A mighty tree did indeed fall in Delhi on October 31 four decades ago, but the earth around her should never have been shaken the way it was for several days after. The anti-Sikh carnage unleashed after Indira Gandhi’s assassination claimed, according to official records, 2,146 lives in Delhi and 586 in other parts of the country; the numbers were much higher by most other counts. Several commissions were set up by governments to probe the murder, arson and loot that had unfolded.
The most consequential of them—led by Justice G T Nanavati, which finished its two-volume report in February 2005—identified several Congressmen as having led and instigated the violence. Prominent on the list was Jagdish Tytler, then the minister for overseas Indians. Despite counter-claims, the commission found “credible evidence” that Tytler “very probably had a hand in organising attacks on Sikhs.”
What followed was decades of deflection, obfuscation and delays. Last week, in a 57-page order that also assessed the findings of all the earlier inquiries, special court judge Rakesh Syal asked the CBI to frame charges of murder, abetment, rioting, promoting enmity and unlawful assembly against Tytler, now aged 80. As late as last year, a recording of someone claiming to have killed “100 Sikhs” was forensically matched with Tytler’s voice. Even if most charges of complicity are based on victim testimonies, Tytler’s browbeating of the police to release his men had been independently recorded by several journalists.
That Tytler was given electoral tickets and made a minister despite a pile of testimonies against him reflected terribly on successive Congress leaderships. The travesty of natural justice was made worse when several deponents later refused to name him for the fear of reprisal from a minister. An atmosphere of administrative coercion had been a feature, not a bug of the context surrounding the inquiries. The Ranganath Mishra Commission had also recorded in its 1986 report that witnesses in Delhi, Kanpur and Bokaro had been threatened, at times by the local police, not to depose.
The day after Tytler resigned as minister in August 2005, Manmohan Singh told the Rajya Sabha, “On behalf of our government, on behalf of the entire people of this country, I bow my head in shame that such a thing took place.” Today, after decades of anguish, thousands of families in Delhi can raise their heads towards a horizon where justice seems possible.