On 22 January 2026, a Delhi court acquitted former Congress MP Sajjan Kumar in a case arising from the anti-Sikh violence in Janakpuri, Delhi, during November 1984. The Special Judge held that there was a lack of credible evidence establishing Kumar’s presence or involvement through “instigation, conspiracy, or abetment,” and concluded that the prosecution had failed to prove his guilt beyond reasonable doubt. The acquittal concerned allegations relating to violence on 1 November 1984.
The charges against Kumar, filed as late as 2022, alleged offences including murder, rioting, promoting enmity between groups, dacoity, mischief, and outraging religious sentiments in relation to the violence of 1 and 2 November 1984, under s/ 147, 148, 149, 153-A, 295, 395, 436, 307, 302, and 120-B of the IPC. The chargesheet was based on two FIRs: FIR No. 264/1992 registered at P.S. Vikaspuri, concerning violence on 2 November and the killing of Sohan Singh and Avtar Singh, and FIR No. 227/1992 registered at P.S. Janakpuri, relating to grievous injuries caused to Gurcharan Singh and Tejinder Singh, who “purportedly” later died as a result of the injuries inflicted on 1 November when the presence of Sajjan Kumar was alleged. Although the prosecution treated the incidents of 1 and 2 November 1984 as continuous and arising from the same affidavit, Sajjan Kumar was discharged in FIR No. 264/1992 for lack of evidence, with the court finding no connection between Kumar’s alleged presence on 01.11.1984 and the events of 02.11.1984.
The chargesheet itself was a delayed response by the State, following the constitution of a SIT in 2015 pursuant to the recommendations of the G.P. Mathur Committee in 2014. Tasked with reviewing records afresh and filing chargesheets in “serious cases,” the SIT relied primarily on an affidavit submitted by Harvinder Singh. The affidavit described how, on 1 November 1984, a mob of approximately 200 to 250 persons attacked a gurdwara and Sikh homes, assaulted residents with rods and weapons, and threw people into a burning truck. On the following day, another mob attacked Harvinder Singh, Sohan Singh, and Avtar Singh. Sohan Singh and Avtar Singh later succumbed to their injuries, while Harvinder Singh survived with permanent disability. In his account, Harvinder Singh identified Sajjan Kumar as a leading figure in the violence, an identification corroborated by five witnesses who also identified Kumar in court. By the time of trial, Harvinder Singh, then residing in Mohali, Punjab, declined to travel to Delhi to record his statement under Section 164 of the CrPC, stating that he continued to fear for his life even three decades after the carnage. Such enduring fear, following the loss of family members, livelihoods, and community, is well documented and foreseeable given the scale and brutality of the violence (see Delhi 1984: The Long Aftermath, PUDR Report dt. November 2025).
The constitution of multiple commissions and committees, including the G.P. Mathur Committee, reflects an acknowledgment of serious investigative failures. Police investigations during and after the 1984 violence were marked by negligence and indifference, often enabling impunity for influential Congress leaders of the time. The record of affected families, particularly women, persistently attempting to file complaints is extensive, as is the documentation of threats, warnings, and refusals to register FIRs. Against this background, Sajjan Kumar’s earlier conviction had stood out as one of the few instances of meaningful accountability.
PUDR notes that the present acquittal compromises the essence of justice promised by the State in the aftermath of the carnage.
Firstly, the judgement misses the foundational principle on which the re-investigation of the 1984 incidents was ordered by the Committee. The judgement majorly relies on the fact that the witnesses and accused did not explicitly name Sajjan Kumar as the accused for thirty years; and his name was recorded for the first time after re-investigation was ordered. The judgement finds itself in a circular logic: when re-investigation was conducted precisely due to ineffective, pro-State police investigations after 1984, the Court relied on the same, earlier documents to conclude that Sajjan Kumar was never named in the complaints, leading to the presence of reasonable doubt of his involvement. However, many prosecution witnesses explicitly submitted before the Court that the police had refused to name Sajjan Kumar as the accused in their complaints. PUDR herein asks: despite the well-established negligence of the police in effectively naming the accused in 1984 FIRs, why did this remain a pertinent consideration, sufficient for acquittal, before the Court? The Court thus adopted a hyper-technical approach of rendering the testimonies of witnesses and complainants as unreliable due to a long-drawn silence. The Court blames the survivors of the violence for “never naming the accused”; the Court ought to have functioned with the presumption that these testimonies would lack the name of the accused, and should have tested the reliability of these statements recorded in Court.
Secondly, the Court’s application of the res gestae doctrine raises serious concerns. While res gestae permits the admission of hearsay statements made “as part of the same transaction”, the Court excluded testimonies without conclusively establishing that they were temporally removed from the occurrence. In the case of Manjeet Kaur, who testified that she heard Kumar’s name from others in the crowd, the Court held that she “failed to clarify” whether this occurred during or immediately after the violence, or after a sufficient lapse of time. The “failure to clarify” could have resulted from deficient examination in Court rather than from the witness herself. Similar exclusions affected statements attributed to victims who have died and could not be examined, a circumstance attributable not to the witnesses but to prolonged investigative delay. These deficiencies are mirrored in the discharge of FIR No. 264/1984, where the judgment offers no meaningful account of the investigation that severed Kumar’s alleged presence on 1 November from the violence of 2 November, despite the prosecution’s claim of continuity. Further, if Gurcharan Singh and Tejinder Singh allegedly died due to injuries inflicted on 2 November 1984, the continued absence of murder charges in FIR No. 227/1992, even at the stage of re-investigation, remains unexplained. The evidentiary weaknesses identified by the Court thus appear inseparable from systemic investigative failure rather than from any inherent unreliability of the witnesses.
Thirdly, the judgment reflects a persistent judicial failure to understand the anatomy of mass violence against targeted communities. It underscores the absence of clear judicial guidelines for investigating and adjudicating cases of pogroms and mass political violence. The Court declined to meaningfully engage with Sajjan Kumar’s conviction in State v. Sajjan Kumar and Ors. (2018 SCC OnLine Del 12930), dismissing it as merely a prior conviction in a similar riot-related offence. That judgment had explicitly held that “the factum of delay cannot be used to the advantage of the accused but would, in fact, explain the minor contradictions and inconsistencies in the statements of the key eye- witnesses in the present case. (p. 220)” It also stated that “merely because the State has not taken any action and has allowed time to go by, it cannot take advantage of the delay to scuttle an inquiry (p. 151.1).” Therefore, incidents of mass violence have serious fundamental differences from instances of individual crime, where factors like delay and lack of evidence may be inadequate grounds for acquittal.
Courts must be institutionally equipped to adjudicate mass violence with an understanding of its structural and systemic nature. The present acquittal stands as a stark commentary on judicial insensitivity in faulting survivors for “silence” amid decades of threats, intimidation, and State complicity. Incidents of mass violence cannot be viewed in isolation; they constitute a continuum of State-enabled assault against a targeted community, demanding a fundamentally different judicial lens.
Shahana Bhattacharya and Deepika Tandon
(Secretaries)
