Editor,
The Delhi High Court convicts Congress Leader Sajjan Kumar for his involvement in1984 Anti-Sikh Riots. Justice was deliberately delayed during the UPA regime through the pressure tactics of the then central ruling dispensation by intruding into the independence of the judiciary. Now justice is at last delivered after 34 long years. Congress leader Kamal Nath, Sanjay Gandhi’s Doon School buddy was Indira Gandhi’s “third son,” the richest minister with assets worth Rs 263 crore as early as in 2011. Kamal Nath’s appointment as the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh is widely seen as a case real-politik trumping common sense.
Kamal Nath was accused of leading a mob outside the Rakabganj gurudwara during the pogrom. Two Sikhs were burnt to death in his vicinity. His presence at the gurudwara was testified to formally by the police and a journalist. H S Phoolka and Manoj Mita in their book on the pogrom point out that his presence for two hours at the head of a mob near the gurudwara was never satisfactorily explained. As explanation Kamal Nath said that he was there at the behest of Rajiv Gandhi. He denied complicity in the violence and the Nanavati Commission set up two decades later (a face-saving exercise of the Congress party) to enquire into the pogrom have given Kamal Nath the benefit of the doubt.
Again none of the high profile Congressmen accused of abetting mob violence during the pogrom were convicted, despite allegations. HKL Bhagat, Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler survived probes and investigations for want of clinching evidence; the sort of evidence that seldom survives the State’s complicity in organised killing; rather the worst lynching episode of the country. However Bhagat, Kumar and Tytler had their political careers cut short because of their association with 1984 annihilation of Sikhs. But Kamal Nath continued to prosper being in the inner circle of Rajiv Gandhi, a part of the young gang of courtiers who defined the craven political culture of Indira Gandhi’s durbar in her last years. From Sanjay Gandhi’s thuggish orbit to 1984, Kamal Nath is both a survivor and a representative of the dark times of the Congress.
The appointment of Manmohan Singh as prime minister twenty years later was seen as a landmark in a process of hidden contrition. In response to Opposition demands, in 2005, Singh addressed directly (as he was prompted and rehearsed by the Ala Kaman as a henchman) during a parliamentary discussion on the Nanavati Commission report to apologise to the Sikh community on behalf of the Government and to the whole Indian nation because the events of 1984 ran against the concept of nationhood enshrined in the Constitution. Does this absolve the Congress party of their dastardly acts of perpetrating genocide against a minority community as enshrined in Article 25 of the Constitution of India? And all this while appeasing another minority community as “vote-bank” and preaching pseudo-secularism only to remain in power by hook or crook? Although the symbolism of Manmohan Singh’s elevation allowed people to give Sonia Gandhi’s Congress the benefit of doubt, people of the country also realize that this is a clear dichotomy of the Congress party consisting of sycophants and cohorts.
Thirteen years later, it is clear that Sonia Gandhi’s son and heir does not share the sense of shame and contrition of that hideous pogrom and his party’s role in it. If he did, he would not have chosen Kamal Nath to represent the Congress’s political revival. Rahul Gandhi was fourteen years old when his grandmother was assassinated and thousands of Sikhs were killed in retaliation with the complicity of the ruling party, the Congress. He might have been too young to take in the enormity of that massacre. That does not absolve him now as the President of the Congress when a person or a party fudges the starkness of its evil. What does Manmohan Singh, whom Congress had used as shield to cover-up deftly the heinous and most cruel massacre ever executed in the history of independent India, think of Kamal Nath’s coronation?
Yours etc.,
Samares Bandyopadhyay
Advocate, Kolkata High Court