Abstract

The officially admitted massacre of 2,733 Sikhs in 1984 is unlike any other instance of sectarian violence faced by India, post-Partition. For, it happened right in the Capital, which is administered directly by the federal government. Yet, that made little difference to India’s record of impunity with regard to perpetrators of mass killings.

This is thanks to, as is often the case, political complicity, that too stretching to the highest levels. As two judicial inquiries have brought out in varying degrees, members of the ruling party at the Centre, Congress, were complicit in the targeted killings of a minority community over three days in Delhi.

Those killings were sought to be passed off as a spontaneous public reaction to the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by two Sikh bodyguards. In his first public meeting barely a fortnight later, her son and successor Rajiv Gandhi, rather than condemning it, likened the pogrom to the reverberations caused by the fall of a mighty tree.

The import of such a brazen attempt by the head of the government to justify the 1984 killings was not lost on those working the levers of the legal system: police, CBI, prosecution, the judiciary. As a result, in the 25 years that have lapsed since then, no more than 25 persons have been convicted for murder.

If most of the cases have fallen by the wayside, it is because of a range of systemic impediments or subversions: the cases were registered too late or in a faulty manner, the shoddy or partisan investigation, the protracted trial, the intimidation or inducement of witnesses to turn hostile, and so on.

Needless to add, none of the Congress leaders indicted by the last judicial probe has so far been convicted. Thanks to a sustained campaign for justice, there has lately been a cause for hope. While CBI resurrected cases against one leader (Sajjan Kumar), the Delhi high court, in a sudden display of urgency towards the 1984 carnage, set a six-month deadline for completing the pending trials.