Slow, unsteady: on the Sajjan Kumar case and the 1984 riots

The adage that ‘the wheels of justice grind slowly, but grind exceedingly fine’ may be true, but there are times when punishment for crimes comes so late that it is hardly recognisable as justice. The patience of a family’s long wait for justice may have been rewarded this week, when Congress leader Sajjan Kumar was sentenced to life imprisonment for the killing of a 50-year-old man and his 18-year-old son by a frenzied mob during the anti-Sikh pogrom in Delhi in 1984, but no justice system ought to be proud of a verdict that comes 40 years after the crime. This is the second case in which Mr. Kumar, then a Congress Member of Parliament, has been found guilty of leading a mob. In 2021, the Delhi High Court reversed a trial court judgment acquitting him of overseeing the killing of five people in the same locality, Raj Nagar, and sentenced him to imprisonment for the rest of his life. His involvement in leading the riotous mob was known to many, witnessed by some, but covered up by all those who mattered. The police had initially failed to carry out any genuine investigation, registered omnibus first information reports for many separate incidents, discouraged complainants and witnesses from naming or describing the assailants, and only recorded the loss of property and belongings looted by the mobs that ransacked houses before burning them.

However, public outcry, political activism and the change of regime over the years have ensured that there were mechanisms from time to time to reopen closed probes and record testimony: the Justice Ranganath Misra Commission, the Justice Nanavati Commission and the Jain-Aggarwal Committee. Affidavits filed before these panels, purported contradictions in them, and the question of whether these disclosures were made at the earliest opportunity, have all been exploited by defence lawyers to delay trials over the years; but a few have made it to the very end. These outcomes kept a sliver of hope alive for at least a few victims, the latest being the three women who witnessed Jaswant Singh and his son Tarundeep being beaten and burnt before their eyes. It is a fact that fixing criminal liability in mob violence is extremely difficult, but the lesson is that the problem of finding credible witnesses should not be compounded by manipulated investigations. Even in this case, the last word has not been said as Mr. Kumar may question the finding of his guilt in appeal. A belated conviction may be seen as proof that the efflux of time need not be an impediment to justice. Or, one may wonder if it is inevitable that influential people can evade the law long enough so that they have a full and untrammelled political career before their role is proved.