Sajjan Kumar’s life imprisonment is the first acknowledgement by the System that the System was culpable in the killings of Sikhs in 1984.The killing of over 2,700 Sikhs in the national capital alone by murderous mobs, 10 committees and commissions set up to help bring justice for the crimes, and 34 years later, the conviction of 1 high-profile politician. Those numbers — 2,700, 10, 34, 1 — speak of a justice delayed and then delivered, but only just. Yet even those telling numbers only inadequately reveal the horror story of the anti-Sikh massacre of 1984 in the wake of the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in which Tuesday’s High Court conviction and sentencing of former Congress MP Sajjan Kumar brings an important turn. Kumar’s life imprisonment is the first acknowledgement by the System that the System was culpable in the killings of Sikhs in 1984. That the murderous mob was not just made up of individuals crazed by hate, but by individuals who counted on the support and complicity of the then Congress-led state as they perpetrated what the Delhi HC has rightly called “crimes against humanity”.
The High Court verdict is powerful because in indicting Kumar, it finally speaks of the crime that has not been fully named: “Targeting of minorities and attacks spearheaded by the dominant political actors being facilitated by the law enforcement agencies.” While the crimes were being committed, the police “turned a blind eye and blatantly abetted… the rioting mobs” and the state machinery “came to a complete standstill”, it says. It calls the investigation later by the local police “a farce”. As it commends the “courage and perseverance” of the eyewitnesses, the court verdict seems to echo the abiding despair of those like Nirpreet Kaur, one of the petitioners who had appealed against the April 2013 trial court acquittal of Kumar. Kaur, now 50 and then 16 years old, remembers watching a Delhi police inspector hand a matchbox to a mob that had caught her father and poured kerosene on him. The indictment of Sajjan Kumar also points, once again, to the denial by the Congress party of the crime that, in retrospect, seemed to take the cue from a remark by one prime minister — Rajiv Gandhi’s “when a big tree falls…” — and which could not be washed away by the very belated apology by another. In Rajya Sabha in 2005, 21 years after the killings, Manmohan Singh, the country’s first Sikh PM, said: “I bow my head in shame…”
The court’s sentencing of Sajjan Kumar also lays out the larger challenge going forward, and not just for the Supreme Court-appointed SIT currently reinvestigating 186 out of 241 cases of 1984. The court has spoken of a pattern, connected the dots between 1984 and other episodes — during Partition, 1993 Mumbai, Gujarat 2002, Kandhamal 2008, Muzaffarnagar 2013. The larger challenge is this: To find a way to insulate due process in cases of complicity of dominant political actors in the perpetration of mass violence. The court suggests that a new law may be one way out. That can be debated but one thing is clear — the search for and rescue of due process in fraught times must now be more widely joined.
