India: Justice to 1984 victims has been unacceptably delayed | Edit, TOI Dec 19 2018

The Times of India
December 19, 2018

Sajjan’s reckoning: Truth will triumph but not in a vacuum. Justice to 1984 victims has been unacceptably delayed

Editorials

By sentencing Congress leader Sajjan Kumar to life imprisonment for his involvement in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, Delhi high court has corrected a grave injustice compounded by years of official apathy and judicial inaction. Despite several commissions of inquiry probing the 1984 riots which took nearly 3,000 Sikh lives in the capital, Sajjan was finally implicated only in the 2005 Nanavati commission report. In 2013, a trial court acquitted Sajjan but convicted five other rioters despite three eyewitness testimonies naming all six men.

Sajjan’s conviction after decades is a scathing indictment of state agencies and the criminal justice delivery system. Justices Muralidhar and Goel go to the heart of the matter when they note in their judgment: “There has been a familiar pattern of mass killings since the Partition, including Mumbai in 1993, Gujarat in 2002, and Muzaffarnagar in 2013 … Common to these mass crimes were the targeting of minorities and attacks spearheaded by dominant political actors facilitated by law enforcement agencies. The criminals responsible for the mass crimes have enjoyed political patronage and managed to evade prosecution and punishment.”

This pattern of targeting and impunity is indeed true of most mass crimes India has witnessed. The verdict makes a stirring call to strengthen the legal system so that decades do not similarly elapse before the guilty are made answerable. The absence of punishment for “crimes against humanity” and “genocide” in the Indian Penal Code has also been flagged. Unless this pattern of impunity and political patronage is recognised and reversed communal riots, mob violence and lynchings can be expected to go on.

Recall Union minister Jayant Sinha garlanding lynching convicts when they secured bail. More recently, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath downplayed the murder of a police inspector after the Bulandshahr mob violence as an accident. State incapacity to act against mobs and powerful politicians – a CBI team raiding Sajjan was forced back by a mob in 1990 and the Srikrishna committee report’s indictment of Bal Thackeray for the Mumbai riots was given a quiet burial – must be turned around. The state must look after its weakest and assure security to all: implicit in sabka saath, sabka vikas was this promise. India must comprehensively overcome its Partition-era legacy, which makes it an outlier among civilised nations.

This piece appeared as an editorial opinion in the print edition of The Times of India.