1984 anti-Sikh riots case: 39 years on, no end to trauma

New Delhi: Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena on Saturday gave his approval for the prosecution to appeal in the Supreme Court against the Delhi High Court’s order acquitting 12 murder accused in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots case.

L-G Saxena approved the Delhi government’s home department’s proposal to file a Special Leave Petition (SLP) in the top court challenging the August 2023 judgment of the High Court, which acquitted all the accused in the case involving the murder of eight people in the Nangloi area of West Delhi in 1984.

In its order, the high court noted that there was no explanation for the inordinate delay of 27 years in filing the appeal against the trial court’s acquittal order in April 1995. It also stated that the grounds presented by the state were not justifiable.

The Delhi government’s proposal to file the SLP stated that the High Court had not considered the merits of the case and instead dismissed the state’s appeal solely on the grounds of the inordinate delay in filing the appeal.

This case was one of the 186 cases related to the 1984 anti-Sikh riots that the Supreme Court ordered to be re-examined in 2018. Subsequently, a Special Investigation Team (SIT), comprising Justice (Retd) SN Dhingra and an Indian Police Service (IPS) officer, Abhishek, was constituted.

The SIT’s report in 2019 noted that this was a case where the prosecution should have appealed immediately after the trial court’s judgement. However, the committee recommended filing an appeal with an application for condonation of delay.

In a report in August this year, the Additional Public Prosecutor (APP) expressed the opinion that an SLP can be filed before the Supreme Court because the High Court ignored the fact that the challenge against the trial court’s verdict was filed based on the recommendations of the commission constituted by the court.

The AAP also pointed out that, in this case, there is a crime against humanity, and the observations of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh in a similar matter relating to the mass killing of Bangladeshi citizens in 1971 by sympathisers of Pakistan are relevant.

Meanwhile, the Standing Counsel of Delhi High Court noted that there is a delay of only 274 days, not 27 years, as it should be calculated from the date of the SIT report and not from the trial court judgment.

The 12 accused persons in the case are Maikale Ram, Ramesh Chandra Sharma, Bishan Datt Sharma, Des Raj Goel, Anar Singh, Jagdish Prasad Sharma, Mahavir Singh, Balkishan, Dharampal, Om Pal Chauhan, Gyan Prakash, and Ved Prakash.

The individuals killed were Avtar Singh, Jagir Singh, Darshan Singh, Kulwant Singh, Baldev Singh, Sharvan Singh, Balwinder Singh, and Harcharan Singh. One person named Dharmendra Singh was injured
Families continue to be traumatised 39 years after communal riots rocked the national capital, in which an estimated 3,900 people lost their lives, many families continue to be traumatised by the event, which took place in the aftermath of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination on October 31, 1984.

“Too much smoke was seen from the neighbouring colony at about 11.00 am on 1.11.84. That smoke started coming nearer slowly…” recalled one such eyewitness. That morning, Harvinder Singh saw a crowd of 200 to 250 people who reached the Gurdwara at his colony and set it on fire.

“On reaching home, I found my father who had sustained a rod injury. He was lying unconscious. His entire body was blood-stained. A mob of about 200/250 culprits attacked the house of Nath Singh, the president of our colony when I was still helping my father. They started beating the members of his family and set the truck parked outside on fire. I and the members of my family saw the incident peeping through the holes of the rear door of our house,” he said in a statement in the court. The mob threw Nath’s teenage son into a burning truck, but the residents of the colony saved him later.

“We were so scared that we ran away leaving the doors of the house open. My Jeeja Ji (husband of my sister) and my father went to the house of an old Hindu lady who locked the house from the outside. There, I came to know that some Hindu brother had got my injured mother admitted into the Rana Nursing Home, Rajouri Garden. The noises of arson and looting were heard by us while sitting inside the closed room,” it was stated.