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Damning Evidence
WSN Network
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It is time the average Sikh grew out of deliberately perpetrated
myths. One was that the CBI inquiry did not nail Tytler or
Sajjan. The truth is that the investigating sleuths did their
job but the men at the top and the politicians compromised.
Another myth is that courts did not do their job. Or that
conniving policemen went scot free. As this piece brings out,
probes called the Trilokpuri SHO a ‘living shame’ and east Delhi
DCP a‘slur’ on the police. Both were held responsible for the
killings. But both were promoted. A judge wrote in his ruling
that police officers often gave wrong facts to help the accused.
Clearly, the aftermath of the 1984 pogrom saw new killers, the
killers of justice. |
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 How
police in Delhi connived in the massacre of the Sikhs in 1984, and
how ever since it remains compromised
This is what the
police did during the 1984 Sikh massacre: they watched. They let the
rampaging mobs storm the Sikhs’ houses. And some even took part.
They removed the Sikh police officers who would have acted against
the killers. They disarmed ordinary Sikhs so they couldn’t protect
themselves, and gave them no protection. They wired messages about
Sikhs charging ahead with kirpans, but forgot to mention the mobs
assaulting the Sikhs.
This is what the
police did soon after the 1984 Sikh massacre:
* Concealed the
number of those killed despite dead bodies all around.
* Closed 300 of
the 700 cases claiming the culprits were “untraceable”.
* Directed
subordinates to not register cases.
* Merged
hundreds of cases into a single FIR.
* Refused to
register FIRs against police officers and government officials.
* Registered —
shockingly — FIRs against Sikhs.
* Threatened
eyewitnesses and forced them to sign affidavits favouring the
police.
* Reduced major
offences to minor ones, manipulated evidence.
* Destroyed
paper trails.
* In some areas,
the police said that the curfew that followed the mass killings only
applied to the Sikhs.
There’s worse.
Pretending to be
victims, many officers wrote false affidavits exonerating various
Congress leaders who were seen inciting the killer mobs.
Since the
pogrom, many investigative commissions have come and gone, each
scrutinising the role of the police. First, in 1984, the commission
led by IPS officer Ved Marwah. Then, in 1987, the Committee led by
former IAS officer Kusum Lata Mittal. In 1990, the Jain-Agarwal
Committee led by retired judge JD Jain and retired IPS officer DK
Agarwal. And, in 2000, the Nanavati Commission of retired Supreme
Court judge GT Nanavati. Each received thousands of affidavits
meticulously detailing how the police aided the Sikh massacre.
A quarter
century later, neither justice nor accountability has come. In all,
the various commissions and committees indicted 147 police officers
for their role in the Sikh killings. Not one officer has been
prosecuted. Some 42 of these officers had retired or died by 2005.
The Delhi Government has taken no action against the remaining
officers.
 Several
officers, whose dismissal was recommended for their role in the
killings and in destroying evidence, were promoted. Several others
were allowed to retire gracefully. The Union Home Ministry
exonerated five officers. Meanwhile, systematic machinery has been
in place to ensure that those accused of killing the Sikhs remain
scot-free.
IT WAS on
Shoorveer Singh Tyagi’s watch that 500 Sikhs were brutally killed in
the east Delhi slum of Trilokpuri. He was the SHO of the local
police station. This was the Capital’s heaviest toll in a single
location. The Kusum Lata Mittal probe noted Tyagi’s “criminal
misconduct” during the killings and described him as a “living shame
for any police organisation”.
“[Tyagi’s]
attempts, to a great extent successful, in obtaining affidavits in
his favour by browbeating the witnesses indicate that it is highly
unlikely that any witness would have the courage of coming and
giving evidence against him,” Mittal wrote in her report. Her
shocking finding — Tyagi found an honourable discharge from the
court only because the police failed to take the sanction from the
Union Home Ministry to file a chargesheet against him, which was
mandatory because he was a government employee. No action was ever
taken against him. In 2005, he was promoted to the rank of Assistant
Commissioner of Police (ACP).
Sewa Dass, DCP
(East), was Tyagi’s immediate boss. This is what Mittal said of him:
“The conduct of Sewa Dass is a slur on the name of any police force.
He should not be trusted with or assigned any job of responsibility.
Sewa Dass removed Sikh officers from duty who were inclined to take
proper measures to deal with the rioters. The SHOs under his
jurisdiction systematically disarmed the Sikhs [and] as a result
they couldn’t protect themselves. At the same time no steps were
taken to provide police protection to them.”
She added: “Sewa
Dass made blatant efforts to conceal the number of killings. He
directed his subordinates to register only a few cases in each area,
which was illegal. The killings continued till November 5, which
could have been prevented. Tyagi in Kalyanpuri/Trilokpuri and Dass
in the whole district have been mainly responsible for the
killings.” Sewa Dass was later promoted as Special Commissioner.
The DCP of west
Delhi, UK Katna, wrote nothing in his logbook from
11 am
to 10.30
pm on November 1, and from 9 am to 5.30 pm on November 2. This is
the period when Sikhs were being massacred in his area. The logbook
of DCP of south Delhi, Chander Prakash, was actually later found
with pages torn pertaining to the time of the Sikh massacre in his
area.
Delhi’s
Police Commissioner at the time, Subash Tandon, never submitted his
logbook to the Mittal Commission.
Amrik Singh
Bullar, the then SHO of Patel Nagar Police Station, told the
Nanavati Commission that senior police officers had ordered him to
merge 115 complaints as one FIR. Even the Jain-Agarwal report
acknowledged this: “Instead of registering a separate case on the
complaint of each victim, the police registered a vague and
generally worded omnibus FIR purportedly covering all the offences
that took place in a given locality. Since the FIR itself contained
no specific information, much less the names of the accused persons,
whatever chargesheets were filed under it ended mostly in
acquittals.”
The numbers tell
the story. The official death toll in
Delhi
is 2,733. For that many deaths, the police filed only 228 FIRs, the
Delhi Administration told a Commission headed by former Supreme
Court Chief Justice Ranganath Misra.
Several
eyewitnesses say they have testified against Ram Pal Saroj, the
Congress Pradhan of Trilokpuri, who was a subordinate of the late MP
HKL Bhagat, another Congress leader widely accused of leading the
mobs that killed the Sikhs.
In his ruling on
the case against Saroj, then Additional Sessions Judge SN Dhingra
wrote: “Police had not made any other person as witness in this
case. In fact, there is no investigation done by the police except
recording the statements [which] are also very sketchy. Sometimes
the statements are actually not made by the victims but they have
been recorded by the police officials sitting in a police station
and it is alleged that these statements were made by victims. In
most of the cases in order to help the accused persons police has
given wrong facts in the statements. The victims when appeared in
court had given altogether a different story.”
IN THE rare
instance a police officer tried to bring justice, he was stopped. In
his affidavit to the Nanavati Commission, Marwah — the first police
officer to inquire the police lapses — disclosed that he was asked
to discontinue his probe before he could examine senior police
officers. His handwritten notes were destroyed on instructions from
higher authorities. Justice Nanavati ignored all such observations.
On Sewa Dass, he wrote: “As the departmental inquiry held against
him... exonerated [him] the commission does not recommend any action
against him.”
The commissions
and the committees may have forgotten the role of the police. But
the eyewitnesses remember everything in graphic detail. “A policeman
shot my husband in the head right before my eyes,” says Ladhi Kaur,
41, who then lived in Trilokpuri. “The SHO [Tyagi] was standing
there too.” Kaur, who now lives in a one-room quarter in a
resettlement colony in west
Delhi,
lost 18 members of her family. “My biggest sorrow is that our own
people, not outsiders, killed us… our own politicians, our own
policemen.” (Excerpted from 1984:The Orphans of Politics, a
reportage marking the 25th anniversary of the genocide of the Sikhs
by investigative weekly Tehelka.)
29
April 2009
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