New Delhi: The Allahabad High Court has dismissed petitions filed by 10 individuals accused of participating in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Kanpur, who had sought to have criminal proceedings against them quashed. The judge noted that the gravity of “crimes against humanity” outweighed all technical arguments regarding the destruction of original records and decades-long delay in prosecution.
One of the accused died last December and his application was abated, but for the remaining nine, the court refused to quash proceedings. The judgement was delivered Tuesday by Justice Anish Kumar Gupta.
The case goes back to the nationwide violence against Sikhs that broke out following the assassination of then prime minister Indira Gandhi on 31 October, 1984, at her residence by her Sikh bodyguards, Beant Singh and Satwant Singh.
In Kanpur, the Sikh community was targeted through brutal killings, arson and looting. One of the cases involved an attack in the city’s Naubasta on 1 November, 1984, in which a mob broke into a home, brutally beat two men with lathis and iron rods, and set “ablaze the younger brother by tying a mattress on his face”, leading to his death.
Despite the horrific nature of these crimes, “final reports were submitted in a hurried manner and the cases were closed within a short period of time” in the mid-1980s, effectively exonerating the accused without a proper trial, the court noted.
In subsequent years, official records state that original documents, including case diaries and final reports, were “weeded in the year 1990”, under the direction of the then superintendent of police of Kanpur. Further losses occurred at the (Uttar Pradesh) Chief Minister’s Office, where records regarding deceased persons were “destroyed by termites”.
The tide began to turn in 2000, when the central government appointed the Justice Nanavati Commission to investigate the riots. The commission’s report described the events as “crimes against humanity” and noted that the “Sikh community has become refugee(s) in their own country”.
Following writ petitions filed in 2016 and 2017, the Supreme Court took action. In 2018, it constituted an SIT to re-examine 186 cases in Uttar Pradesh, including 20 in Kanpur Nagar.
According to court documents, the SIT successfully reconstructed FIRs and recorded statements from survivors between 2020 and 2022. This led to the filing of charge-sheets in 11 cases where trial courts subsequently issued summons in 2023 and 2024.
In nine cases, FIR could not be extracted, therefore, no re-investigation could be conducted, the court noted.
The applicants, many now elderly, argued that a fair trial was impossible without original 1984 records and that the delay violated their rights under Article 21 of the Constitution. However, the HC noted that the Supreme Court had specifically directed that these matters be heard “out of turn” and expeditiously in a July 2025 order.
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‘Genocide’
Justice Gupta’s order underlined that “perpetrators of such crime cannot plead technical grounds that time has passed”. Citing the legal precedent of 2010 in Sajjan Kumar vs CBI, the court held that “entire proceedings… cannot be closed merely on the ground of delay”.
The judge concluded that because a prima facie case is made out through surviving witnesses, the trial must proceed to serve justice for the victims of the 1984 genocide.
The court noted that it is an undisputed fact that though FIRs were lodged immediately after the incident itself, final reports were submitted in a hurried manner. However, the cases were part of a larger chain of incidents which took place against the Sikh community throughout the country after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, it said.
“The nature of the incidents was like a genocide against a particular community in which various innocent persons were killed, (set) ablaze alive, house and properties were burnt, destroyed and looted and such a large-scale crime, committed against humanity gone (went) unnoticed and in almost all such cases the final reports were submitted in a hurried manner to save various accused persons,” states the order.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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