A Dog-eared Clean Chit

More than 24 years have elapsed since Indira Gandhi was shot down by her own security guards and Delhi erupted the next morning in an orgy of anti-Sikh riots that took the lives over 2,000 innocent Sikhs. A thousand more were killed in other parts of the country. And as every Sikh in Delhi who was either a survivor or a witness can tell us, the orgy of selective communal killings was started by the Congress with people like Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar at the head of the group that undertook the gory genocide. For years, as long as the Congress was in power after the killings, the inquiry that was initiated was no more than a cosmetic ritual to announce to the comity of nations that democracy was in good health in India, and that the ‘secular’ Indian government did not permit the persecution of any religious groups even if the perpetrators of such communal riots were members of the ruling political party. However, it did not take very long for the nation to realize that the so-called votaries of ‘secularism’ and the staunch critics of communalism could be as communal as any other political party in the country that the Congress certified as communal. And because the Congress was performing a mere ritual and was far more anxious about protecting its own members than about ensuring justice to small minority groups, it made sure that the inquiry about the riots would remain on the back burner as long as the Congress was in power. What was much worse was that during this period, the intimidation of witnesses by Congressmen went on quite openly, and the party workers, legislators and ministers of the Congress succeeded eminently in browbeating most of the witnesses into silence or amnesia. However, there were the few intrepid souls who bided their time and waited for a change in the rulers to be able to seek justice for their kith and kin who had died for no fault of theirs. And when the NDA government was in power, the trials of those who had instigated the riots and been responsible for much of the killings were resumed in right earnest, but not swiftly enough to stall those who were working overtime to destroy evidence. And when the trials began in right earnest during the NDA regime, the CBI found it increasingly difficult to persuade the witnesses to testify. Far too much was at stake on either side, and the intimidation of the remaining witnesses began afresh in full swing. Later on, when the Congress was back in power again as senior partner of the UPA, the back-pedalling and calculated neglect of the trials was resumed again, and the CBI dutifully failed to make the evidence stick.

The greatest beneficiaries of the CBI’s failure to secure conviction (as happens in more than 90 per cent of the cases that it investigates nowadays) are people like Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar, the two main leaders of the pogrom against the Sikhs. Jagdish Tytler has been particularly fortunate because the CBI was obliged to plead before the Metropolitan Magistrate that the case against him be cancelled because the witness was unreliable. He was thus given a clean chit by the court, courtesy the CBI. It will probably be the most dog-eared clean chit in the world considering that it relates to a crime committed almost a quarter century ago. But the Congress seems destined to have a dose of poetic justice not merely because of its dynastic obsessions but also because of the way it has always bent over backwards to protect criminal elements within the party. THE SENTINEL