Thirty-four years later, justice still seems only half done | Opinion News, The Indian Express

Thirty-four years later, justice still seems only half done | Opinion News, The Indian Express

Written by Rahul Bedi |Updated: December 19, 2018 2:58:56 pm

The writer is a Delhi-based journalist. He reported the 1984 anti-Sikh riots for The Indian Express

Thirty-four years later, justice still seems only half done

The judges passing sentence on Kumar sagely declared that the Sikh killings in Delhi and elsewhere in November 1984 were “crimes against humanity”, a massacre that will continue to shock the collective conscience of society for a long time to come.

Policemen magically disappeared and the handful who were visible were unwilling, or under orders not to open fire upon cowardly mobs that drew encouragement solely from their numbers and assurances of immunity from prosecution.

The life sentence handed down by the Delhi High Court to Sajjan Kumar of the Congress party has, no doubt, brought a modicum of closure to victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh massacre; but it’s not nearly enough considering the quantum of reprisal killings in Delhi and elsewhere, purposefully instigated by some Congress party members like Kumar.

Jagdish Kaur, one of Kumar’s principal accusers, tersely termed the sentence a “little balm applied to long time scars”. She also resignedly declared that at least one high-profile individual accused in the Sikh killings would now be jailed, in what remains the most reprehensible episode in independent India’s history, in which the Congress-ruled state turned avenger.

Kaur’s son and husband were amongst her five family members clubbed to death and set alight by marauding Hindu mobs under Kumar’s instigation, within hours of Indira Gandhi’s assassination on October 31, 1984, by her two Sikh bodyguards. Their only sin, like that of some 3,000 others like them in Delhi, was that they were easily identifiable as Sikhs, and hence fair game for mobs, some led by Congressmen, to be slaughtered.

Kumar’s comeuppance also took 34 years in coming, or a time frame of one generation-and-three-quarters, to adjudicate in India’s lugubrious judicial system. The tortuous lead-up to sentencing the 73-year old former Congress parliamentarian to spend the rest of his natural life in jail, too, was riddled with crafty legal and procedural wrangles manipulated by his political colleagues for decades.