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Long Arm Beckons

H.K.L. Bhagat finds himself in the dock 12 years after the anti-Sikh riots

Jan 31, 1996

Ishan Joshi

Finally, it took just one lower court judge to issue a non-bailable warrant against former Union minister and Congress strongman H.K.L. Bhagat for his alleged role in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi. The testimony of just one victim proved enough. Twelve long years after the Sikh population of Delhi was cast as the gaddars (traitors) and thousands of them dragged out of their homes and murdered, the survivors had stopped hoping. That the guilty would ever be punished. Or that they would ever be 'rehabilitated'. Or that they would ever forget.

Then came January 17, 1996. The setting: the court of Shiv Narain Dhingra, additional sessions judge. Satnami Bai, an ayah at Delhi's Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narain Hospital, narrates how her husband was killed in front of their house in Block 32, Tirlokpuri, west Delhi, on November 1, 1984. She says that Bhagat instigated his cohorts, who executed the task while she watched in horror, her five-year-old daughter in her arms. She mentions Budh Prakash Kashyap, a local Congress leader at the time, as a participant in the act. The judge orders that Kashyap (who is present in court in connection with another case) be taken into custody immediately and that Bhagat be served a non-bailable warrant through the Delhi police riot cell. He adds that he wants Bhagat produced in court by January 24.

This dramatic burst of orders, in a case long overtaken by history, came with a rationale. Dhingra had to emphasise that though Bhagat and Kashyap were not named in the FIR and cognisance of the offence was not taken at the time of committal, the court is empowered under Section 219 of the Criminal Procedure Code to summon any accused person against whom evidence is unearthed during the course of the trial. Four others are already on trial in the case.

The effect of Satnami's testimony and the judge's decision was instantaneous. Hope returned to Tilak Vihar, the colony on the fringes of west Delhi where the riot victims were resettled. Satnami Bai's response is unequivocal: "Now they must be hanged. Nothing else will satisfy me. I've suffered so much that I have lost the capacity to forgive."

She goes back to that day in 1984. "My husband, Mohan Singh, was a poor autorickshaw driver who was never involved in any politics. They dragged him out of the house, hit him on the head with an iron rod, sprinkled petrol on him and burnt him alive." She adds that "Bhagat and his cronies must not be allowed to get away". The other riot widows agree.

Bhagat, on his part, is screaming foul. He claims that the charges are "fabricated and politically motivated", engineered by Delhi Chief Minister M.L. Khurana and a section of the Akalis. "It's a pack of lies. Why did this woman keep quiet for 12 years and then suddenly decide to come up with this story? Why didn't she give my name to any of the numerous commissions that have probed the 1984 riots?" he asks.

Satnami's stand is that January 15the day she gave her initial testimony before the lower courtwas the first time after the riots that followed the Indira Gandhi assassination that she lodged a complaint. "When the army took me and my daughter to the riot victim camp in the first week of November 1984, a policeman took down all the details and said he'd registered my com-plaint. Over the past 12 years, I thought my complaint was being processed along with all the others and I had no time to follow it up on my own. I was busy eking out a living and bringing up my daughter. It's only a few months ago that I realised my complaint wasn't even registered. That's when I decided to approach the courts," she says.

Satnami denies she ever filed affidavits before the Ranganath Mishra Commission and the Jain-Bannerjee Commission, or that she was examined by the Jain-Aggarwal Committee. "How can this be true? How could I mention Bhagat as one of the rioters in my earlier testimonies when not a single sarkari commission ever spoke to me?" she asks.

Local Sikh leaders point out that even the Government has counted 1,850 riot widows. Many of them are from Tirlokpuri's Block 32, one of the worst-hit areas. And many allege Bhagat's wife also participated in the riots. "Ask anybody in Block 32 whether they saw Bhagat's wife sitting in an open vehicle while the murder and loot was going on," says one of them.

For Bhagatwhose lawyers have moved the Delhi High Court to "quash the lower court order and stay the proceedings before it"the development comes at a particularly bad time. He has been marginalised in his former fiefdom, the Congress' Delhi unit. Once the "uncrowned king of Delhi", his influence with the high command amounts to nothing these days. And even his aides concede that with the general elections around the corner and the Congress looking for Sikh votes, an enfeebled Bhagat may just be "sacrificed" to assuage the feelings of the community if Satnami's charges stick.

Still, Bhagat does retain the support of a core group which is extremely agitated at the court summons. And, rather ominously, they recall how a CBI team which had attempted to arrest Congress MP Sajjan Kumar a few years ago for his alleged involvement in the riots was thrashed by his men as an example that may be worth emulating. "It's natural," says Bhagat, his diminished stature brought out in sharp relief by the two couple of die-hard supporters flanking him. "When an innocent man is unjustly accused, the anger will be there. They're insisting they won't let the police arrest me but I've been trying to calm them down."

As far as the summons is concerned, Bhagat is banking on the high court to bail him out. "If it's required by law, I will appear before the court," he says. Have the police got in touch with him? "No. Why should they? In any event, they won't come here, to my house, till January 24. And the high court should have decided one way or the other by then." And that also buys him time to try out some desperate political measures. For one, he has been trying to gather his dwindling flock. He has also thrown his weightfor whatever it's worthbehind the unity moves within the Congress in the hope that Sonia Gandhi will agree to "guide the party and the nation". For, he realises more than anyone else that the current dispensation has not much use for him.

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?200699

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1984 Anti-sikh Riots

Justice After A Long Wait

Twelve years after the horrific riots, a judge sends 90 accused to jail and more could follow

Sep 11, 1996

Bhavdeep Kang

Dr Ashok, epitome of a political wannabe in crumpled kurta-pyjama, looked tense as he faced Additional Sessions Judge Shiv Narain Dhingra last week. The Congress (T) member, who was municipal councillor from Trilokpuri at the time of the 1984 riots, is accused of having been part of a mob which broke into a Sikh home on the morning of November 2, 1984, dragging men out by their hair, beating them with iron rods and then burning them alive.

"It is a political conspiracy. The government became defender of the actions of the rioters, who had become government agents of violence.I wasn't even there," mumbles the defendant, who was the Congress (T) nominee from Aligarh in the 1996 Lok Sabha poll. After Dhingra's sentencing spree last week, consigning 90 riot accused to five-year terms in two separate orders, he admits to a shadow of trepidation about the outcome of his own case.

In contrast to the doctor, Kishori the 'butcher' swaggers into court without a trace of nervousness. Charged with hacking 16 people to death during the '84 riots and already serving an eight-year sentence for rioting, his primary concern is the cuisine at Tihar Jail. After all, it's going to be a long stay.

If the accused have one thing in common, it is a healthy fear of Dhingra, regarded by the Shahadara district court lawyers as a cross between Judge Dredd and the Avenging Angel. Inclusive of last week's orders, 136 people have been convicted in cases pertaining to the 1984 riots in East Delhi.

Many more cases are listed for disposal this week. Convictions are expected to come thick and fast; Dhingra is on the warpath.

For 10 years "the order sheet of the court in this case has been nothing but an attendance register of the accused persons...the case was never opened", Dhingra observed last week in his main order convicting 89 persons for rioting. As for the other riot-related cases, his predecessor S.S. Bal had a penchant for dismissing them. Public prosecutor A.B. Tandon says: "The majority of the 87 cases registered in East Delhi ended in acquittals by Bal. I have recommended appeals against 15 of these."

It was Tandon who brought some sense of order to the messy body of litigation he inherited in 1994. As soon as Dhingra took over in 1995, he moved a plea that the omnibus challan filed by the police in the Trilokpuri case should be split up. It was nigh impossible to squeeze all 200 accused into one courtroom, he pointed out. Dhingra agreed, 70 separate challans were filed and progress has been swift thereafter. The bulk of the accused are Hindus, with a sprinkling—perhaps 10 per cent—of Muslims. Only in one rather bizarre case, has a Sikh been accused.

Currently, there are some 70 riot cases pending in various courts, the bulk of them in East Delhi. Tandon, who is handling 45 East Delhi cases, says his chief problems are the delay in bringing the accused to trial and the lackadaisical police investigation. He points out that although 95 bodies were recovered from Trilokpuri's Block 32 on November 2, only one FIR was registered, on a complaint by survivor Rijju Singh. It underwent many amendments, with names and charges being added piecemeal over the years by various commissions.

The investigation was handed over to a special cell in April 1985. Some 160 witnesses were examined and two chargesheets filed. So shoddy was the police work that prosecutors found themselves hard put to explain to the courts the delay in filing the FIRs and recording statements of the witnesses and victims and the non-recovery of dead bodies and weapons. Tandon considers himself lucky that the courts recognised the "abnormal situation following the riots and took a sympathetic view". In many cases, he says, the victim may be the sole witness and the judge has to be convinced of his or her credibility.

"It is not only that the police did not do its duty of investigating the crime properly but it deliberately did not collect evidence," Dhingra's order in the Trilokpuri case said. "Is it not surprising that 200 murders were being investigated by one SI with the help of a constable...(that) the murders of more than 200 innocent persons was not sufficient to require a high-level investigation according to the police norms?"

Equally unsparing of police and administration, the judge has not balked at naming names. The then SHO Kalyanpuri, Shoorvir Tyagi, "made no arrangement for the protection of the lives of these Sikh persons...the SHO seemed to have fabricated (an FIR) to conceal his malafide inaction and shield his collusion with the rioters".

Delhi Police Commissioner Nikhil Kumar, then an additional commissioner of police, also drew Dhingra's attention.

He quoted an article which described how Kumar "justified the absence of the police in Trilokpuri on the ground that he performed his duty by informing the police control room". Kumar is quoted as having said: "I'm a guest artist here on posting orders out of Delhi."

The then district magistrate of East Delhi, R.S. Sethi, too, comes in for criticism: "If (he) was a witness to the riots and could say with authenticity that there was no political leader among the rioters, then he was also a party to the killings by not performing his duty." The then lieutenant-governor received a rap on the knuckles for having given "a clean chit to various powerful persons".

Dhingra added: "The inaction of the police, the government and the administration in the riot case was a well-thought out process." He pointed out that the government is still sitting on a bunch of affidavits filed by riot victims "in which the names of political leaders were given by the victims as the accused persons". He has now summoned these affidavits.

Something that advocate P.N. Lekhi would welcome. He agrees that senior politicians have so far escaped the net, turning the investigations into "a mockery of justice". But now, the wheels appear to be turning. Ex-MP Sajjan Kumar, whose supporters 'arrested' CBI officials who had come to arrest him in a riot-related case in 1990, thus enabling him to get bail, is to face trial.

The erudite judge ended his order, peppered with maxims from the Manu Smriti , with the observations: "Where a government refuses or neglects to protect citizens, the very legitimacy of the government or its executive wing which is responsible for protecting is questioned and doubted." Small wonder that the mood among the lawyers defending the riot accused is getting progressively pessimistic. The pessimism deepened last Friday with the Delhi High Court dismissing Congress leader and former union minister H.K.L. Bhagat's plea to quash the charges of murder, rioting, and unlawful assembly framed against him by Dhingra's court in two 1984 riot cases. Yet another riot case is listed for final orders, Budh Prakash Kashyap, an associate of Bhagat, joins the procession of riot accused parading through Dhingra's court. One of the accused, Ram Pal Saroj, erstwhile Congress pradhan of Trilokpuri, is believed to have committed suicide. The boot, it seems, is finally on the other foot.

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?202071

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  • 1 month later...

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/tension-fear-stalk-trilokpuri-after-doctors-murder/536410/0

Tension, fear, stalk Trilokpuri after doctor’s murder

Zahid Rafiq

Tags : doctor murder, delhi

Posted: Tuesday , Nov 03, 2009 at 0123 hrs

New Delhi:

Three days after the murder of a 60-year-old doctor, Budhprakash Kashyap, who was once accused in the anti-Sikh riots, tension prevails in Trilokpuri, where the murder took place. While the police are yet to make any headway in the case, Kashyap’s family is alleging that his murder is linked to the riots. This has caused a stir among the Sikh community in Trilokpuri, which fears being dragged into the case.

Trilokpuri was a hotbed of the ’84 riots in which 298 Sikhs were killed. Kashyap’s murder occurred on October 31, the 25th anniversary of the riots.

Kashyap was stabbed in his clinic while examining a patient. The murderer, his face hidden in a monkey cap, managed to escape. The police say no one saw his face. And they have no confirmation that the murder is linked to the riots.

Kahyap, popularly called Dr Lamboo, had been a Congressman all his life and was accused in seven cases. The lower court acquitted him in six and sentenced him for one. He appealed in the High Court and after serving time for 11 months, was acquitted. Kashyap’s family says he had no enemy except the ones who alleged his involvement in the anti-Sikh riots. “It is the Sikhs who killed him. It was they who always accused him of killing people in 1984,” said his widow Bimlesh Kumari (55). “They chose the day the riots happened to kill my husband.”

Many do believe her. “He was a humble doctor who treated almost everyone in the area,” said Ram Babu (38) a shopkeeper. “This murder has only one obvious reason.”

A few lanes away, in a dark, humid room with garlanded pictures of young men, a teenage Sikh boy sat with his mother and grandmother.

“Everyone has been saying that the murderer was a Sikh even though no one has any proof. It could have been anyone, but we are getting hostile looks and words,” said the mother.

The family witnessed the ’84 riots but even as the houses of their relatives became vacant, they, encouraged by a few neighbours, decided to stay on. Now, the wounds have almost been forgotten, if not healed.

“We never talk about ’84 anymore, but in the past three days, we have seen suspicion and distrust again. I have seen one ’84, I can’t see another. I can’t see my grandson die like my sons,” said the grandmother, who has lost two sons to the riots. “We never utter the names of neighbours who we know were killing us. And when one of them is murdered by an unknown man, everyone gives us hostile looks.”

A few streets away, a thin man peeked out through the iron door before opening it. Ved Prakash (60), a plumber, is worried after Kashyap’s murder — though for different reasons.

He is one of the 88 men in Trilokpuri who still has cases against him. Prakash and his brother Om served eight years in 14 cases and are out on permanent bail. “I am afraid of going out now,” said Prakash. “I come back late from work and I could get killed.” The brothers have lost their government jobs. “What have we got?” he asked, “They got compensation. We lost everything we had and no one looks at our misery.”

Note - Apparently Mr.Ved Prakash wants compensation for his role in the Anti Sikh pogroms.

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