The Delhi High Court on Friday said it will hear in November the appeal of former Congress MP Sajjan Kumar challenging his conviction and life imprisonment in a murder case related to the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.
This appeal was scheduled to come up for hearing before the bench of Justice Vivek Chaudhary and Justice Manoj Jain, but the bench did not sit. Now the next hearing of the case has been fixed on November 19.
Sajjan Kumar was sentenced to life imprisonment by a lower court here on February 25. The lower court had said that in view of the convict’s advancing age and illness, he should be given a lesser punishment instead of death penalty.
The trial court said that although the murder of ‘two innocent persons’ in this case is no less a serious crime, it is not the ‘rarest of the rare’ case which warrants death penalty. The case pertains to the murder of Jaswant Singh and his son Tarundeep Singh on November 1, 1984. The crime of murder carries a maximum penalty of death and a minimum sentence of life imprisonment.
The trial court had said that the case in question is part of the same incident and can be seen as a continuation of the same incident for which Kumar was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Delhi High Court on December 17, 2018.
Subsequently, he was found guilty of causing the death of five people in a similar incident in the riots that followed the assassination of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Therefore, the trial court sentenced Kumar to life imprisonment for being part of the mob that set fire to the victims’ houses and ‘brutally murdered’ two victims, while also looting their belongings. The court had also imposed a fine of about Rs 2.4 lakh on Kumar.
According to a report by the Nanavati Commission, set up to investigate the violence and its aftermath, 587 FIRs were filed in Delhi in connection with the riots, in which 2,733 people were killed. Overall, around 240 FIRs were closed by the police and the accused were acquitted in 250 cases.
Of these 587 FIRs, only 28 resulted in convictions, in which around 400 people were convicted. About 50 people, including the former MP, were convicted of murder. Kumar, an influential Congress leader and MP at that time, was accused in the murder of five people in Delhi’s Palam Colony on November 1 and 2, 1984. In this case, he was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Delhi High Court and his appeal challenging the sentence is pending in the Supreme Court.
