Neme­sis catches up. Jus­tice over­whelm­ingly de­layed, but fi­nally not de­nied. Delhi High Court sen­tences Con­gress leader Saj­jan Ku­mar to life sen­tence for con­spir­ing to kill 5 Sikhs in No­vem­ber 1984.

Over­turn­ing a judge­ment of the lower court ac­quit­ting Saj­jan Ku­mar of his in­volve­ment in the killing of 5 Sikhs of the fam­ily of Jagdish Kaur, the Delhi Court has sen­tenced Con­gress leader Saj­jan Ku­mar to life im­pris­on­ment and asked to sur­ren­der by 31 De­cem­ber and not to leave the city of Delhi.

73 year old Saj­jan Ku­mar be­comes the first key leader of the In­dian Na­tional Con­gress to be so sen­tenced as so far all big fish have es­caped the drag­net. This pro­vides hope to the vic­tim fam­i­lies who want to see the Con­gress lead­er­ship, se­nior po­lice per­son­nel and bu­reau­crats be­hind bars for their con­spir­a­to­r­ial roles in the mass killings of the Sikhs on 1-2 No­vem­ber 1984.

A High Court bench com­pris­ing Jus­tices S Mu­ralid­har and Vinod Goel de­liv­ered the ver­dict in the case re­lated to the killing of five peo­ple in the Raj Na­gar area of the Delhi Can­ton­ment.  The judges told in open court that, “It is im­por­tant to as­sure the vic­tims that de­spite the chal­lenges truth will pre­vail. The af­ter­shock of those atroc­i­ties is still be­ing felt.”

The court ap­pre­ci­ated the courage of prime wit­ness Jagdish Kaur and re­marked, “the per­pe­tra­tors en­joyed po­lit­i­cal pa­tron­age.” This lends cre­dence to the Sikh call or terming the No­vem­ber 1984 mass killings as geno­cide.

Af­ter the death of the then Prime Min­is­ter In­dira Gandhi, of­fi­cially 2733 Sikhs were killed in No­vem­ber 1984 though un­of­fi­cial fig­ures range upto 5000 and more.

The Cen­tral Bu­reau of In­ves­ti­ga­tion (CBI) had filed an ap­peal chal­leng­ing Ku­mar’s ac­quit­tal say­ing that the trial court had “erred in ac­quit­ting Saj­jan Ku­mar as it was he who had in­sti­gated the mob dur­ing the ri­ots”.

In the same case, five in­di­vid­u­als —Kis­han Khokkar, Gird­hari Lal, for­mer coun­cil­lor Bal­wan Khokkar, for­mer leg­is­la­tor Ma­hen­der Ya­dav and Cap­tain Bhag­mal  were  con­victed in 2013 and sen­tenced for three years, which term has been in­creased by the Delhi High Court to 10 years.