According to what appear to be carefully timed news leaks, the Narendra Modi government is likely to set up a Special Investigative Team to probe a number of cases from the 1984 massacre of the Sikhs. A committee headed by Justice GP Mathur convened by the government last December submitted a report stating that 225 cases are still to be examined. This is not the first time a BJP government has intervened to speed up the delayed quest for justice for the victims of the massacres. But back in 2000, when the BJP-led NDA government had appointed the GT Nanavati Commission to investigate the massacre, the ninth such commission, the result was disappointing. This excerpt from Hartosh Singh Bal's 'Sins of Commission', from our October 2014 issue, details how the Nanavati Commission was destined to be a failure from its very inception.
In May 2000, there was a final opportunity to arrive at the truth when the GT Nanavati Commission was appointed by the newly elected National Democratic Alliance government. The first term of reference for the body was that it would “inquire into the causes and course of the criminal violence and riots targeting members of the Sikh community which took place in the National Capital Territory of Delhi and other parts of the country on 31st October, 1984 and thereafter.”
GT Nanavati was a problematic choice to head the commission. In 1998, he was part of a two-member Supreme Court bench that commuted the death sentence of the convicted murderer Kishori Lal to life imprisonment. Lal is often referred to as “the butcher of Trilokpuri” for his role in the 1984 killings. In the judgement, Nanavati and his colleague wrote:
We may notice that the acts attributed to the mob of which the appellant was a member at the relevant time cannot be stated to be a result of any organised systematic activity leading to genocide. Perhaps, we can visualise that to the extent there was unlawful assembly and to the extent that the mob wanted to teach a stern lesson to the Sikhs there was some organisation; but in that design, they did not consider that women and children should be annihilated which is a redeeming feature.
It is difficult to follow the Supreme Court’s logic that killing only the male members of a family mitigates the crime of murder. The judgement suggests that Nanavati had made up his mind about the events of 1984 before the commission was ever constituted. If he had already concluded that the violence in Trilokpuri was not organised, more evidence, and from other neighbourhoods in Delhi, was unlikely to change his mind.
In its 2005 report, the Nanavati commission effectively retraced the steps taken by the Misra commission twenty years earlier, and followed much the same reasoning.
According to evidence admitted by the Nanavati commission, on Nov 1, 1984 the attackers “either came armed with weapons and inflammable materials like kerosene, petrol and some white powder or were supplied with such materials soon after they were taken to the localities where the Sikhs were to be attacked.” (The powder is likely to have been white phosphorous, a volatile substance not stocked in most households or ordinary shops. How an industrial quantity of this substance suddenly became available to mobs in Delhi was not investigated.)
The commission also acknowledged evidence that on the night of Oct 31, “either meetings were held or the persons who could organise attacks were contacted and were given instructions to kill Sikhs and loot their houses and shops. The attacks were made in a systematic manner and without much fear of the police; almost suggesting that they were assured that they would not be harmed while committing those acts and even thereafter.”
One means of murder was common in neighbourhoods across the city:
Male members of the Sikh community were taken out of their houses. They were beaten first and then burnt alive in a systematic manner. In some cases, tyres were put around the necks and then were set on fire by pouring kerosene or petrol over them. In some case, white inflammable powder was thrown on them which immediately caught fire thereafter. This was a common pattern which was followed by the big mobs which had played havoc in certain areas.
Sikh-owned shops in these localities were “identified, looted and burnt. Thus, what had initially started as an angry outburst became an organised carnage.”
It seems clear from these observations that on the night of 31 October, instructions were issued on how Sikhs were to be killed, along with assurances that the police would not interfere. That disparate groups of rioters in different parts of Delhi spontaneously decided to string their victims with tyres and burn them alive is implausible. It is far more likely that orders to carry this out issued from a single point of command.
But like previous commissions, the Nanavati commission, in its conclusions, contradicted the evidence placed before it:
Some of the affidavits filed before the Commission generally state that the Congress Leaders/Workers were behind these riots. In Part-III of this report, the Commission has referred to some of the incidents wherein some named Congress(I) Leaders/Workers had taken part. No other person or organisation apart from anti-social elements to some extent, is alleged to have taken part in those incidents. Smt. Indira Gandhi was a Congress (I) Leader. The slogans which were raised during the riots also indicate that some of the persons who constituted the mobs were Congress (I) workers or sympathisers.
According to the commission, there was simply no evidence that “Shri Rajiv Gandhi or any other high ranking Congress (I) Leader had suggested or organised attacks on Sikhs. Whatever acts were done, were done by the local Congress (I) leaders and workers, and they appear to have done so for their personal political reasons.”
The failure of this, the last of nine commissions, indicates that the Indian state is not institutionally equipped to ensure justice for victims of communal violence. If justice remains impossible for the victims of 1984, when the violence took place in the national capital and where the evidence is so ample, it seems likely that justice will continue to elude the vast majority of such victims anywhere in the country.
An excerpt from 'Sins of Commission,' published in The Caravan's October 2014 issue. Read the story in full here.