Sauce for the goose...

Sajjan Kumar’s life imprisonment for his role in the 1984 massacre of Sikhs that horrified the country and world as much as the pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat did 18 years later reassures us that justice delayed need not be justice denied. It’s a pity, therefore, that Amit Shah’s exuberant delight at the verdict — even publicly thanking Narendra Modi for making it possible by setting up a special investigation team to look into pending cases — should give the legal process a political hue, even to the extent of blurring the distinction between justice and vengeance.

The judges responsible for this belated acknowledgement of the wrong committed after Indira Gandhi’s murder cannot thank the Bharatiya Janata Party chief for his intervention. Arun Jaitley, who might have been expected to display a more nuanced understanding of how to respond to court findings, also used the judgment to launch a tirade against the Congress. The point is that if lay criticism of a judicial decision is banned under the contempt law, so should praise be forbidden. The fulsome endorsement of partisans like Mr Shah and Mr Jaitley cannot but embarrass strictly impartial judges who need no politicians’ commendation.

Mr Shah’s Twitter effusion that the Delhi High Court “has once again assured the victims that the criminals of 1984 will not go scot-free” holds a wider message that he probably doesn’t realise. It promises to punish other perpetrators of violence as in Gujarat in 2002 who have escaped justice so far. Or those responsible for Assam’s 1983 Nellie massacre when more than 10,000 people may have been butchered against the official claim of 2,191. The Tiwari Commission’s report is still secret but of the 688 criminal cases filed, 378 were closed due to “lack of evidence”. Chargesheets were expected in the remaining 310 but were abandoned when the political rationale of the 1985 Assam Accord demanded that no one should be punished.

Being anonymous “foreign nationals”, the victims and their relatives didn’t have champions like the powerful Sikh lobby with its stellar personalities or legal luminaries like the Aam Aadmi Party veteran and senior advocate, Harvinder Singh Phoolka, a former leader of the Opposition in the Punjab Assembly, to take up their case. I wonder if the Central Bureau of Investigation would have intervened without such advocacy backed, of course, by the full weight of Mr Modi’s government. Classical Europeans who portrayed Justice as a blind goddess should have shown her as also deaf. 

Many such instances can be cited. Riot follows riot, men, women and children of one community or other are singled out for extermination. Youths are lynched, women violated, houses destroyed, fields burned and shops looted. Innocent blood is spilt in the name of religion or race in places as far apart as Malabar and Meerut, Baduria and Bangalore, Kohat and Kolkata. It was a measure of how far the rot had set in that the N N Singh Inquiry Commission into the 1987 Bhagalpur riots recommended action against 125 IAS and IPS officers. Madness peaked in 1992 when the mass frenzy that demolished the Babri Masjid also destroyed community tranquility for a long time. The Srikrishna Commission’s report into the Mumbai riots (and blasts) were neither accepted nor implemented. It didn’t suit the powers-that-be to do so. Justice is not only blind and deaf but often at the mercy of our political masters. 

The baying for Kamal Nath’s head burst into full spate only when he was sworn in as Madhya Pradesh’s first Congress chief minister after vanquishing 15 years of BJP rule. No one bothered in 2005 when Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, complimented Mr Nath for lumbering under the weight of the 600-page landmark Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement that had just been signed. Economic integration doesn’t interest party propagandists; governance of the Hindi-Hindu heartland does.

The Delhi judgment established a welcome precedent by setting aside Mr Kumar’s acquittal in April 2013 by the Karkardooma district court. The High Court accepted the CBI’s plea that the trial court “erred in acquitting Sajjan Kumar as it was he who had instigated the mob during the riots” but it couldn’t allege political bias since the Karkardooma court convicted five other accused. The central point is that if the grisly events of 1984 can be re-examined, so can the Gujarat bloodbath of 2002. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. As another colloquialism has it, “murder will out”.