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Justice Delayed DENIED
 The
internet is a useful tool for anyone trying to extract information
on a particular subject, but there are ways in which it befuddles
you at times. Google "Tytler 1984 case" and you bang into two kinds
of screaming headlines popping up: 1. Nanawati Commission nails
Tytler, and, 2. CBI closes case against Tytler.
That's the face
of Indian jurisprudence for you when it comes to affairs of the
Sikhs. That it is happening under the watchful eyes of s Sikh Prime
Minister is something that the community will find hard to swallow.
This Friday, India's
top sleuthing agency, the Central Bureau of investigation, roughly
comparable to the FBI of the United States, closed the 1984
anti-Sikh massacre case against senior Congress leader and former
Union Minister Jagdish Tytler saying it was unable to find witnesses
to support its charges against him.
The CBI has
filed the closure report before a court here and has held that many
of the witnesses in the case were either dead or did not want to
testify. The closure report also included the name of late Congress
MP Dharam Das Shastri. This comes within weeks of the country
agonising itself on witness encouragement and witness protecting
plans and Supreme Court's searing remarks on delay in justice
delivery. India has
recently witnessed a number of incidents where the people on the
streets lynched to death rank criminals because they had little
faith in the power of the justice delivery mechanism to deliver.
India's
opposition right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has an
alliance with the Akali Dal and shares power in Punjab has condemned
the closure of the anti-Sikh massacre case and said the agency has
become a "tool" to save the Congress and its leaders.
Party
spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad has sought from Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh the justification for closing the case.
Jagdish Tytler,
64, wedded to the Congress party, is one of India's most
controversial politicians, has been a Union Minister repeatedly, and
was India's federal minister for Overseas Indian Affairs, when he
was severely indicted by the Nanawati Commission tasked with probing
the massacres of Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere in 1984 in which
Tytler was said to be one of the leading players among instigators.
The Commission said the 'balance of probability' indicated he was
responsible for inciting and leading murderous mobs against the Sikh
community in Delhi during the
1984 massacre of the Sikhs.
So shameless was
the Congress that Tytler, born in Gujranwala (now in Pakistan), and
adopted by a missionary and educationalist Rev. James Douglas Tytler,
was repeatedly given tickets and teh aprty ensured that he won in
1991 and 2004.
Despite the
Nanawati Commission's scathing report, the Indian government decided
not to prosecute Tytler who made light of the evidence against him
by saying it was a case of mistaken identity. When the civil
society's protest crescendo became too shrill, Tytler quit the
ministership on August 10, 2005.
Tytler,
alongside Sajjan Kumar, R.K. Anand and others was accused not just
by Nanawati Commission 20 years after the genocidal massacres but
even earlier, and from the very beginning, by several independent
commissions of inquiry of being complicit in the riots, including
the People's Union for Civil Liberties, the People's Union for
Democratic Rights and the Citizens' Justice Committee.
3 October, 2007
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