted all the recommendations, and in keeping with a policy adopted in VP Singh’s reign, directed the CBI to register the cases naming political leaders. But, after the fiasco over Sajjan Kumar’s arrest in Anwar Kaur’s case in September 1990, the CBI showed no inclination or courage to take up any carnage case. The agency chose to disregard the lieutenant governor’s reference rather than take on the might of carnage-tainted political leaders. It may also be borne in mind that the Chandra Shekhar government had before long been reduced to a caretaker regime, following the withdrawal of the Congress Party’s support. That enabled the CBI to ignore Markandey Singh’s references with impunity, and instead, prepare for the return of the Congress Party to power. Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination by Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers in the course of the 1991 election, did not seem to have, in any way, reduced the influence exerted by carnage-tainted elements, over the system. This was not surprising, given that PV Narasimha Rao, who was India’s home minister during the 1984 carnage, succeeded the deceased leader in 1991 as the Congress president, and became the prime minister. Markandey Singh’s days in office were numbered, as he got into a tangle with HKL Bhagat on the cases recommended against him. Despite the Congress

Party’s return at the centre, Markandey Singh stood up to Bhagat’s pressure to withdraw those recommendations. Details of the tussle between the two are discussed in the next chapter. It would suffice to say that Markandey Singh’s refusal to give in to Bhagat’s pressure cost him his job, or at least, hastened his exit from the office of the lieutenant governor. If Markandey Singh thus had to pay for standing up for the riot victims, consider the rewards given to Bhagat since the carnage. Rajiv Gandhi elevated him immediately in 1984 to the cabinet rank, and gave him important portfolios. Though Bhagat was defeated in the 1991 Lok Sabha election, Narasimha Rao built him up as the Congress Party’s first chief ministerial candidate for Delhi, when it was provided a legislative assembly in 1993. It is another matter that the electorate denied Bhagat that distinction, as the Congress Party lost the first Delhi assembly election to the BJP. In another ironic twist, Bhagat’s upset defeat in the 1991 Lok Sabha election, coincided with Sajjan Kumar’s successful comeback to electoral politics. Sajjan Kumar was among the two sitting MPs from Delhi – Dharam Dass Shastri being the other – to have been denied Congress tickets in 1984, ostensibly because of the widespread allegations against them in the context of the carnage. The party refused a ticket to Sajjan Kumar again in the 1989 election, maintaining the pretence that it was earnest in keeping away carnage-tainted leaders. Thanks to the change of regime after the 1989 election, the law was finally set in motion, as the CBI booked Sajjan Kumar for allegedly leading a mob that killed Anwar Kaur’s husband in the 1984 carnage. Logically, this belated development in 1990 should have persuaded the Congress Party to continue with its policy of not fielding Sajjan Kumar as its candidate. Instead, since politics has its own logic, the Congress Party did the opposite. For the first time since the 1984 carnage, the party gave a ticket to Sajjan Kumar in the 1991 election. Thus, the party appeared to punish him as long as the law was not allowed to touch him. But when the law caught up with him in 1990 under a non-Congress regime, the party suddenly saw him as a victim of political vendetta, and sought to compensate him by giving him a ticket in the election that followed. In the event, the electorate vindicated the Congress Party’s decision to rehabilitate Sajjan Kumar despite the murder case pending against him. It was a reminder that the elections in India might be free and fair, but its democracy was yet to imbibe the rule of law, in letter and spirit.

Pitched Battles our long struggle for justice stretching over two decades, I can recall two In distinct phases when we had great difficulty in keeping the issue alive. The first one was from 1987 to 1989. It began when the whitewash by Justice Ranganath Misra, a sitting judge of the Supreme Court, came to light. Those down the line, in the executive as well as the judiciary, took it as a signal to do their own bit to shield the culprits. The stonewalling of all efforts to secure justice for the riot victims suggested that every institution of governance was committed to the ‘patriotic’ cause of teaching Sikhs a lesson. We were, after all, ranged against a regime that acquired a brute majority in parliament, after whipping up an anti-Sikh wave around the country in 1984. We got out of that phase of extreme adversity only after the Congress Party was defeated by a loose combination of Opposition parties in the subsequent election in 1989. The next time I was filled with despair was in 1992-93, when the Congress Party, having returned to power, started sending out signals of impunity for the guilty of the carnage again. That was also the period when the country saw another eruption of large-scale violence, blurring the distinction between sectarian and terrorist killings. The demolition of Babri Masjid triggered riots across the country, particularly in Mumbai (then Bombay) and that led to a series of bomb blasts in India’s commercial capital. The Jain-Aggarwal Committee, which had been playing the role of a watchdog on the police and prosecution in dealing with the 1984 carnage cases, was wound up in the first half of 1993. Whatever little progress we had made during the non-Congress interregnum was all but rolled back. Take the three trial courts that were set up at our instance during VP Singh’s reign and exclusively allotted carnage cases. The idea, obviously, was to expedite the disposal of those cases. But, under the Congress rule of PV Narasimha Rao, the very same device of exclusive courts turned into a means to subvert justice. This retrograde change began as a reaction to the independence displayed by a judge heading one of the exclusive courts, JB Goel. Bucking the trend with riot cases, Goel awarded conviction in two of them, on charges of murder, and showed signs of doing the same in more cases. Not surprisingly, Goel’s courageous decisions raised an alarm in the Congress circles. All of sudden, he was transferred, and the riot cases pending before him were shifted to the exclusive court headed by SS Bal, who held a contrary record. Later, the cases from the third exclusive court were also transferred to Bal’s court. As a result, the victims suffered a lot of inconvenience, as most of them had to travel far greater distances to reach Bal’s court. The accused, on the other hand, had reason to feel less anxious about their fate as all but two of the 123 riot cases decided by Bal, resulted in acquittals.

As luck would have it, the fresh challenges on the carnage front were compounded by personal setbacks. SC Malik, who was the senior advocate for the CJC before the Misra Commission, and later before Delhi High Court, passed away in January 1993. I felt orphaned because, as my long-standing mentor, he was somebody I had come to depend on for advice and guidance. Around the same time, a medical crisis engulfed my family. My son was diagnosed as a ‘special child’, a euphemism for a slow learner. One symptom of it was that as a three-year-old, he had still not learnt to talk. Much to our dismay, my wife Maninder, and I also discovered that there were hardly any facilities in India to cater to the special needs of such children. We were advised to migrate to an advanced country to make things easier for our son. We could not help regretting our decision, two years earlier, to turn down the jobs that had been offered to Maninder in the US. While working as general manager (technical) with what was then the largest food processing company in India, Modern Food Industries, Maninder received a fellowship from a US organization in 1990 for further studies in that country. The American Institute of Baking in Kansas declared her as an ‘outstanding graduate’. On the strength of that accomplishment, she got job offers from two US companies. We were in a fix. We were greatly excited about the prospect of Maninder joining a lucrative and far more challenging job in the US. But there was a hitch. It was inconceivable for me to leave India at that juncture. No, it was not because of the prestigious assignment I had landed as central government standing counsel in the Delhi High Court. I was prepared to take a chance with my career and somehow start afresh in an alien environment. No such alternative was, however, available to me on the carnage front. The mission I had been engaged in for years was bound to suffer in my absence. I could not think of anybody who could have, at that advanced stage, taken over the role of spearheading the struggle for justice. Since she was not willing to live in the US without me, Maninder was forced to decline the job offers. She was the one who decided that the cause I was fighting for was more important than the prospect of her professional growth in the US. The confidence she reposed in my mission at the expense of her career opportunities had made me all the more conscious of the responsibility I owed the victims to espouse their cause till they got justice. But that was the state of my mind in 1990. Two years later, the combination of a hostile government’s efforts to shield the culprits, and my son’s medical problems, took a toll on my morale. I stopped attending to any carnage-related work in 1992, and it remained so throughout the first half of 1993. I could barely find any motivation to come up with a strategy to fight back and recover lost ground. I snapped out of that state sometime in July 1993 when the co-author of this book, Manoj Mitta, brought a fresh instance of cover-up to my notice. Mitta had kept up his interest in the carnage issue as part of his journalistic work. The

head of the riot cell of the Delhi Police, AA Farooquee, had disclosed to Mitta that they had registered eight cases involving political leaders. But then Farooquee had spoilt the good news by adding that they were unable to make any progress with their investigations. Reason: the victims making the allegations against political leaders in their affidavits, backed out when the police sought to record their statements. Smelling another cover-up, Mitta promptly took down the names and addresses of the victims involved to verify Farooquee’s claim. That was how Mitta sought me out for help. I called up my old ‘victim’ expert, Jatinder Kaur Lal, to help Mitta trace the ones in question. To their surprise, they found that those victims were indeed vague about the alleged complicity of political leaders. All of them, barring one, admitted that they had themselves not seen any leader during the riots. They had only heard about the involvement of the leaders from others. Intrigued as I was by that turn of events, I dug into my archives for the affidavits filed by those particular witnesses. It involved a lot of search because, despite my intimate knowledge of the material I had preserved, the names of those victims were unfamiliar to me. I discovered that I had a good reason for forgetting their names. Their oral testimony to the police was actually in keeping with their affidavits, which showed in no uncertain terms that their allegations against political leaders were based entirely on hearsay. Since hearsay is no evidence, those affidavits were not quite actionable against leaders. Therefore, I had not included them in the list I had prepared during the Misra Commission’s proceedings, of important witnesses giving direct evidence against the leaders. I gave my list to Mitta to check with the police what they had done with those vital affidavits. Farooquee denied ever having received such affidavits, and added that the Jain-Aggarwal committee had probably not recommended them at all for registration. It so happened that the Jain-Aggarwal Committee had by then been wound up. Aggarwal, when contacted by Mitta, confirmed that the committee had recommended registration of cases on affidavits figuring in my list of important witnesses. So, the big question was, what happened to those affidavits which could have got the likes of Sajjan Kumar into deep trouble? The challenge of finding an answer to that question filled me with fresh energy. Working hard at it, Mitta and I traced the affidavits in the home department of the Delhi Administration. We need to go into a bit of background to understand how those affidavits were gathering dust there, rather than being converted into cases for investigation. In VP Singh’s time, the government took a policy decision that cases related to political leaders would be handled by the CBI, the premier investigation agency in the country, while the rest of the cases would be entrusted to a specially created riot cell of the Delhi Police. But after burning its fingers with Anwar Kaur’s case against Sajjan Kumar–remember the fiasco in 1990 over his arrest – the CBI was reluctant to take up any more riot cases. So,

when Markandey Singh sent twenty-one more affidavits against political leaders over a period in 1991, the CBI sat on them for over a year. Those twenty-one affidavits included some of the witnesses whom I had shortlisted for their strong evidence against political leaders. After Markandey Singh’s departure from the post of lieutenant governor, the CBI returned the affidavits to the Delhi Administration in November 1992. The CBI shirked its duty on the pretext that the Delhi Police already had a special cell to deal with riot cases. In turn, the home department of the Delhi Administration neither returned the affidavits to the CBI nor entrusted them to the riot cell of the Delhi Police. Thus, the affidavits filed against political leaders, continued to gather dust. This was graphically demonstrated by the fate of the very first case recommended against Bhagat by the Jain-Aggarwal Committee, on a particularly poignant affidavit filed by Harminder Kaur, widow of a head constable from Delhi Police. She had not only lost her husband, but also her son, and son-inlaw, in the carnage. Markandey Singh accepted the committee’s recommendation and referred Harminder Kaur’s affidavit to the CBI in September 1991. The CBI, however, sat on Markandey Singh’s reference. When Mitta brought this out in the The Times of India, Bhagat wrote to the lieutenant governor, questioning the reference on the ground that he had already been exonerated by the Misra Commission. Markandey Singh sought the JainAggarwal Committee’s opinion on Bhagat’s objection. On 27 November 1991, Satbir Sailas, joint secretary in the home department of Delhi Administration, wrote a letter to the secretary of the committee as follows: Observation of the Lt Governor: On seeing a news item in the press, Shri Bhagat spoke to me regarding recommendation of the Jain-Aggarwal Committee relating to the affidavit in which his name figures. His view was that the observation of the Ranganath Misra Commission should also have been taken into consideration while formulating the recommendation of the committee.’ Bhagat was understandably trying to take advantage of Misra’s clean chit to the Congress leaders in general, and him, in particular. The Misra Commission had exonerated Bhagat saying that ‘in the absence of convincing material, the commission is not in a position to accept the allegation that Shri Bhagat had instigated the rioters.’ But then the same report was also instrumental in the appointment of the Jain-Aggarwal Committee to probe individual offences committed during the riots. Accordingly, the committee told the administration that the Misra Commission’s observations on Bhagat were not a hurdle, especially because Harminder Kaur’s affidavit had not been seen by the Supreme Court judge. She filed her affidavit in 1987, well after the Misra Commission had submitted its report. Harminder Kaur’s affidavit was, in fact, in response to a fresh notice issued by the Jain-Banerjee Committee, a predecessor of the JainAggarwal Committee, after the Rajiv Gandhi government had declined to give it

access to the affidavits received by the Misra Commission. The motive of the Rajiv Gandhi government, in doing so, was obviously to make it that much harder for any follow-up committee to get fresh material from victims at that late stage, on political complicity in the carnage. Harminder Kaur’s affidavit came in 1987 despite such odds. (It is another matter though that on account of our lobbying with the VP Singh government in 1990, the committee was given permission to see all the records of the Misra Commission.) The rejection of Bhagat’s representation against Harminder Kaur’s affidavit should have spurred the CBI to register the long overdue case against him. But the CBI continued to sit on Harminder Kaur’s affidavit, and then, in November 1992, returned it along with twenty other politically sensitive affidavits to the Delhi Administration, citing the excuse mentioned earlier, about the special cell set up in the Delhi Police, to deal with riot cases. Though political cases were subsequently entrusted to the riot cell of the Delhi Police, they did not initially take up any of the twenty-one affidavits returned by the CBI. Instead, they selected eight other affidavits, even though those did not, as explained earlier, contain any direct evidence against political leaders. In September 1993, Mitta exposed all these manoeuvres in Narasimha Rao’s reign in a three-page story in India Today titled ‘‘84 Riots: Shielding the politicians’. The story which was highlighted by the magazine on its cover appeared in the run-up to the first Delhi Assembly election in November 1993. It came as a god-send to the BJP as the Congress Party’s chief ministerial candidate was none other than Bhagat. Even otherwise, the carnage issue had acquired political currency as Sikhs constituted a significant part of the electorate in several assembly constituencies. In an unusual display of conviction, a Congress MP from Punjab, Jagmeet Singh Brar, created a sensation in the parliament when he attacked his own government for letting off political leaders involved in the 1984 carnage. As a cumulative effect of all such factors, the Rao government announced the initiation of departmental proceedings against some seventy police officials indicted by an official inquiry conducted by retired bureaucrat, Kusum Lata Mittal. It was an obvious bid to refurbish the image of the Congress Party before the Delhi polls. The BJP’s chief ministerial candidate, Madan Lal Khurana, countered it by arguing that the cover-up of the political complicity in the carnage was the real issue. Khurana put the Congress on the defensive by promising Sikhs that he would secure justice for the riot victims, if voted to power. A survey conducted around that time by The Times of India showed that 70 per cent of readers considered punishment to the guilty of the 1984 carnage as one of the five most important issues confronting the new chief minister of Delhi. We were heartened to see that we had succeeded in our efforts to ensure that the decade-old carnage issue did not fall off the radar. The survey strengthened the hands of Khurana, too, when he became the first chief minister

of Delhi in the new constitutional arrangement put in place in 1993. But he soon ran into a constitutional problem. Since Delhi continued to be a union territory, its chief minister did not have jurisdiction over the crucial subject of law and order. The lieutenant governor, who was the centre’s nominee, retained charge of the Delhi Police. This meant that Khurana had rather limited options when it came to delivering on his promise of delivering justice to carnage victims. I met Khurana for the first time in early December 1993, along with Lieutenant General JS Aurora and Justice RS Narula. He appeared earnest in seeking to fulfil his election promise. We suggested that he set up a committee to identify action points for securing justice to the riot victims. The idea was to put on record the material that could form the basis for whatever action he might take. Khurana promptly set up a committee on 17 December with Justice Narula as chairman, and me as member secretary. The system struck back. Lieutenant Governor PK Dave issued a press statement asserting that Khurana had no power to appoint a committee dealing with law and order. When Khurana called us for discussions, I suggested that we could get around Dave’s objection by making it clear that our committee was purely an advisory committee to the chief minister. Khurana was worried that in that case, he would not be able to pay us any perks for working in the committee. I assured him that none of us was seeking any compensation for that assignment. The next issue was that in the absence of the lieutenant governor’s consent, Khurana would not be able to provide infrastructure and secretarial staff either. I volunteered that my office could be the infrastructure, and my staff could do all the necessary secretarial work for the committee. Justice Narula offered his house for holding committee meetings. Thus, the Narula Committee took off despite the centre’s objections, and submitted its report within the stipulated period of one month. To be sure, we did call for, among other things, immediate registration of cases against political leaders, particularly on the basis of the twenty-one affidavits against Bhagat and Sajjan Kumar recommended by the Jain-Aggarwal Committee but suppressed by the home department. Referring to a case closed by the police against Jagdish Tytler, another Congress leader, we said that it should be reopened without delay. Armed with the arsenal we provided him, Khurana spared no effort in chasing the Rao government on carnage cases. The situation was rich in irony: while Congress leaders, who strutted around as champions of secularism, were unabashedly shielding the perpetrators of the 1984 carnage, Khurana, who made no bones about his association with a Hindu supremacist ideology, proved to be more sincere in seeking justice for the victims of that sectarian violence. It was discovered that soon after Khurana had become chief minister, the home ministry at the centre took away those twenty-one affidavits in an obvious bid to put them beyond his reach. Following the Narula Committee’s report,

Khurana asked the centre to send those affidavits back so that cases could be registered. When repeated reminders failed to elicit a response from the Rao government, Khurana declared that he would, as chief minister of Delhi, file a petition before the National Human Rights Commission, accusing the centre of shielding the guilty of the carnage. The threat worked as the centre returned the affidavits, though in a shabby condition, tied up in bundles. In yet another departure from the norm, the centre had not created files for the affidavits, obviously because they were politically inconvenient. Thanks to his tenacious efforts to fight such odds, Khurana’s tenure saw the arrest of Bhagat, sending shock waves in the Congress circles, as he was by far its most important leader from Delhi. In another major development, the CBI case against MP Sajjan Kumar for the murder of Anwar Kaur’s husband, finally reached the stage of trial. Several other riot cases ended in convictions even if they were only for offences other than murder. SN Dhingra, the judge dealing with cases from east Delhi, the worst affected district in the carnage, struck a blow for the rule of law by deciding carnage cases, without fear or favour. Dhingra alone convicted over 150 persons in carnage cases. Around the same time, Justice Anil Dev Singh of Delhi High Court, ordered a compensation of Rs 3.5 lakh for each person killed in the 1984 carnage. That was a big jump from Rs 10,000 for each death given in the first instance by the Rajiv Gandhi government. Though much more needed to be done, our solace was that the trend of impunity had changed, if not reversed. But good days, again, proved to be short-lived. The proceedings in the carnage cases lost their momentum after Dhingra was transferred, and Khurana himself quit office, in early 1996, as he found himself amongst a host of politicians booked by the CBI in the Hawala corruption controversy.

Travails of Leaders constituency saw the greatest number of killings during the carnage. H is Despite the clout wielded by him as the foremost Congress leader in Delhi, several witnesses came forward with evidence that he had addressed meetings of his supporters hours before the massacre began on the morning of 1 November 1984. Yet, despite our relentless campaign for justice, the police took a whole decade to register their first and only case against HKL Bhagat. Welcome to India’s rule of law, such as it is. The police registered the ‘first information report’ against Bhagat in 1996 after the exit of the Congress government at the centre. It was based on the affidavit of Harminder Kaur mentioned earlier, whose policeman husband had been killed by a mob allegedly instigated by Bhagat. The Jain-Aggarwal Committee had recommended the case in 1991, but the CBI had declined to take it up after sitting on it for a year. Subsequently, it was on the prodding of the BJP government of the Delhi territory that the police finally registered the case at the Mansarovar Park police station. In 1992, the Jain-Aggarwal Committee had made another recommendation against Bhagat, and that was to reopen a case filed at the Gandhi Nagar police station right in 1984. The recommendation was specifically to probe the allegation made against Bhagat by the riot victim, Ajay Kaur, in her affidavit. But after going through the motions of investigating those two cases, the police filed a chargesheet in only one of them, that too without indicting HKL Bhagat. Needless to add, the police made no attempt to arrest him in either case. For all the favourable treatment he got from the police, Bhagat did not, however, escape the mortification of being arrested by them, eventually. The police were forced to arrest him in 1996 in yet another carnage case. It was all thanks to the activism displayed by Shiv Narayan Dhingra, who was then a trial court judge, and is now a judge of Delhi High Court. To get a true measure of Dhingra’s achievement, one just has to see how the police dealt with their own two cases involving Bhagat. In Harminder Kaur’s case, the police recorded her statement as many as six times, questioning her over and over again on her allegation against Bhagat. She was harassed and driven to a point where she actually regretted giving any affidavit on the murders of her husband, son, and son-in-law. In contrast, the police felt no need to question Bhagat even once. Not surprisingly, the police closed the case in court in 2000. We made a representation to Lieutenant Governor Vijay Kapoor to reopen the case against Bhagat, and transfer the investigation to the CBI. Kapoor sought the opinion of additional solicitor general, KK Sud. In a detailed opinion pointing out flaws in the investigation, Sud castigated the police for shielding Bhagat.

Kapoor then sent Harminder Kaur’s case to the CBI. By the time it got around to filing charges in the case, Bhagat, however, became mentally unfit to be tried for any crime. Earlier, in the case reopened at the instance of riot-inflicted widow, Ajay Kaur, the instruction given to the police by the home department of the Delhi Administration in April 1993 was: ‘With regard to the reference made of Shri HKL Bhagat, no action may be taken at present till the decision is taken by the (Union) Ministry of Home Affairs.’ Accordingly, the police filed a chargesheet only against three other accused persons. The omission was not rectified even after Ajay Kaur reiterated her allegation against Bhagat in her testimony in the court on 4 January 1995. She said that on the night of 31 October, she had seen Bhagat telling a crowd in her neighbourhood that the police would ‘not interfere for three days’, and those people were therefore at liberty to ‘kill every Sikh’ and do their ‘duty to Bharat Mata’. The judge concerned, SS Bal, did not deem it necessary to summon the leader. That was probably because within a few days, on 27 January 1995, Bal went on to acquit the three arraigned by the police. Bal’s verdict in Ajay Kaur’s case was in tune with his overall record of acquitting the accused for some reason or the other, in practically all the riot cases. The information given by the police before the Nanavati Commission showed that all but two of the 123 cases decided by Bal, resulted in acquittal. Not for nothing had Bal been entrusted with the riot cases of all the three district court complexes. It was against such a backdrop that Dhingra inherited in August 1995 the remainder of the east Delhi cases which Bal could not dispose off in his tenure. One of the cases left behind by Bal related to the Trilokpuri massacre, where 400 Sikhs were killed in one block alone. Bal could not conclude this case because the police had complicated it by covering all the murders of that locality in one ‘challan’ or chargesheet. This meant that there were about 250 accused persons, and it was impossible to ensure the attendance of all of them at every hearing. Even otherwise, it was contrary to law as well as logic, to cover in one omnibus case, murders committed at different parts of the locality, and by different people. So, the first order Dhingra passed in the case was to split the ‘challan’ into several cases. This simple expedient made a dramatic difference to the prosecution and outcome of the cases related to what was undoubtedly the single largest massacre during the 1984 carnage. Dhingra had the will to do justice, and he found a way to do so. Within a year, he disposed off, for instance, the original case, which was left with 107 accused persons. He sentenced ninetythree of them to five years in jail. An even more significant fallout of Dhingra’s decision to split the Trilokpuri case was that two of its offshoots entangled Bhagat. It happened because, in separate cases, widows Satnami Bai and Darshan Kaur named Bhagat while giving their testimony in court. Unlike other judges, Dhingra did not baulk at

issuing non-bailable warrants against Bhagat on the statements issued by the witnesses. He did so first on Satnami Bai’s testimony on 15 January 1996. I mention the date especially because that was probably the first time any judge had issued warrants against a former union cabinet minister, that too, on a murder charge. Not surprisingly, it created a sensation not just in Delhi, but across the country. Bhagat, on his part, could not tolerate the idea that any judge had dared to issue a warrant against a person of his stature. So, in his revision petition before the Delhi High Court, against the warrants, Bhagat levelled personal allegations against Dhingra. I worked closely with the team of government lawyers to find a fitting response to Bhagat’s legal challenge that Dhingra had ‘lightly and casually’ used a power that was meant to be invoked sparingly. We found that the case law on that point was far from settled, as high courts had expressed divergent views. The matter came up for hearing on 22 January, three days ahead of the date on which Bhagat was due to be arrested and produced in Dhingra’s court. At the outset, the High Court judge, Justice Jaspal Singh, objected to the personal allegations against Dhingra, in the petition. In a stern warning, Justice Singh told Bhagat’s counsel, RK Anand, that he would have to withdraw the allegations, or be prepared to face contempt proceedings. It was only after Anand withdrew the allegations did Justice Singh begin to hear the matter on merits. We were relieved to see that Justice Singh, who has authored several law books, was thoroughly prepared for the case. Whenever Anand quoted a judgment in his favour, Justice Jaspal Singh would promptly summarize its details and draw the lawyer’s attention to a particular paragraph that went against him. As Anand could not counter that, the High Court dismissed Bhagat’s petition. It turned out to be such a well-reasoned judgment that Bhagat did not take the risk of going to the Supreme Court. As it happened, Justice Jaspal Singh’s judgment was later upheld by the Supreme Court when, in similar circumstances, a trial court summoned former Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao on the basis of Lakhubhai Pathak’s testimony in a corruption case. In the cold morning of 25 January 1996, the police arrested Bhagat from his high-security government bungalow on Prithviraj Chauhan Marg in New Delhi. He was taken from there to Dhingra’s court in the Karkardooma court complex, which was located in the east Delhi constituency, from where Bhagat had won four times. The atmosphere in the court was tense, as over 10,000 people gathered in front of it. This happened despite the fact that all the entries to the court were sealed, and no other work took place in the court that day. The police took strong precautions, and did not allow traffic anywhere near the court complex. The security build-up was such that the Sikhs in the area feared a fresh outbreak of violence. Bhagat was accompanied by a battery of 100 lawyers led by RK Anand, who was then the chairman of the Delhi Bar Council. I went to the court along with

five other lawyers, representing complainant, Satnami Bai. But we faced great difficulty in entering the complex. We had to park our cars at the rear side of the court premises, in the area meant for judges. The courtroom was packed with lawyers who had come with Bhagat. There was a big drama in the courtroom when Dhingra entered and sat on his chair. Bhagat stood on his chair because that was the only way he could, given his short stature, make himself visible in that overcrowded room. Then he greeted the judge with a ‘namaskar’ in a tone that sounded more like a taunt. Dhingra ignored him because, according to court protocol, the judge had already bowed once and greeted everybody present in the court. He was not expected to greet every individual separately, especially not an accused person. Bhagat said ‘namaskar’ once again, this time more loudly than before. When even that failed to evoke a reaction from the judge, Bhagat said sarcastically, ‘Namaskar to le lo’ (accept my greetings, at least). He was obviously trying to provoke the judge. Dhingra could not take it anymore. ‘Don’t you dare greet me,’ he thundered, ‘as if you are throwing a stone at me.’ Turning to Anand, the judge told him to ask his client to behave. Anand and other lawyers reacted with alacrity, as if Dhingra had played into their hands. In a shocking display of misbehaviour in the court, those lawyers started shouting at Dhingra, accusing him of bias and other faults. I screamed at them, saying that they were enacting a drama just to create a ruckus and get the case transferred. For good measure, I added that their conduct amounted to contempt of court. My words seemed to take them by surprise, as the decibel level dropped suddenly, and order was restored in the court. Bhagat’s lawyers looked sheepish, as if their game was up. After hearing arguments from both sides on Bhagat’s bail application, Dhingra reserved his order. That set the stage for Bhagat to start another drama. As if on cue, Bhagat complained that he had chest pain and lay down on a table in the court room. In the commotion that ensued, some of his lawyers, who knew me well, came up to me and urged me to leave the place. They were apprehensive that if Bhagat’s bail was rejected, the mob outside might lynch us. Taking their advice seriously, I left the court through the back door along with my teammates. The same evening, we learnt that Bhagat had been refused bail, and that he had, however, been shifted to a hospital. The battle of attrition continued the next day, as Dhingra called for hospital records to verify Bhagat’s condition. On the third day, doctors reported that he could be shifted to the jail. On Dhingra’s orders, Bhagat was immediately shifted to Tihar Jail. The same night, he created a scene again, forcing the doctors to shift him back to the jail hospital. On the fourth day, Dhingra granted him bail even as he criticized Bhagat for continuously creating impediments to the case. Having got a fair idea, by then, of Dhingra’s no-nonsense attitude, Bhagat did not dare play any more games in the court. He attended the court regularly as an

accused person, during the trial proceedings. Moreover, he had to endure another warrant issued against him by the same judge on 4 March 1996, in another Trilokpuri-related case when a widow called Darshan Kaur testified against him. Since he was attending the hearings in Satnami Bai’s case regularly, Dhingra readily granted bail to Bhagat in Darshan Kaur’s case. On our part, we ensured that both Satnami Bai and Darshan Kaur were represented at every hearing by MS Butalia, a seasoned criminal lawyer who had been associated with us since the days of the Misra Commission. Indigent as they were, we also had to arrange for the two widows to be taken to Karkardooma courts on the hearing dates, from the other end of the town, Tilak Vihar, in west Delhi, where a lot of riot victims were resettled. Our point man, for this very responsible job, was Atma Singh Lubana, who was himself a resident of Tilak Vihar, and had served as a link to victims from early days. The next big day in Satnami Bai’s case was 12 November 1996 when she was due to give her evidence afresh in Bhagat’s presence. But, in a totally unforeseen setback, Satnami Bai changed her testimony and denied that she had seen Bhagat in Trilokpuri on the morning of 1 November, instigating the crowd to attack the Sikhs. Dhingra issued her a notice for perjury. I felt terrible at this turn of events, particularly because I was not in court when Satnami Bai did the somersault. In fact, I was not even aware that she was due to give her testimony that day. Neither Butalia nor Lubana had intimated me about the date. When I called Butalia to find out how the case had collapsed, he said that Satnami Bai’s volte-face had come as a surprise to him as well. Lubana never returned my call, and kept away from me after that. Riot victims of Tilak Vihar ransacked Lubana’s house as they suspected him to have struck a deal with Bhagat, and thereby influenced Satnami Bai to change her stand in court. Lubana went underground for a period. Later, the Akal Takht, the highest temporal seat of Sikh religion, ostracized him as a ‘tankhiah’. Two years later, Atma Singh Lubana rejoined the community, after paying a heavy penalty. In retrospect, I feel I should have pursued Satnami Bai’s case myself, instead of delegating the responsibility. Whether others sabotaged the case or not, I cannot escape blame for letting slip an opportunity I had worked for since 1984. As it happened, Satnami Bai called me up soon after her turnaround in court. She raised hopes of undoing the damage when she sought my legal help. She met me in my office the day after she made a splash. With her knowledge and consent, I took the precaution of videotaping whatever she told me in my office about her testimony in court. She alleged that she was forced to change her statement because there was a threat to her life from Lubana. She wanted my help for getting another chance to testify so that she could set the record straight. A reporter from Pioneer, Tripthi Nath, happened to be in my office during Satnami Bai’s visit. Tripthi Nath reported Satnami Bai’s fresh statement to me in

the next day’s newspaper, but Satnami Bai failed to come back to me to sign the petition I had drafted at her instance. Instead, she addressed a press conference in the company of the very person she had, in her videotaped statement to me, accused of intimidating her into deposing in favour of Bhagat. Sitting next to Atma Singh Lubana, Satnami Bai came up with another version of why she had changed her testimony in court. What was even more shocking, she did so at the behest of – and in the presence of – the president of Akali Dal in Delhi, Avtar Singh Hit. Becoming a pawn in petty Sikh politics, Satnami Bai alleged that the person who had intimidated her was Hit’s rival in Delhi, Paramjit Singh Sarna. That came as a double blow to us. Thanks to the conflicting statements Satnami Bai made after turning hostile in court, the fair chance we had of retrieving the case against Bhagat, took a beating. Had Satnami Bai stuck by her videotaped statement to me, Dhingra might well have initiated fresh proceedings against Bhagat and Lubana for intimidating witnesses. By getting her back in his grip, Lubana pre-empted that possibility, saving his own skin and that of Bhagat. In another setback to us, Hit’s open support to Lubana’s manipulations put a question mark over Akali Dal’s commitment to the cause of justice for the carnage victims. Indeed, it seemed to undermine the very raison d’etre of the party, which was born to protect the interests of the Sikh community. Having worked closely with Akalis on the carnage issue from the beginning, it was painful for me to see some of their leaders collaborating so blatantly with the perpetrators of anti-Sikh violence. Hit and Lubana thrived in Akali Dal despite such anti-Sikh activities. Hit remained in charge of the Delhi unit, while Lubana went on to become its secretary, and contested Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee elections on the party ticket. All this sent out a cynical message: that Akali Dal’s association with the carnage issue had more to do with politics than any genuine concern to secure justice. Put off by this murky brush with politics, I washed my hands of Satnami Bai, and decided to focus on Darshan Kaur, the other widow who was due to depose against Bhagat. My resolve to shift my attention to her was reinforced when a group of victims from Tilak Vihar sought my help in Darshan Kaur’s case. I learnt from them that it was her turn just three days after Satnami Bai’s. Taking no chances, I was in court when Darshan Kaur gave her statement. Thankfully, Darshan Kaur displayed the courage to identify Bhagat, and stick to her statement. Bhagat asked for time to try and get the matter transferred from Dhingra’s court. He filed a transfer application before the Delhi High Court. However, while the application was still pending, Dhingra himself was transferred. Bhagat’s counsel stretched Darshan Kaur’s cross-examination over eight months in a bid to win her over. He could not succeed, especially because we were more vigilant this time. In a counter move, I filed an application seeking cancellation of Bhagat’s bail, on the ground that he was threatening Darshan Kaur. During the arguments on my application, Bhagat’s counsel requested the court not to pass any orders, as he was going to conclude Darshan Kaur’s cross-

examination on the next date of hearing. He kept his word. But the trial carried on all the same for almost five years. One tangible consequence of our relentless follow-up of the case was the steady decline in the size of Bhagat’s contingent in the court. If he came to the court the first time with a battery of 100 lawyers and a 10,000-strong crowd of supporters, the same Bhagat came with just his son, bodyguards, and a solitary lawyer, towards the end of the proceedings. His party was no more in power then: the centre was ruled by the United Front and the Delhi territory, by the BJP. That was a clear measure of the loss of his political clout during the pendency of the case. For all those changes and all our efforts, the case did not have a happy ending for us. The trial court acquitted Bhagat on the ground that, in a riot case, a conviction could not be based on the words of just one witness, namely, Darshan Kaur. The trial court felt that the prosecution should have produced other witnesses corroborating Darshan Kaur’s allegation. I filed a revision petition in the High Court saying that the police had not cited other victims as witnesses, and that an application by us, adding more witnesses to the case, was rejected by the court. Significantly, the police did not file an appeal in Darshan Kaur’s case, even though the complainant had stood by her allegation. But it filed an appeal in Satnami Bai’s case despite the complainant’s volte-face. Thankfully, our revision petition was admitted by Justice RS Sodhi, and he issued warrants against Bhagat once again. In May 2004, the police reported that they could not execute the warrants because Bhagat has since been afflicted by a brain disease, dementia. Justice Sodhi dismissed our petition, as Bhagat was in no condition to face legal proceedings. Bhagat’s son, Deepak, came up to me in the High Court and said, ‘Please spare my father at least now. He is on his death bed.’ I was tempted to give a fitting retort. But decency, and my seniority in the bar, stopped me from saying anything to Deepak. I draw solace from the fact that even if Bhagat escaped conviction in the court of law, our pursuit of that leader, over two decades in the court of people, was not entirely in vain. But Sajjan Kumar, whose outer Delhi constituency was next only to Bhagat’s east Delhi in terms of casualties during the carnage, proved to be more resilient. Even though he had been dropped by Rajiv Gandhi for two consecutive Lok Sabha elections following the 1984 carnage, Sajjan Kumar regained his hold over the outer Delhi constituency, and won the last election in 2004. The Congress propaganda was that he had been cleared of all charges of complicity in the carnage. The fact was that the evidence against him was even greater than that against Bhagat. Many credible affidavits accusing him of holding meetings or leading mobs in suburban areas such as Sultanpuri, Mongolpuri, Punjabi Bagh, Nangloi, and Palam Colony, have remained untouched. The CBI case against Sajjan Kumar

booked in September 1990 on the basis of Anwar Kaur’s affidavit, resulted in his acquittal twelve years later in December 2002. In a bizarre twist to the riot cases, Sajjan Kumar was exonerated because two Delhi Police officials had deposed in his favour, and countered the charges brought against him by the CBI. It was the same Sultanpuri case in which the Delhi Police had sabotaged the CBI’s attempt to arrest Sajjan Kumar in 1990. Sajjan Kumar produced two police officials who had investigated another riot case from the same locality way back in 1984, with most of the accused persons being common. The two police officials, Sukhbir Singh and Raj Singh, deposed in court that they had never come across any allegation against Sajjan Kumar while they were investigating the other case, State vs Suresh Chand, in the aftermath of the carnage in 1984. The trial judge, Manju Goel, cited that as a ground in Anwar Kaur’s case for acquitting Sajjan Kumar of the charge of leading a mob that had murdered her husband. Thus, Goel found those two police officials more trustworthy than the three poor victims who had, displaying courage against all odds, named Sajjan Kumar in court. Thankfully, there is hope yet that superior courts will overturn Sajjan Kumar’s acquittal. Anwar Kaur and seven other victims filed revision petitions, pointing out many flaws in Manju Goel’s verdict. Besides, Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee filed two revision petitions – one in Anwar Kaur’s case; and the other, in the 1984 case against Suresh Chand and others. The CBI, too, filed an appeal against the acquittal of Sajjan Kumar. After sitting on them for more than a year, Delhi High Court issued notices on the revision petitions on 17 May 2004, within a week of Sajjan Kumar’s victory in the Lok Sabha election. It’s a reminder that he continues to be haunted by the ghosts of 1984.

A Fresh Inquiry nation went through three Lok Sabha elections in quick succession in As the the second half of the 1990s, the carnage issue became hotter even as it apparently fell off the political map. This time, it was the initiative of the judiciary, which passed two dramatic orders in 1996, one leading to the arrest of Congress leader, HKL Bhagat, in connection with the carnage, and the other leading to a multifold increase in the compensation to the victims. Scalded by Satnami Kaur’s retraction, my associate NS Bawa, and I took the precaution of attending the trial proceedings that remained against Bhagat, based on the testimony of Darshan Kaur. The compensation order of the High Court prompted hundreds of victims to inundate my team with the necessary paperwork for availing themselves of the enhanced package. It entailed a lot of quiet work, away from the headlines. We came to the next big milestone in our struggle for justice after the Atal Behari Vajpayee government restored a measure of political stability in 1999 in its third stint in power. Unwittingly, I played a role in nudging the carnage issue back into the limelight with the appointment of a fresh judicial inquiry. Another judicial inquiry after fifteen years? It is understandable if the appointment of the Justice GT Nanavati Commission in May 2000 to inquire once again into the 1984 carnage evoked a cynical reaction. Why, it might have even seemed that I had developed a vested interest in raking up an old anti-Congress issue in the reign of a BJP-led government. Let me therefore clarify at the outset that I did no lobbying whatsoever for a fresh commission of inquiry. My role was limited to floating the idea at a meeting commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of the carnage on 1 November 1999. Subsequent speakers at the function in Delhi’s Constitution Club, Justice Rajinder Sachar, and Justice RS Narula, heartily supported the proposal. That prompted the chief guest, BJP leader KR Malkani, to promise, in turn, that he would take up the issue with the government. But nothing happened for a month till, speaking on the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition in the Rajya Sabha, eminent journalist and independent MP Kuldip Nayar, drew attention to the state’s failure to punish the guilty of the 1984 carnage as well. Much to his credit, Malkani seized the opportunity to suggest that there should be a fresh judicial inquiry to revisit the 1984 issue. Luckily, Malkani’s suggestion drew spontaneous support from diverse sections in the Rajya Sabha–from communist parties, to the BJP, and Akali Dal. It was evidently an idea whose time had come, and no force, not even the Congress Party, could resist it for long. It was only after all the parties, other than the Congress, called for the reinquiry that I took up the issue once again. Some of my associates and I met the two top leaders of the then government, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee,

and Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani, to reinforce the demand made by the political parties. As the minister directly concerned with the subject, Advani said that he was counting on the leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Dr Manmohan Singh, to make a statement in the House the same day, on behalf of the Congress Party, giving its consent to the appointment of the commission. Advani told us frankly that if the Congress Party did not give its consent, it would be difficult for his government to proceed with the idea lest it was accused of engaging in a political vendetta. In the event, Manmohan Singh did declare the Congress Party’s support for the re-inquiry, notwithstanding the inherent risk of being indicted by it. For a party that positioned itself as a secular alternative to the BJP, the Congress Party could scarcely afford to oppose the idea of finding out the truth about a sectarian massacre. At a personal level, the unanimous backing in December 1999 for a fresh inquiry into the 1984 carnage came as a vindication of the often lonely and frustrating struggle we had to wage over the years to bring the guilty to book. In a larger perspective, though, one might well see this turn of events as an example of democracy at work. No such broad-spectrum consensus to reopen the carnage issue could possibly have emerged had the Congress Party remained in power all through. It was in such circumstances that the government appointed retired Supreme Court judge, GT Nanavati, to conduct the fresh inquiry. Since the subject of the inquiry was as old as fifteen years, the slow-moving wheels of the bureaucracy took another whole year or so to deliver the relevant records to the Nanavati Commission. Besides the existing records from the earlier commission and otherwise, the commission received 6,000 fresh affidavits in response to its public notice, from victims and witnesses, including a host of prominent citizens. In a departure from the practice adopted by his predecessor, Justice Nanavati threw open all the records other than a few relating to aspects like the deployment of the army and disciplinary proceedings against police officers. The access we then got to police records, therefore, shed light on how such mass killings had come to take place in the capital. They exposed the Rajiv Gandhi government’s false claim that the police had been taken by surprise by the sudden eruption of violence, and that senior officers were in the dark, as they had not received reports from the field staff on time. Fresh evidence showed that far from being caught unawares, the police, at all levels, had paved the way for the massacre by neutralizing resistance from the Sikhs. We also made the shocking discovery of the pattern on the first day of the massacre: the police were busy disarming or taking action against the Sikhs who were defending themselves from their own houses. The appointment of the Nanavati Commission prompted us to constitute a new body in 2000 to espouse the cause of the victims before the Nanavati Commission. The Citizens Justice Committee set up at the time of the Misra

Commission had long become defunct. Its chairman, Justice SM Sikri, was no more; human rights doyen, Justice VM Tarkunde, had grown too old; and Soli Sorabjee was back to his old post as the attorney general. Fortunately, two other stalwarts, Kuldip Nayar and Rajendra Sachar, agreed to join the new CJC, namely, Carnage Justice Committee. Compared to the old CJC, the new one involved a measure of compromise in the vastly different circumstances. It related to the terms on which the statutory body, Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC), was willing to pay for the enormous expenses involved in marshalling evidence from the entire city on behalf of the victims before the judicial inquiry. In 1985, DSGMC provided funds although it was kept out of the membership of the CJC to keep the body non-political and non-denominational. But this time, DSGMC imposed the condition that its representatives would not only have membership, but that its president would be CJC’s convenor. What made it all the more difficult for us to stomach this condition was that DSGMC’s president, at that time, was none other than Avtar Singh Hit, who had been involved in that shameful1 996 episode when Satnami Bai had been induced into retractingher evidence against Bhagat. We accepted the condition, however reluctantly, after we had received an assurance from the then chief minister of Punjab, Prakash Singh Badal, that our autonomy would in no way be compromised by the membership of DSGMC representatives. It was because of this compromise that I decided to change the name of the committee to Carnage Justice Committee because I could not get myself to pass off a panel that included politicians, as being the same as the one that had been constituted purely to defend human rights. The new CJC was formed with Kuldip Nayar as its chairman, the president of DSGMC as its ex officio convenor; and my associate, Wing Commander RS Chhatwal, as its general secretary. In the DSGMC election that took place close on the heels of the CJC’s formation, Hit was replaced as its president by Paramjit Singh Sarna, who, despite being pro-Congress, extended every help needed by us. In retrospect, I may record my appreciation of the fact that, true to its word, DSGMC provided us funds, with no strings attached. The integrity of the work we have done right since 1984 has, I believe, helped us keep our human rights campaign above the vagaries of Sikh politics. There was much debate among ourselves about who I should represent before the Nanavati Commission. I had the option of representing the government since I had by then again become standing counsel for the central government in Delhi High Court. I could have, in that capacity, served the purpose of ensuring that the government produced all material records before the commission. Besides, being a paid job, I stood to earn about Rs 20 lakh, as other senior counsel representing the government did during the commission’s proceedings. Despite such advantages, I once again chose to represent the victims because, given my long association with the cause, we could not find anybody more suitable than me. In a further setback, I resigned from the post of senior standing

counsel in the High Court, as the workload of the Nanavati Commission left me with little time for other assignments. The decision to appear gratis for victims stood me in good stead in 2004 when Jagdish Tytler, who was a minister in the central government, publicly alleged that I had been pursuing the carnage issue to make money. He said this in the course of a live programme that he and I had been invited to on NDTV, on the findings awaited then from the Nanavati Commission. Though that was my first ever meeting with him, Tytler issued veiled threats alleging that I had been blackmailing him. The provocation was a notice issued by the Nanavati Commission at our instance, asking him to explain why he should not be indicted for allegedly leading a mob that killed Sikhs during the carnage. Tytler’s intemperate remarks prompted Akali Dal leaders, Prakash Singh Badal and Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa, to come to my defence. But the then president of Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee, Prahlad Singh Chandiok, happened to be a supporter of Tytler, and had already conferred a ‘saropa’ on the minister. In a bid to discredit me, Chandiok started spreading a canard that I had taken huge amounts of money from DSGMC, under the guise of professional fee, for representing the victims before the Nanavati Commission. He even tried to fabricate documents to that effect, but fortunately, the staff of DSGMC refused to be party to that crime. The propaganda against me was effective enough to make a long-standing associate like Kuldip Nayar ask whether I had received Rs 50 lakh from DSGMC to appear before the Nanavati Commission. This was probably the most trying phase for me, faced as I was with a concerted attempt to silence me, so that the cases against leaders automatically collapsed. Besides my reputation taking a beating, I feared that the cause itself would suffer if Chandiok, as DSGMC president, were to issue a statement against me. But, fortunately, he was pre-empted by a DSGMC election that led to his ouster. Sarna, who returned to the office of DSGMC president, cleared the air saying that I had not taken a penny from DSGMC for the carnage inquiry. As for Tytler’s allegation that I had blackmailed him, I filed a criminal case of defamation against him, and a Ludhiana magistrate summoned him in the matter. We faced another significant problem with regard to the fresh inquiry. When it came to the crucial issue of collecting fresh affidavits on the carnage after sixteen years, we had to deal with the fatigue factor. Many victims had, by then, given up all hope of securing justice. On the other hand, because of the passage of time and change of regime, it had also become easier for them to depose against police officials and politicians. Besides, we got the help of the Akali Dal government in Punjab in mobilizing affidavits from victims who had migrated to that state. Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal invited me to Punjab to address a meeting of riot victims, and another of field-level bureaucrats who had been

assigned the task of helping them out with the legalities of preparing affidavits. I went to places like Patiala, Ludhiana, and Amritsar, to supervise the preparation of affidavits. Apart from taking such pains to reach out to the victims, we focused, this time, on collecting evidence of prominent citizens who had first-hand information on the carnage. That was how we got testimonies, written or verbal, from a wide range of VIPs before the commission: sitting cabinet minister, Ram Vilas Paswan; then chief secretary of Jammu and Kashmir, Ashok Jaitly; former prime minister, IK Gujral; former chief minister, Madan Lal Khurana; writers Khushwant Singh and Patwant Singh; Lieutenant General JS Aurora; senior advocates Ram Jethmalani, Shanti Bhushan, KK Venugopal, and Justice RS Narula; former governor, Govind Narain; activists such as Swami Agnivesh and Madhu Kishwar; and journalists George Varghese, Rahul Bedi, and Sanjay Suri. Since I led the team of lawyers representing the victims at the hearings, it was but natural for me to develop a rapport with Justice Nanavati over a period. But that is not to say we did not have our share of altercations. One such altercation occurred in 2002 when I was cross-examining police officials from the Kalyanpuri police station, which was the worst hit area during the carnage. I asked them why, rather than taking action against the mob that had descended on Block 11 of Kalyanpuri, they had disarmed and arrested the Sikhs, the very community that was under attack. The police’s lame excuse for their failure to arrest members of the mob was that the miscreants were far too many in number. That provoked me to ask why they had not then taken the help of the Sikhs instead of seizing their weapons and arresting them. But to my surprise, Justice Nanavati disallowed this line of questioning, saying that he did not find anything wrong with the seizure of weapons from the Sikhs, as a pre-emptive measure. I pointed out that such conduct would have been tenable if the police had, by the same token, disarmed the Hindus as well. A combative Nanavati challenged me to show evidence that the Hindus, too, were armed. One of the news agencies, United News of India, reported this exchange, conveying the message that Justice Nanavati had effectively justified the seizure of weapons from the Sikhs during the carnage. Embarrassed as he was with the report, Justice Nanavati sought to control the damage by reprimanding the UNI reporter, Manoj Kumar, and clarifying that he had not formed any opinion yet. Notwithstanding such warning signals, I kept my faith in Justice Nanavati and awaited his findings with great hope. But the report turned out to be rather a mixed bag. We were happy that a judicial inquiry had finally indicted the political leaders for their complicity in organizing the carnage. The indicted leaders encompassed practically the entire top brass of the Congress Party in Delhi of 1984: HKL Bhagat, Jagdish Tytler, Sajjan Kumar, and Dharam Dass Shastri. But that crucial finding was spoilt by a gratuitous qualification. Justice

Nanavati’s indictment was limited to those who he describes as ‘local’ leaders in a contrived effort to distance national leaders such as the then home minister, PV Narasimha Rao and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. On the one hand, the commission’s report said that a ‘large number of affidavits indicate that local Congress (I) leaders and workers had either incited or helped the mobs in attacking the Sikhs. But for the backing and help of influential and resourceful persons, killing of Sikhs so swiftly and in large numbers could not have happened.’ But on the other hand, the same report handed out a clean chit to top leaders, with little justification. ‘There is absolutely no evidence suggesting that Shri Rajiv Gandhi or any other high ranking Congress (I) leader had suggested or organized attacks on Sikhs. Whatever acts were done, were done by the local Congress (I) leaders and workers, and they appear to have done so for their personal political reasons.’ There were similar contradictions on the culpability of individual police personnel. We were shocked to see, for instance, that all the police officials of east Delhi and west Delhi, the two worst affected districts, had been exonerated. Within a few days of the publication of the report, I wrote an article in The Indian Express titled, ‘Disappointing, Justice Nanavati.’ It was not easy for me to come out with a public attack on the report considering the cordial relations I had maintained with Justice Nanavati all through. Though I received an encouraging feedback on my article, I never had an inclination to meet Justice Nanavati after the publication of his report. For all the good that came out of it, I could not help feeling uneasy about him for some of the shortcomings in his report.

Late Impact the time the Justice GT Nanavati Commission submitted its report on 9 B y February 2005, after five years of a fresh inquiry into the 1984 carnage, the Congress Party had returned to power at the centre, after a lapse of eight years. In a further quirk of fate, Rajiv Gandhi’s widow, Sonia Gandhi, who was the president of the Congress Party, had selected a Sikh, Manmohan Singh, as prime minister. No prizes for guessing that the coalition government of the United Progressive Alliance headed by the Congress Party was not too enthusiastic about the comeback of the 1984 carnage issue, in the form of the commission’s report. Not the least because the Congress leaders, who had been served notices by the commission, on the basis of evidence suggesting their complicity, included two ministers in the Manmohan Singh government: Kamal Nath and Jagdish Tytler. After much speculation in the media on how the government might deal with any findings against them, it was finally announced that the report would be tabled in the parliament on 8 August 2005, the last possible day under law. The government is statutorily required to make public an inquiry commission’s report within six months of its submission. The government is given that much time to formulate its action taken report (ATR). My associate, Wing Commander RS Chhatwal, and I watched the proceedings from the visitors’ gallery of the Rajya Sabha as Home Minister Shivraj Patil formally tabled the Nanavati report along with the ATR. Within minutes of the formal tabling of the report, a deceptively quiet affair, I was whisked off to the office of the leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, LK Advani. I had been asked by leaders of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) to give them an on-the-spot briefing, as an input for chalking out their immediate strategy. If the commission’s report was disappointing (for its preferential treatment of Kamal Nath, for instance, in giving him the benefit of the doubt), I found the government’s ATR shocking. Most of the commission’s recommendations, such as they were, were either rejected or disregarded by the government. Far from being an action taken report, it seemed a ‘no action taken report’ to me. Take the cavalier manner in which the ATR rejected the indictment of Jagdish Tytler, the then minister for overseas Indians. The commission’s finding that Tytler ‘very probably’ had a hand in organizing attacks on Sikhs was, according to the ATR, inadequate to launch a prosecution against him. It claimed that any further action on the allegations against him would ‘not be justified’ as ‘the commission itself was not absolutely sure about his involvement in such attacks.’ The ATR flew in the face of the fact that even while framing charges, the trial court would only see whether the prosecution had made out a prima facie case against the accused.

The NDA leaders agreed with my view that the immediate plank of attack should be the government’s ATR rather than the commission’s report. They decided to seek adjournment motions in both houses immediately after the lunch break. When I stepped out of the meeting with NDA leaders, I was mobbed by press persons, with microphones and TV cameras, asking for my reaction. From the tenor of their questions, they seemed to share my outrage at the excuses cited by the government for refusing to take the action recommended against Tytler, and Congress MP Sajjan Kumar. But I displayed forbearance in keeping with our prior decision that the response of the Carnage Justice Committee, which had espoused the cause of the victims before the Nanavati Commission, should not be announced till we had discussed the report at Kuldip Nayar’s house, where a press conference was due to be held later in the day. Given the spirit in which we had kept up the campaign for justice over two decades, I was also keen that whatever I said then should come across as the reaction not so much of the Sikhs as that of human rights defenders. So, all I told the media in the parliament was that the commission’s recommendations to book or prosecute Congress leaders should be implemented. While I was on my way to Nayar’s house, I got a call, out of the blue, from one of the top leaders of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM), Brinda Karat. I was surprised by the call because I did not know her. Besides, I wasn’t sure how somebody like her might have perceived my rather non-ideological approach of taking help from any political party that was willing to advance the cause of justice. After all, I had just emerged from Advani’s room under the media glare while Karat’s party was very much an ally of the government. But, putting me at ease immediately, she expressed relief at reaching me on my mobile, and said that she had been trying hard to get in touch with me. So hard that she actually got my number that day, she said, from her US-based niece, Shonali Bose, who had directed an award-winning movie called ‘Amu’ which was based on the 1984 carnage, and in which Karat herself had played a key role. I was touched to learn that Karat had taken all that trouble, as she too wanted to consult me on the Nanavati report. I promised to visit her office immediately after our press conference. But even as I told her so, I wondered whether we had made a mistake in assuming that, on a day when the action was focused in and around the parliament, journalists would be motivated enough to travel all the way to Vasant Vihar in south Delhi, where Nayar’s house was located. My fears, however, dissolved on arriving at Nayar’s house, as press persons were already camping there, well ahead of the scheduled time of our press conference. It was encouraging to see that, after years of uncertain struggle, the issue had suddenly become so hot and newsy, whether due to political changes or otherwise. Practically every newspaper and channel seemed to be represented there. They had to wait till we were done with our closed-door meeting where stalwarts like Justice Rajinder Sachar, Kuldip Nayar, Dr Amrik Singh, and Dr Maheep Singh,

much to my relief, endorsed my strategy of going easy on the shortcomings of the report, and exerting pressure on the government to implement whatever had been recommended. After the press conference, I rushed to Karat’s office. She gave me a list of queries based on the material given to her by the government for justifying their refusal to take action against Tytler and Sajjan Kumar. Since I could see through their specious excuses, I promised to respond shortly with supporting documents. I went straight to my office and sent her the promised material. Later in the evening, while I was hopping from studio to studio to appear on TV programmes related to the Nanavati issue, I repeatedly got calls from Karat, each time, with further queries. On the following day, 9 August 2005, both houses of parliament were again adjourned without transacting business, as there was a deadlock on whether the adjournment motions on the carnage issue proposed by Opposition members should be taken up or not. Meanwhile, I continued to get calls from Brinda Karat, as she grappled with the nuances of the commission’s recommendations, and the government’s prevarication. The last call was made after her party had arrived at a decision, and she took me into confidence about the announcement that was going to be made the same afternoon. In a major blow to the Congress Party, the CPM declared that it would vote against the government on the proposed adjournment motions. By no means could it have been easy for the CPM, as an ally, to think of voting against the government, and supporting the adjournment motions proposed by the BJP members. Having belied all expectations, the CPM seemed to have opened political floodgates. A southern regional party, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), despite being part of the coalition government, announced that they too would vote against the government. Thereafter, a northern regional party, Samajwadi Party, came out against the government despite all their aversion to joining the BJP on any issue. Sure enough, all such anti-government statements were amplified in the media, escalating the crisis for the government. Left with no other option, the government reluctantly agreed to have a discussion in the Lok Sabha the next day, and in the Rajya Sabha, the day after. Thus, on popular demand, the Lok Sabha speaker set aside all regular business on 10 August, and allowed a discussion on the Nanavati report. As MP after MP demanded action against the indicted Congress leaders, the government saw the writing on the wall. With both Opposition parties and allies attacking it, there was a real danger of the adjournment motions being voted against the government. The only way the government could have got its allies back on its side was by conceding their demand to review its ATR. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh did just that when he gave a ‘solemn promise’ to the Lok Sabha that the government, notwithstanding the contra-indications in its ATR, would take ‘all possible steps’ wherever the Nanavati Commission had ‘named

any specific individuals as needing further examination or specific cases needing re-opening and re-examination.’ That was a clear signal that the government had abandoned the position taken in the ATR two days earlier that no further action needed to be taken on the allegations against Tytler. The shift in the government’s stand had an immediate and sensational fallout. Realizing that he had run out of options, Jagdish Tytler put in his papers the same evening. There may be few instances in the world of a minister stepping down for a crime he was found to have committed more than twenty years earlier. Somebody who had become a minister for the first time in 1984 in the wake of the carnage was forced to quit two decades later, ironically, on the same issue. The Indian democracy, with all its faults, does seem to work, if pushed long enough. In a sequel to Tytler’s resignation, Sajjan Kumar was forced to quit a Delhi government post. Armed with these resignations, Manmohan Singh seized the moral high ground the next day in the Rajya Sabha, where there was a discussion on another adjournment motion on the Nanavati report. In an emotionally stirring speech, Manmohan Singh tendered an apology to the Sikh community and to the nation saying that ‘what took place after Indiraji’s death was a great national shame’ and ‘the negation of the concept of nationhood.’ It is no credit, however, to the Indian democracy that it took so long for the government to apologise in the parliament for a massacre of Sikhs and that it finally took a Sikh prime minister to do so. Whatever the circumstances, the symbolic value of Manmohan Singh’s apology cannot be underestimated. It is in keeping with the spirit of ‘truth and reconciliation’ catching on in the world. Not surprisingly, even Tytler’s resignation turned out to be little more than a symbolic victory for us. Pursuant to Manmohan Singh’s commitment to the parliament, the CBI did conduct a fresh probe into an attack on a north Delhi gurdwara allegedly led by Tytler. Given that the investigation was undertaken after a lapse of two decades, it did not however take much for the CBI to let him off the hook two years later, in September 2007, when it filed a chargesheet in the court. The big picture is, for the 2,733 Sikhs officially admitted to have been massacred in Delhi in the 1984 carnage, the legal system has so far imposed punishment on just thirteen persons in half a dozen murder cases. In all other cases, either the police have closed the file or the courts have acquitted the accused. Symbolism assumes greater significance, given the gap between the rhetoric and reality of the rule of law in India.

Small Mercy

T he resignation of a minister in 2005, and an apology from the prime minister in the parliament were, of course, the most conspicuous fallouts of the fresh inquiry into the 1984 carnage. Much as those have a tremendous symbolic value, it is gratifying that the fresh inquiry also led to a more tangible benefit to thousands of carnage victims in the form of further monetary compensation. In pursuance of an assurance given by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in August 2005 during a discussion in the parliament on the report of the Justice GT Nanavati Commission, the government immediately appointed a committee to work out a fresh rehabilitation package for the 1984 carnage victims across the country. The package announced by the government within five months was of Rs 717 crore. It enhanced the compensation for all the classifications of victims. Take, for instance, the compensation for death. Originally, all that was given to the families of dead victims was a measly Rs 20,000. In 1996, Justice Anil Dev Singh of the Delhi High Court ordered the Delhi government to raise it to Rs 3.5 lakh. In 2005, the central government doubled it to Rs 7 lakh, for the killings in the capital. The government, in a sense, followed the precedent set by Justice Anil Dev Singh, who had increased the compensation manifold from Rs 20,000 saying the state was ‘duty bound to adopt a realistic approach.’ Enforcing state liability for the 1984 carnage, the judgment delivered in 1996 said: ‘Here we are concerned with illegal extinction of life by mobs which put into execution their plans openly in public places and in full gaze of the authorities. It was not something done clandestinely for which the state could plead ignorance. At least in the capital of the country the state has requisite resources to prevent the riots.’ This inspired another Delhi High Court judge, Justice Gita Mittal, to increase the compensation similarly in May 2005 for the victims who had suffered injuries during the carnage. Justice Mittal enhanced the compensation for the injured from Rs 2,000 to Rs 1.25 lakh. But since Mittal’s judgment was yet to be implemented, the central government package of January 2006 incorporated that rate of compensation for the injured. The package also included employment for one member of each affected family, and pension to the aged. The further enhancement of the compensation in 2006 made a tremendous difference to widows who had to take over the role of breadwinners and educate or marry off their children. Let me cite a case that was mentioned to me by home ministry bureaucrat, IB Karan, who was member secretary of the committee appointed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, to disburse the compensation package.

Mohinder Kaur’s application for death compensation raised an interesting situation for the committee, as it was generally working out compensation for those who had official papers to prove the nature of damage suffered by them. But, given the peculiar circumstances in which her husband, Gurmej Singh, was killed during the carnage, Mohinder Kaur did not have any documentary proof of his death. When Karan mentioned her case as an example of victims who did not have the requisite papers, it sounded familiar to me. I realized that he was actually talking about a victim I had already dealt with. Gurmej Singh was based in Mumbai when he married Mohinder Kaur in 1983. But she stayed with her in-laws after marriage, at Khadoor Sahib village in Punjab. Gurmej Singh was all set to take her to Mumbai for the first time in November 1984, by when they had been blessed with a two-month-old daughter. To their misfortune, their long-scheduled train journey clashed with the sudden outbreak of violence against the Sikhs in Delhi. En route to Mumbai, their train reached the Shahdara railway station in east Delhi on 1 November 1984, the first day of the massacre. A mob rushed inside the train, searching for Sikhs. There was no way Gurmej Singh could escape. He was pulled out of the train and mercilessly beaten on the platform. After a while, they left him for dead as they went in search of more male Sikhs to attack. With the help of co-passengers, Mohinder Kaur pulled her husband back into the train. But after some time, another mob arrived. In keeping with the pattern of violence in most parts of Delhi, there was a clear demarcation of functions between the two mobs. If the earlier mob limited itself to beating up the Sikhs till they fainted or died, the second mob burnt their bodies to destroy evidence of murder. Whether it was because of the tell-tale signs of blood on the platform, or because they had a list of passengers, the second mob stopped in front of Mohinder Kaur’s bogie, and demanded to know the whereabouts of the Sikh passenger who, they were sure, had been beaten senseless by the earlier mob. In a remarkable display of humanity, the copassengers tried to mislead the mob by saying that somebody else had dragged the body away. The miscreants did not get taken in. They entered the coach in search of the Sikh who had been left behind for them to dispose off. Gurmej Singh was discovered under a berth in a severely injured condition. The mob dragged him out of the train, doused him with petrol, and set fire to him. Mohinder Kaur helplessly watched as her husband was burnt alive, and reduced to ashes. Taking pity on her, one of the families travelling in the same compartment, persuaded Mohinder Kaur to go along with them to Mumbai. In that utterly tragic situation, all she could think of was to get off the train with her baby, and make a desperate attempt to put out the fire, for whatever it was worth. It was the first time she had ever stepped out of Punjab–and what an experience it turned out to be! Her co-passengers made her see the futility of remaining at that

railway station, and the danger that might pose to her and her baby. She carried on with her journey to Mumbai, minus her husband. She stayed in Mumbai for two months with her co-passengers, who got in touch with her family in Punjab. Her brother came and took her back to Khadoor Sahib village. Impoverished as they were, Mohinder Kaur had no opportunity to visit Delhi to lodge a complaint or an FIR. I came to know of her plight twelve years later because of the splash made by the 1996 Delhi High Court verdict, enhancing the death compensation to Rs 3.5 lakh. One of the elders of her village, Sant Baba Sewa Singh, called me up to help her get the benefit of the High Court’s decision. But in the absence of any documentary evidence of her husband’s death in Delhi’s local jurisdiction, the government rejected the application I had filed on her behalf. I filed a writ petition before the Delhi High Court, pointing out that several victims were being denied their due because of such technicalities. Seeing merit in my submission, Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul directed the government to create an appellate authority, which the victims could approach if they were aggrieved with the rejection of their claims. The appellate authority conceived by Justice Kaul provided relief to hundreds of victims. Mohinder Kaur filed her appeal through me, against the rejection of her compensation claim. My junior, Israel Ali, persuaded the appellate authority, Finance Commissioner GK Marwah, to see Mohinder Kaur before taking a call on her appeal. Convinced as he was by the bona fides of her case, Marwah relaxed the requirement of producing an official proof of Gurmej Singh’s death in Delhi. He said that he was prepared to allow Mohinder Kaur’s appeal on the basis of any contemporaneous evidence, whether official or not. After a great deal of research and investigation, Israel unearthed a document recorded by the chowkidar of Khadoor Sahib village in Punjab, saying that her husband’s death had taken place in Delhi on 1 November 1984. That tied in very well with the circumstances in which Mohinder Kaur’s husband was said to have died. In 2005, Marwah accepted the chowkidar’s note as proof of Gurmej Singh’s murder in the carnage. Shortly thereafter, the Manmohan Singh government doubled the existing compensation for death. The timing could not have been better, as that two-month-old baby who had lost her father in the 1984 carnage, had grown into a beautiful young lady called Kulbir Kaur. For somebody who had never experienced the care of her father, Kulbir Kaur had done well and had pursued a course in nursing. Though she had been engaged, her wedding was put off for want of money. In November 2006, Mohinder Kaur came to my house with a packet of sweets and showed me a cheque for Rs 7 lakh, which she had just received from the government. Shortly thereafter, she married off Kulbir Kaur. Attending her wedding in Punjab was an emotional experience that I shall cherish forever. The joy I saw on the faces of Mohinder Kaur and Kulbir Kaur testified to the difference that enhanced compensation might have made to so many victims. That simple

wedding seemed such a grand finale to our struggle for justice.

Epilogue

W hichever way you look at India, whether as the world’s largest democracy, or as one of the fastest growing economies in the world, it is hard to imagine that any genocide could have taken place a few years ago right in its capital. A UN convention, signed by India, defined genocide in 1948 as mass violence committed with ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’. In an uncanny transposition of the figures of that year, Delhi had its tryst with genocide in 1984. But there was little consciousness of genocide in the public discourse of that period, despite Rajiv Gandhi’s infamous attempt to shrug off state responsibility by dismissing the massacre of 3,000 Sikhs in three days as the tremors caused by the fall of a mighty tree. The first time the Indian parliament and courts ever saw any serious debate on the question of genocide was in the context of the 2002 carnage in Gujarat, in which officially 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were killed, and 223 persons went missing over three months. The Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which had presided over the 2002 carnage, sought to counter charges of genocide by citing one telling contrast with the 1984 carnage: almost all the casualties in Delhi were of a minority community, while scores of Hindus were killed in Gujarat in police firing. The Congress camp took refuge in an equally striking contrast: the Delhi massacre was controlled in three days, while the Gujarat carnage dragged on for three months. Whatever the difference in circumstances, state complicity was evident in both instances. Not the least because Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi came up with his own variant of Rajiv Gandhi’s tree-shaking-the-earth rationalization. Even as the killings were going on, Modi was embroiled in a controversy over his reported reference to Newton’s third law of motion, suggesting that an action of the Muslims had provoked an equal and opposite reaction from the Hindus. In another obvious inspiration from 1984, Modi got the state assembly dissolved prematurely in 2002 in order to force an election in a communally charged environment. The BJP’s attempt to emulate the Congress Party’s example, however, provoked a specious reaction from sections of the civil society, which, taking liberties with facts, downplayed the gravity of the 1984 carnage. Ashutosh Varshney, a US-based political scientist, who wrote a book on Hindu-Muslim conflicts – admittedly a far more serious fault-line in Indian society – asserted that ‘the riots in Gujarat were the first full-blooded pogrom in independent

India’. In his 2004 essay titled ‘Understanding Gujarat Violence’, he argued that it was ‘not plausible’ to consider the anti-Sikh violence in Delhi as the first pogrom because, unlike the BJP, ‘the Congress ended up developing an attitude of contrition’. Given the hostility displayed towards Sikhs by the Rajiv Gandhi government in so many blatant ways in the aftermath of the carnage, Varshney, it would seem, could not possibly have had that crucial and prolonged phase of the Congress rule in mind when he noticed signs of repentance in the party. But, strangely enough, he referred to actions of that very phase while trying to substantiate his theory that the Congress Party had undergone a change of heart. The source he quoted was a newspaper article titled ‘Pot is blacker than the kettle’, written by senior journalist Shekhar Gupta, during the Gujarat violence, offering a comparison that was misleading, however well-intentioned. While making a case for Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to take action against Modi, Gupta cited, of all things, what he saw as ‘damage control’ started immediately by Rajiv Gandhi, in 1984: ‘The Congressmen whose names surfaced, or were even popularly mentioned in connection with the killings, all paid the price. Political careers of HKL Bhagat, Jagdish Tytler, and Sajjan Kumar, never recovered from the taint of 1984 although nobody was ever convicted.’ In reality, the political careers of Bhagat and Tytler, far from suffering on account of ‘the taint of 1984’, blossomed as if they had been rewarded for engineering the violence. Having won the 1984 election under the shadow of the carnage, Rajiv Gandhi immediately promoted Bhagat to the rank of cabinet minister, and inducted Tytler into the government for the first time as minister of state. Both remained in the Rajiv Gandhi government till the end of its tenure in 1989. If such facts failed to register in the minds of opinion makers such as Gupta and Varshney, it is indicative of the extent of misinformation on the 1984 carnage and its aftermath. In a larger perspective, this shows that for all the material progress made by India, its legal culture is still far from developed. If the struggle for justice could not secure the conviction of a single political leader or police officer; if so many institutions collapsed during and after the 1984 carnage; if Delhi set a precedent for mass killings in Gujarat, the civil society cannot escape blame for lack of ‘due diligence’, and for neglecting the duty of ‘eternal vigilance’. Despite all the setbacks, the tale of this two-decade struggle is, thankfully, not entirely of despair. It has had its moments of consolation: when prosecution for murder was brought against Bhagat and Sajjan Kumar; when Bhagat was detained for a while during his trial; when Tytler was forced to resign as a minister after being indicted by a judicial inquiry; when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh apologized in the parliament for the carnage, even if that came twenty years too late.

The losses have been substantial; the gains, symbolic. The challenge now is to make those gains more systemic and enduring.

Annexure

E xcerpts of testimonies before the Misra and Nanavati Commissions: Writer Khushwant Singh before the Nanavati Commission: … That the same evening Mr MJ Akbar (newspaper editor) came to my house for dinner. I heard some noise outside on the main road and I went out to check. I saw about 20-25 policemen standing on the road and the mob was looting shops belonging to Sikhs at Khan Market. The policemen were not taking action at all. The policemen did not make any attempt to stop them or disperse them. …That after some time the mob burnt the taxi stand on the main road. …That around midnight the gurdwara behind my house was attacked… Writer Patwant Singh before the Nanavati Commission: …That Air Chief Marshall Arjan Singh (Retd.), Lt. Gen. Jagjit Singh Aurora (Retd.), Brig. Sukhjit Singh (Retd.), S. Gurbachan Singh and I called on the president of India in the morning of 1 November1984. We spent one hour with the president and told him that numerous Sikhs were being killed all over the capital, emphatically spelling out for him the violence overtaking the Sikhs throughout the city. We made clear that he as the president was morally and constitutionally bound to put an end to it. He replied, ‘I do not have powers to intervene.’ I was stunned by this astounding remark. I said, ‘Mr. President, you mean to tell us that if the nation is going up in flames and people are being butchered in the streets, you have no power to stop the anarchy and bloodshed.’ He kept silent… Former prime minister IK Gujaral before the Nanavati Commission: On 31 October 1984, I came to know about the attack on Mrs Indira Gandhi at about 11.00 am. I then went to All India Institute of Medical Sciences, and returned from there in the afternoon. Late in the evening, I came to know that riots had broken out in the city and elsewhere. Next morning i.e. on 1 November 1984, after reading newspapers, I contacted the president of India on telephone. He advised me to visit some of the affected areas, and also contact the government. I considered it very odd that the president of India had asked me to do such a thing. On 1 November 1984, there was a meeting of Opposition leaders and therefore, I was picked up by Dr Farooq Abdullah at about 10.00 am. On my way, I noticed houses, trucks, etc burning. After I returned to my house, I received a telephone call from General Aurora, and I was informed that he, along with Mr Patwant Singh, Air Chief Marshal Arjan Singh and others, had met the president of India, and had returned disappointed by his response. I then went to the house of Mr. Patwant Singh and there we decided to go and meet the home minister, Shri Narasimha Rao. I saw various incidents of burning properties

while on the way to the home minister’s house, and return. I could see that there was no attempt either to get hold of the people or to extinguish the fire. As I was driving the car myself because my driver was absent on that day, I was stopped on the way twice by the crowd carrying lathis, etc, and shouting slogans. Some of them came near my car, and opened the door and enquired whether there was any Sikh inside the car. During my talk with the home minister, I noticed that he did not know many details about what was happening in the city… General Aurora was contacted by some army men and after being escorted by army men, he came to my house. So General Aurora and Mrs Aurora stayed in my house… Minister for chemicals and fertilizers and steel, Ram Vilas Paswan before the Misra Commission: …That we, a group of four, including myself, Karpoori Thakur, Devi Lal and KR Arya, went in a car up to Tilak Nagar to assess the whole situation. On the way, our vehicle was stopped at many places by mobs. They let us go only after ensuring that there was no Sikh with us. We saw that there was smoke everywhere and there were many groups of miscreants standing at many places… …One sardarji who was lurking somewhere was beaten mercilessly. He sought refuge in my residence… The mob attacked my house at about 4.00 pm. My bodyguard Joginder Prasad Singh and private secretary Mahinder Betha were at the gate. They closed the gate. But the mob surrounded the residence from all sides. Joginder Prasad Singh knows many faces in the mob and can appear as a witness if and when required. According to him, the known figures were workers of Congress (I). They were shouting anti-Sikh slogans… We managed to save our lives by escaping through the servant quarters situated at the rear wall of the house. Then they caught hold of the injured old sardarji who could not run along with us. The mob threw him alive in the burning garage, where he was roasted alive… Former law minister Ram Jethmalani before the Nanavati Commission: …My friend Ms Laila Fernandes came to my house that evening, and she narrated some of the terrible incidents that were happening in the city. We decided to call on Shri Narasimha Rao, the hon’ble home minister at that time. We met him. We mentioned the incidents of fire and killings taking place in the city, and requested him to take immediate steps to stop the carnage. I even detailed some of the steps that were urgently required. They included imposition of curfew and induction of the army. We were with Mr Rao for about half an hour. During this time, I did not see Mr Rao giving instructions to any officer, or taking any urgent steps of any other kind. I found him listless and unenthusiastic. This could well be his ordinary style of behaviour, or it may be that he too was shaken by the events. I can only say that I experienced acute disappointment on this visit…

Former law minister Shanti Bhushan before the Nanavati Commission: … That we visited Shakarpur, Pandav Nagar, and several east Delhi’s colonies, and rescued many trapped Sikh families, and took them to the nearest gurdwara … we also saw many dead bodies of Sikhs who had been killed, and some bodies were still burning… That we also saw some police officials with their name plates on their clothes, but got the impression that they did not appear to be doing anything much to stop the killings… …That it is my firm conviction that these incidents could not have happened without some people organising them, arranging for the mob, and distributing kerosene and other inflammable material to them in an organized manner, with the connivance of the state machinery. If the state machinery really wanted to stop those incidents, they had sufficient means to stop them by opening fire at a couple of places on the first day. Former finance minister Madhu Dandavate before the Misra Commission: When the train reached Tughlakabad Station (on the suburbs of Delhi) on 2 November morning, a large number of persons carrying iron rods, axes, crow bars, etc. entered our train. They were searching for Sikh passengers in the train. They declared that no Sikh would be allowed to leave the train alive. At that time, I found that some Sikhs in the adjoining compartments were pulled down by those outsiders carrying weapons. I found two Sikhs killed and thrown on the platform, and then their dead bodies were set on fire on the platform. The police standing on the platform made no efforts to prevent either the killing or burning of the Sikhs. Director of MacArthur’s India office Poonam Muttreja before the Nanavati Commission: …On 1 November, 1984, by 1:00 am. morning, phone calls started informing me about the water poisoning in Delhi’s water supply. I also called a friend in Munirka at 2:00 am, informing him of this news. My friend, Shekhar Singh, explained to me that it was technically not possible to do so. At 2:30 am, I heard the following on a public address system, ‘Aap ke pani mein jahar mila dian gaya hain, kripya pani nahin pee jeaey.’ I ran into my balcony and caught sight of a jeep that was moving away from the colony towards the road leading to JNU. The jeep was dark blue in colour and looked like a police jeep. …I got confused and then suspicious of the police making such announcements. I would not sleep through the night. I also received a call from a friend that she had confirmed with a senior police officer about the water supply being poisoned. Hindu victim Mandodari Devi’s affidavit before the Misra Commission:… Riots erupted in our area at 3.00 pm on 1 November 1984. At that time, my husband and I were at our residence. When rioters came repeatedly to beat our neighbours, my husband who was a police officer went out to protect the

victims…The rioters asked my husband as to why (despite being a Hindu) he was saving those people. They told him to stand aside. When my husband continued to protect those victims, the rioters attacked my husband from behind with iron rods. Severely wounded, my husband fell down. It was nearly 8:30 pm. …Terrified, when I went to bring my husband inside the house, the rioters chased me away. I then left that place. My brother-in-law Ganga Prasad, who was himself injured, and some of our neighbors helped in bringing my husband home. We tried to take my husband to a hospital but rioters did not allow us. …At 9:00 pm we were able to take my husband to the hospital (where he expired a few days later)… Former chief justice RS Narula before the Nanavati Commission: … During the day of 2 November, I received a telephone call from Justice O Chinnappa Reddy, a sitting judge of the Supreme Court of India (who had been the senior most puisne judge with me in Chandigarh). He stated that he had personally seen a Sikh scooterist being beaten to death outside the house of Justice DA Desai (another Supreme Court judge) and asked me if he could send his car and security to fetch me to his own house which was secure. His kind offer was declined by me… …I was also informed on 3 November that my son-in-law Justice SS Chadha of Delhi High Court and his family, who were living at 4-B Zakir Hussain Marg, had to be shifted into the High Court as his own security refused to guarantee their safety… Senior BJP MP Vijay Kumar Malhotra before the Nanavati Commission: …It was officially announced that in all 300 Sikhs were killed during anti-Sikh riots. Later on this figure was revised to 50. Shri Vajpayee told me and other leaders of the BJP to ascertain the correct number of Sikhs killed in Delhi during those days. We had moved around the city and collected the information and it was found that about 2800 Sikhs have been killed. We had also come to know that possibly more Sikhs were killed and no information was available regarding that. On the next day, after we had collected the information, Mr Vajpayee made a public statement regarding the correct number of deaths that had taken place in Delhi. After this public statement was made, whenever we used to visit various localities, we were told by Congress leaders that what we were doing was antinational and that disclosing that such a large number of Sikhs were killed would create a bad impression in the world outside India… Former governor and defence secretary Govind Narain before the Nanavati Commission: …Definitely there was a lot of evidence before us in trans Yamuna area where people had told us that Shri HKL Bhagat, a Congress leader, had planned an organized massacre there. There was evidence before us that in other areas the people who were instigating and organizing with petrol tins / kerosene tins to set houses on fire and here the names of Shri Sajjan Kumar and Shri

Jagdish Tytler were mentioned. Some of these names also figure in the various affidavits that were filed before us…