#1984RiotsVerdict: Here’s why you should read the Delhi High Court’s judgement

The Delhi High Court yesterday sentenced Congress leader Sajjan Kumar to prison “for the remainder of his natural life”. The judgement was delivered by a Division Bench of Justices S Muralidhar and Vinod Goel. Kumar, along with five others, was found guilty of criminal conspiracy during the anti-Sikh riots that swept Delhi in November 1984. He was additionally charged with “abetment in the commission of the crimes of murder, promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of communal harmony, defiling and destruction of the Gurudwara by burning”.

Sajjan Kumar, now 73, was a familiar face in the Lutyens landscape of Delhi politics in the early 1980s. After the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984, Kumar was accused of inciting and orchestrating mob violence against the Sikh community across Delhi. His name featured alongside other Congress leaders of the time like HKL Bhagat, Jagdish Tytler and Kamal Nath, among others.

Union Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal dubbed the judgement as “historic”. It was welcomed by Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, who added that “nobody involved in any riot should be allowed to escape no matter how powerful the individual maybe”. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said those behind “the cover up are now being defeated …The legacy of the riot hangs around the neck of Congress and Gandhi family.”

Regardless of politicians using the moment as a chance to score political points, the judgement is also important because it identifies loopholes and flaws in the Indian legal system, especially that part of it which deals with mass violence—before, during and after it occurs.

Time and Power

Looking at the three-decade-long delay in bringing Kumar to justice, the Delhi High Court noted that longer periods allow violence-struck societies to recover and reconstruct, and build judicial muscles to launch investigations and trials. Citing a judgement by the Supreme Court of Bangladesh, the court observed that victims refrain from confessions in the immediate aftermath of violent social breakdowns since, more often than not, their perpetrators enjoy political patronage and thus threaten retribution.

This observation fits well with what unfolded politically after the pogroms of 1984. Accused HKL Bhagat was awarded the rank of cabinet minister in Rajiv Gandhi’s government. Accused Jagdish Tytler stepped up as a Union minister of state. And in 1991, accused Sajjan Kumar was given a ticket to run in the Lok Sabha elections.

Plugging an important caveat, the court argued that time cannot dilute culpability. It noted that the immunity and political power enjoyed by alleged criminals “poses a serious challenge to our legal system”, and that it is a “loophole” that “needs to be addressed urgently”.

The complicity of the police

The judgement mentions an account of murder as narrated by the prosecution. On the morning of November 1, 1984, two of Sajjan Kumar’s henchmen had a violent confrontation with the Sikh community in the south-eastern locality of Raj Nagar in Delhi after they tried to burn down a local gurudwara. The police intervened and duly took away the kirpans of the Sikh males on the pretext of disarming them and reaching a compromise between the parties. Hours later, the two henchmen returned and asked one of the Sikh men, Nirmal Singh, to accompany them to a nearby shop to calm things down. Singh obliged, reached the shop, and was doused with kerosene by a waiting mob. When the mobsters couldn’t find a matchstick to set him alight, it was the police inspector who threw in the matchbox, chastising them with “Doob maro, tumse ek sardar bhi nahin jalta (Die! You can’t even set one Sikh on fire)!”

The High Court judgement comes down hard on the Delhi police for inaction, and in effect abetting the crimes hatched by the criminal conspirators. This included not recording incidents of violence, not investigating murders, and not questioning those who witnessed the riots. “These circumstances establish the apathy of the Delhi Police and their active connivance in the brutal murders being perpetrated,” wrote Justices Muralidhar and Goel.

Crimes against humanity

The most important highlight of the judgement was its evocation of the Nurembergian term “crimes against humanity”. Used famously in the Nuremberg trials that prosecuted the Nazi leadership after the Second World War, the High Court judgement furnished multiple definitions of the term, one of them being the “systematic or widespread attack against any civilian population on national, political, ethnic, racial or religious grounds”.

The court argued that the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 qualify as a “crime against humanity”, and so do the “mass killings in Mumbai in 1993, in Gujarat in 2002, in Kandhamal, Odisha in 2008, in Muzaffarnagar in U.P. in 2013”. A regular feature of such crimes, the court pointed out, is the targeting of minorities by dominant political groups through the aid of law enforcement agencies.

Through references that are both academic and legal, the judgement made a case for incorporating the concepts of “crime against humanity” and “genocide” in domestic criminal law, so that it is well equipped to handle cases that occur in “larger context of mass crimes that require a different approach…”.

By invoking the concept of “crime against humanity”, the complicity of law enforcing institutions, and the political blessings of alleged criminals, the Delhi High Court verdict bared the shortcomings of (a) the law, (b) those who enforce it, and (c) those who write it. The fact that the verdict was delivered on the same day as the swearing-in of Kamal Nath, whose role in 1984 riots has been documented, as the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh demonstrates that even though the verdict rectified the past, perhaps its greatest challenge is to fix the present and rescue the future.

Read the entire judgement here.