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New Delhi, August 2
The Supreme Court on Wednesday questioned a decision of the Delhi High Court to re-open a case relating to 1984 anti-Sikh riots against former MLA Mahender Yadav, 31 years after he was acquitted by a city court.
“Under what procedure it has been done? On what basis this order has been passed? Rightly or wrongly this man was acquitted in 1986 and none challenged the judgment for more than 30 years. All of a sudden in some other matter this order is passed. Under what process of law the high court can unsettle it,” a three-judge bench headed by Justice Dipak Misra asked.
Senior advocate HS Phoolka, representing riot victims, told the bench that eyewitnesses were not summoned; the trial was closed in three months and the high court had cited Zahira Sheikh’s case of the 2002 Gujarat riots case as a precedent.
But the bench didn’t appear to be convinced. “In that case (Zahira Sheikh’s case) someone had challenged the order. Here no one challenged it…Judges should not involved themselves in such cases,” Justice Misra said.
Yadav’s counsel Sultan Singh requested the bench to stay the high court’s order to ensure that no coercive action was taken against his client. “It’s a case of Section 302 (murder),” he submitted.
The bench, however, turned down the request, saying, “Nothing will happen. It’s only a show-cause notice.”
The Delhi High Court had in March 2017 sought to re-open the trial in five 1984 anti-Sikh riots cases in which all the accused were acquitted in 1986.
An HC bench of Justice Gita Mittal and Justice Anu Malhotra had issued show-cause notices to the accused, including Yadav, former councillor Balwan Khokkar and Ved Prakash, questioning why the case against them be not re-tried. Perhaps the matter was decided in a hurry, the HC, which had suo motu taken up these cases during hearing of another matter, had commented.
Total 250 cases closed so far, SC told
The top court was also informed that 51 more cases relating to 1984 anti-Sikh riots have been closed by a Special Investigation Team (SIT) that was set up by the Narendra Modi government to re-investigate them, taking the total number of such cases to 250.
Two years after the Modi government set up an SIT to re-investigate serious anti-Sikh riot cases of 1984 that had been closed, the SIT has managed to file chargesheets only in very small number of cases taken up for further probe.
Almost 3,000 people were killed, most of them in Delhi, in the anti-Sikh riots that broke out following the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984.
Senior counsel Arvind Datar, who represented petitioner Gurnad Singh, told the bench that only nine cases were going on. He demanded that the trial in these cases should be conducted on a day-to-ay basis.
The bench which was considering appointing a committee to scrutinise the cases closed by the SIT, deferred the matter till August 16 after Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta sought time to take instructions in the matter.
The top court has already summoned the files of the cases closed by the SIT. The Centre had submitted photocopies of the files of these cases in a sealed cover.
The bench, which is also seized of another petition filed by victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots from Kanpur who have demanded setting up of an SIT to probe murders of over 125 people, directed that a copy of the petition be handed over to the ASG’s junior and posted the matter for hearing on August 16.
