’84 riots: SC-named panel submits report

Satya Prakash

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, December 6

A Supreme Court-appointed two-judge supervisory panel, which scrutinised 241 cases relating to 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi closed by a Special Investigation Team formed by the NDA government for re-investigation, submitted its report to the court on Wednesday.

The report of the supervisory committee comprising Justice JM Panchal and Justice KSP Radhakrishnan, which started its work on September 5, was submitted before a Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra in a bag, instead of a sealed cover envelope that has been a routine practice.

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The court had assigned the task of examining the said 241 cases closed by SIT to the panel which is supposed to have made recommendations as to whether the cases were rightly closed or not. It had asked the panel to give its report in three months.

Additional Solicitor General Pinky Anand and petitioner’s counsel Amarjit Singh Bedi said they didn’t know what was there in the report and they needed access to the bulky report. The Bench said the parties could have access to the report on December 11, the next date of hearing.

It said if there was any material in the report to show that a particular case had been wrongly closed, it was open to order prosecution in such a case.

Almost 3,000 people were killed, most of them in Delhi, in the anti-Sikh riots that broke out following the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984.

More than two years after the Narendra Modi government set up the SIT to re-investigate serious anti-Sikh riots cases of 1984 that had been closed, it has managed to file chargesheets only in very small number of cases taken up for further probe.

Senior counsel Arvind Datar and HS Phoolka, who represented petitioner Gurnad Singh, had earlier told the Bench that only in nine cases trial was on. They had demanded that the trial in these cases should be conducted on a day-to-day basis.