Media reports continue to refer to it as the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, ignoring the reality that the state machinery had wantonly turned vigilante in seeking vengeance against an entire community for Indira Gandhi’s murder.

“But, unfortunately, Kumar is the only prominent Congress politician to be thus sentenced despite the culpability of numerous others in organizing Hindu mobs to hunt down droves of Sikhs, including women and children, on streets, in their homes and workplaces during these 72 hours and slaughtering them. Many victims were brutally ‘necklaced’ by pinioning their chests and arms with car tires soaked in petrol and setting them alight.”

It has taken 40 years to convict former Congress MP Sajjan Kumar for his murderous role in the anti-Sikh pogrom, that raged unchecked across New Delhi after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot dead by her two Sikh bodyguards on October 31, 1984, ending only with her cremation three days later.

But, unfortunately, Kumar is the only prominent Congress politician to be thus sentenced despite the culpability of numerous others in organizing Hindu mobs to hunt down droves of Sikhs, including women and children, on streets, in their homes and workplaces during these 72 hours and slaughtering them. Many victims were brutally ‘necklaced’ by pinioning their chests and arms with car tires soaked in petrol and setting them alight.

By the time some semblance of order was enforced in the city by the Army, the organized massacres by the State-turned-avenger for the first time in independent India‘s history, had left some 2,733 Sikhs dead in Delhi alone. Human rights organizations, however, put this number in the capital close to 4,000.

Over decades thereafter, around 15 inquiry commissions, committees and special investigation teams (SITs) determined variously beyond reasonable doubt that these killings were engineered by Congress party loyalists like Kumar and his fellow MPs Kamal Nath, Dharam Dass Shastri, Jagdish Tytler and HKL Bhagat, who died in 2005 without even being tried.

These multiple probes also determined that the extended slaughter was executed by a cross-section of largely Congress party members, sympathizers and bands of hired criminals, all of who carried voter lists to identify Sikh households across Delhi’s neighborhoods. Armed with crude swords, cleavers, scythes, kitchen knives and even scissors and an ‘inflammable white powder’, these mobs executed their retribution relentlessly, assured immunity from arrest.

Justice SN Dhingra, who was appointed in 2018 to head the SIT to relook at the 186 cases related to the 1984 pogrom, stated in 2022 that the entire endeavor of the Congress government was to ensure that none of the major perpetrators of violence was punished.

Consequently, it appointed Justice Ranganath Misra to head the commission inquiring into the unrest, fully aware that he was in line to become the 21st Supreme Court Chief Justice — which he did in 1990 — and, therefore, would be ‘cautious’ in his findings. Expectedly, Justice Misra indicted 19 Congress workers, who, ironically, were charged by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties with having abetted the massacres, but blatantly absolved the Congress party of all blame.

Subsequently, the Nanavati Commission — the 10th such inquiry committee in 16 years — instituted in 2000 and headed by GT Nanavati, a retired SC judge, recommended prosecutions in 2005 only against Kumar and Tytler. This was despite several witnesses, including this writer, accusing several other Congress MPs and party cadres of their involvement in the violence. Criminal proceedings against Nath are underway, albeit proceeding at a glacial pace. The Nanavati Commission also revealed that of the original 587 FIRs registered after the 1984 violence, only 25 had resulted in convictions, of which just 12 were for murder. And, of the 440 overall convictions, many cases featured the same person being found guilty of as many as seven counts each. Subsequently, the SC-monitored SIT was formulated in 2018 and continues to ramble on.

Meanwhile, Indira Gandhi’s son and successor Rajiv Gandhi justified the pogrom, declaring at a public rally in Delhi’s Boat Club on November 19, 1984 that ‘Jab bhi koi bada ped girta hai, to dharti thodi hilti hai’ (When a big tree falls, the earth shakes a little).

The new PM had fittingly delivered the Congress party’s metaphor for the pogrom, even though officialese and media reports at the time, and even now, continue to refer to it as the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, ignoring the reality that the state machinery, including the local police, had openly and wantonly turned vigilante in seeking vengeance against an entire community for Indira Gandhi’s murder.

Once Gandhi’s funeral pyre was lit, the State stirred itself into action by empowering the Army to restore order, even though the force had been summoned several days earlier.

But the little-known reality regarding the Army’s deployment in Delhi was more complex and sinister. The force, which four months earlier had seamlessly cordoned off Punjab during Operation Bluestar, was provided vague instructions on its deployment by the Central authorities to control Delhi’s unmitigated chaos. All it knew was that it was authorized to act in conjunction with the Delhi Police, which itself was rudderless and, for all practical purposes, leaderless and in many instances, as emerged later, conniving in the killings by bloodthirsty mobs.

Using decades-old maps of Delhi colonies, particularly of the killing fields like Trilokpuri in the trans-Yamuna belt, where many roads and colonies were not even marked, the Army was expected to end the violence, detect, evacuate and safely billet Sikh refugees in camps. Further complicating matters was the delineation of its jurisdiction. It merely had loose sanction to impose a curfew, but not enough force, or more importantly, the authorization to implement it.

To his credit, PM Manmohan Singh attempted, in 2005, to mitigate his party’s role in the 1984 violence, declaring emotionally in Parliament that he bowed his head in shame over the massacres and apologized for them. But his party loyalties prevailed, when he declared that the horrific incidents needed to be viewed from a ‘wider perspective’ as past events could not be undone. He also failed miserably in ensuring that guilty Congressmen, like Kumar, were duly punished. This has only transpired two decades later.

Compensation to pogrom survivors, too, fell prey to officialdom, which required the production of certificates and proof from an uncooperative, almost-hostile administration, loath to either register cases of murder, arson or looting or even to issue death certificates. It seemed that being a Sikh was reason enough to not comply and, consequently, hundreds of illiterate widows, who comprised the bulk of compensation seekers, simply added penury to their overwhelming losses. And, despite the grandiosely announced compensation schemes, hundreds of pogrom survivors were handed cheques for Rs 1,000 and dismissed.
(Rahul Bedi is a New Delhi-based journalist reporting for over 30 years on strategic, military, and security matters for overseas journals)