What is it?
More than 33 years after the anti-Sikh riots rocked Delhi and several other places in the country, the Supreme Court has ordered the formation of another team to investigate 186 cases arising out of the pogrom that took place in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination on October 31, 1984. As many as 3,325 people of the Sikh community, including 2,733 in Delhi alone, were killed in the riots. The new Special Investigation Team (SIT) will comprise Shiv Narayan Dhingra, a retired judge of the Delhi High Court, Rajdeep Singh, a retired police officer, and Abhishek Dular, a serving police officer. The SIT has been asked to file a status report in two months.
A government-appointed Special Investigation Team has been functioning since February 2015. It was constituted on the recommendation of a committee headed by Justice G.P. Mathur. It was headed by Pramod Asthana, an IPS officer, and included Rakesh Kapoor, a retired district and sessions judge, and Kumar Gyanesh of the Delhi police.
How did it come about?
A Supreme Court Bench, headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, has been hearing a writ petition filed by S. Gurlad Singh Kahlon since 2016. The petitioner, a member of the Delhi Gurdwara Management Committee, wanted the SIT’s investigation monitored by the court to ensure justice to the victims. On March 24, 2017, the court was informed that the SIT had scrutinised 293 cases and closed 199 of them. Of the remaining, 59 cases were taken up for further investigation after a preliminary inquiry. Forty-two of these were closed after investigation. On hearing that 199 cases had been closed after scrutiny, the Bench appointed a Supervisory Committee, comprising two former judges of the Supreme Court J.M. Panchal and K.S.P. Radhakrishnan, to scrutinise these 199 case files and give their views on whether the closure was justified. The panel was also asked to scrutinise 42 other matters that had been closed.
In December 2017, the supervisory body gave its views on all 241 cases it had examined. On January 10, the Bench noted that the SIT had not done further investigation in 186 cases and decided that a fresh SIT be constituted to pursue the investigation further. However, the court clarified that naming another SIT did not reflect adversely on the functioning of the earlier team.
Why does it matter?
Despite the passage of time, the ongoing investigation holds out a glimmer of hope for thousands of people affected by the riots, which several inquiries had attributed to the negligence of the police and, in many cases, their connivance. There have been two major judicial commissions of inquiry — one headed by Justice Ranganath Misra and another by Justice G.T. Nanavati — besides several committees and bodies to deal with different aspects of the inquiry and investigation. Only a few cases have reached their logical conclusion in criminal courts. Congress leaders Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler are two politicians whose names are still linked to complaints of suspected involvement in the riots. Last year, Mr. Kumar, who was acquitted in one riot-related case in 2013 of the charge of instigating a mob, was questioned by the SIT in connection with a complaint.
What next?
The new SIT will have to gather enough evidence to file chargesheets in these cases. It may appear that three decades may be a little too late for pursuing a criminal investigation. However, the organised pogrom that left more than 3,000 people dead is unlikely to be forgotten easily. The new SIT faces an uphill task as earlier probes had found that many incidents that took place during the riots had been clubbed in complaints and individual First Information Reports were not always available. In some cases, the survivors and witnesses may not be easy to trace. Collating and scrutinising records that go back to 1984 will be a difficult task too.
