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Shiv Visvanathan
The Delhi High Court judgment in the 1984 riots case is more than a technical treatise. Like all good judgments, it goes beyond the evaluation of a case. It is a powerful act of interrogation, a slice of storytelling that explores the civics of a broken society. In a more general context, it is an attempt to look at the massacre of the Sikhs following Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, as a crime against humanity. In a narrow sense, it takes a slice of that story, the burning of the gurdwara and the killings of five Sikhs at Raj Nagar in southwest Delhi on November 1 and 2, 1984. It explores the eyewitness account of that story.
There are two aspects to the narrative here. The court looks at the vulnerability of the judicial systems against the sheer brutality of power. Delaying justice at one level is like a roadside bully turned Leviathan, Sajjan Kumar. He was a Congress politician and Member of Parliament who incited the crowd to murder. At another level, it a story of courage of witnesses, especially Jagdish Kaur, whose husband and son were killed, Jagsher Singh and Nirpreet Kaur, who had to watch her father being burnt alive by a mob. It is a story of waiting for justice, fighting for justice. Time in its variants as silence, as delays, as postponements is the third character in the story.
What the judgment captures ruthlessly, and yet with empathy, is the long periods of waiting, the repetition and redundancy of truth as it waits for redemption. Like all good judgments, it transcends the technical. It becomes a fable of courage, waiting, of Kafkaesque forays through the legal bureaucratic complex which makes Kafka’s castle look like an easier game. It is a story of individual courage and mass crimes built around a small locality. Yet, it has the quality of a little miracle as the power of truth eventually overwhelms the truth of power. The despair of 40 years echoes through the 200 pages of the judgment as truth stumbles faithfully through the labyrinth of law.
Reading the judgment, one senses the tiredness of witness and yet, one warms to the courage that has some epic quality. The three witnesses will win no awards for gallantry, or be cited in the pages of history. Yet, their courage — simple, defiant, stubborn and consistent — deserves a salute. It survived the massacre of ’84 and the repeated attempts to distort the truths in the years after ’84. The judgment is a tribute to the witnesses as heroes in keeping the criminal justice system alive. The mob, the witness, the politics that delayed justice, all find their chronicles in this narrative.
II
Jagdish Kaur, clerically labelled PW-1, was a resident of the Mandir Marg road. She lived with her husband, three daughters and two sons. Her husband, Kehar Singh, was a gun fitter at the EME workshop in Delhi Cantonment. Nirpreet Kaur (PW-10) was 16 years’ old when the incident occurred. She lived with her parents and two younger brothers at Raj Nagar, a Palam Colony, close to the Raj Nagar gurdwara. Jagsher Singh (PW-6) lived on Shiv Mandir Marg, Raj Nagar, at that time.
On October 31, Indira Gandhi was assassinated. Nirpreet Kaur saw no untoward incidents that day. Yet, the next day, the granthi of the gurdwara came to her residence and informed her father, who was the president of the gurdwara, that the police was visiting it. The cops were worried about the safety of people praying. Oddly, as the prayer was taking place, the police disappeared. A mob appeared soon after and attacked the gurdwara, yelling slogans. Fearing that it would dishonour Guru Granth Sahib, Nirpreet and her brother rushed to pick it. They were attacked by the mob, but managed to escape. The Sikhs from the area defended themselves for two-three hours before the police personnel reached. The police merely disarmed the Sikhs taking away their kirpans.
A compromise was sought, Nirmal Singh went with some of the crowd to negotiate. Nirpreet followed apprehensively. A mob surrounded him, doused him with kerosene. Ironically, they were unable to find a matchstick. One of the police personnel present commented sarcastically, “Doob maro tumse ek sardar bhi nahi jalta hai.” He gave them a matchbox and set Nirmal Singh on fire. He jumped into a nullah to save himself. The mob pulled him out, tied him to a telephone pole and set him on fire again. Singh jumped into water again. The mob caught him, beat him and doused him with white phosphorous powder. The mob then rushed to his house to attack his family. The police personnel standing by did not help. Luckily, the family escaped in an Air Force vehicle.
Jagdish Kaur states that a mob entered her house armed with lethal weapons, pounced on her son and dragged her husband, crushing his head. The son ran down the street, encountered a mob, which set him on fire. On November 2, she went to lodge a report and saw a public meeting being addressed by a local Member of Parliament. She heard him say: “Sikh saala ek nahi bachna chahiye”. He also asked the crowd to burn any Hindu who went to their aid. Kaur also stated she heard the officer in-charge ask: “Kitne murge bhun diye”. She claimed that at this moment she lost faith in humanity.
III
The narratives are stark and yet the vulnerability of the witness begins after the event. Her truth has to run the gauntlets of time and suspicion, face the wear and tear of waiting, the interrogations which nitpick her story probing for tiny variations in detail. The court understands the epic drama of a witness, its need to survive the vulnerability and drabness of waiting, suspicion. In fact, the verdict is most brilliant in the way it examines the fate of a witness.
It first explores the apathy, the indifference, complicity of the police, content to be involved as spectators. Its analysis splits in three parts — the indifference of police, the power of Sajjan Kumar and the vulnerability of the narratives.
The abject failure of the police to record FIRs is worrying. The court observes that in the area where 341 deaths took place in a span of four days, the police registered only 21 FIRs and of these only 15 pertained to murders. Each incident should claim a separate FIR, but the police club murders like a lucky dip. The FIRs and station dairies need to be regularly maintained, and yet all documents prove the indifference of the police. Its only answer to brutality is apathy and complicity, “an active connivance in the brutal murders being perpetrated”.
The CBI, in its submissions, lists out the paralysing indifference of the Delhi Police. Firstly, the crimes were committed amid the patronising and encouraging presence of the police. Secondly, no reports were entered, nor any cases registered. Thirdly, no police personnel visited the scene of crime either to provide protection, shift the injured or to guard bodies before sending them for autopsy. The police ensured a complete breakdown of accountability. Its real role was to ensure “cast-iron protection to the perpetrators of the crime”.
To the litany of the police indifference, one must add the liturgy of power. Sajjan Kumar, who orchestrated the mob, seemed untouchable. HS Phoolka, the senior counsel, pointed out that such was his position of influence that all attempts to prosecute him were thwarted. He was a master in subverting the criminal justice system. At least 11-12 affidavits filed by victims went in vain. In 1990, when the CBI proceeded to arrest him, its jeeps were burned and its officers kept hostage. It must be noted that Sajjan Kumar was not in power in September 1990, yet, his influence was such that no one dared to take him into custody for questioning.
One must add to this the indifference of the State. Not only did it fail to provide assistance to the survivor and victim, it refused to take responsibility for prosecuting the perpetrators. It was a complete breakdown of the civics of justice. Fear became the key. It also explains why not a single spectator came forward to testify about the events which took place in broad daylight. So intense was the pressure that many of those who sheltered the victims became hostile witnesses.
It is within such a background that one must confront the vulnerability and survival of the witness. The witness knows that the narrative has to survive the indifference, threats, apathy, bribe, delay, the exasperating nitpicking of lawyers, the transition across 10 to 12 pompous commissions. Procedure for all its correctness can wear down truth with its immaculate redundancy of repetition.
The three witnesses survived it with simple courage, a tenacity beyond poetry, sticking to the consistency of the story, with a stamina that the court found impressive. Thanks to their courage, a broken system of civics and justice worked. The miracle of ’84 is the indictment of Sajjan Kumar.
One senses that his power grasped and outlasted everything except the indomitability of the human spirit, especially the commitment of the two women to pursue truth and justice. The court, in acknowledging and capturing this heroic effort, partially redeems the logic of justice. By redeeming the logic of justice, the two-judge Bench adds to the annals of law by locating the violence of 1984 in “crimes against humanity”.
IV
The court notes that crimes of this kind have to be seen through a different lens, a discourse that was first identified by governments after the genocide of the Armenians. It held that such crimes against humanity and civilisation are such that the entire Turkish government is held responsible. Such crimes are inhumane acts defined by the jurist Hersch Lauterpacht as systematic attack against the civilian population. Unlike a genocide which seeks to exterminate a group, no such intent is required for crimes against humanity. The mass killings that eliminated 2,733 Sikhs in Delhi alone and another 3,350 across the country echo the violence of the Partition. In chronicling all this, the Bench refers to the career of such killings across India as a result of political patronage. In all of them, the perpetrators evade justice. They call for a strengthening of such justice as neither genocide nor crimes against humanity, rather as part of the domestic system of law. In addressing this loophole, the judges add both to the imagination of justice and creative power of democracy. Maybe Jagdish Kaur and Nivpreet Kaur would be content with that.
— The writer, a sociologist, is a member of Compost Heap
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