NEW DELHI: Jaspal Singh, session’s judge, discharged Simranjit Singh Mann, Atinderpal Singh and the two Bombay based professors, Dalip Singh and Jagmohan Singh Toni, in the Indira Gandhi assassination case on December 7.

Dalip and Jagmohan were happy at the conclusion of the day’s proceedings and wanted to forget their nightmarish experience. “We are thankful to all those who stood by us in the difficult times. We are particularly proud of being citizens of Bombay and we intend going back there and start our teaching careers once again,” they said.

Dalip spoke out his mind: “My career has been ruined. For 25 years, I have been teaching in a college where students from all walks of life come. Till I was picked up in this case, I never had anything against me. Of course, I was kept under detention in another case. Both the cases were false. Particularly this one. But the people of Bombay are great. They came to meet me and assured their co-operation. There is not one name which I can forget.

Put in death cell

“I am not leaving this place with a bitter taste, but I cannot simply forget overnight what I went through during my detention in the Tihar jail. They put us in a death cell as if we had already been condemned to face the gallows. For 70 days I was not allowed to talk, even to my colleague Jagmohan. Temporarily, they changed my cell after persistent pleading. But a few days later, I was sent back to the same old cell. This is now they treated us in Tihar. Can I hope to forget this? Maybe, in due course I will, but certainly it will linger long in my life.”

“I know it will take some time before the stigma of being involved in the assassination case will go. In fact, after withdrawal of this case, the stigma will shift from us to the Rajiv Gandhi government which had been shamelessly pushing on it with the case. The case was a figment of someone’s imagination. The SIT was told to cook up a story and it did that. I don’t deny that I know Mann, but I don’t know him that well to have been involved with him in anything, I never had any interest in politics and I don’t intend to use this case to gain entry into politics.”

Fabricated case

Dalip, however, intends to meet Mann in case they bump into each other somewhere. “But I don’t intend to go out of my way to meet him,” he added.

While Dalip, who was supported by the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabhandhak Committee throughout, hopes to resume work, Jagmohan will have to look out for a new job. “I lost my job the day I was picked up in this case. I have suffered considerably because of this fabricated case. I would have to look for a new job once I go back to Bombay,” Jagmohan said.

Hypocritical Sikhs

Jasvinder Singh, the son of Prof Dalip Singh of Khalsa College, was taken by surprise recently when a group of city Sikhs asked him to participate in a press conference to demand the release of his father and another co-accused, Professor Jagmohan Singh of Jai Hind College.

“They contacted me the day before the press meet and though didn’t know any of them I agreed to go along,” says Jasvinder who works as an executive in an electronics firm in the city. He could not, however, reconcile himself to the sudden burst of sympathy for his father and Jagmohan Singh from the city’s Sikh community. For, after the arrest of the duo on April 8, 1989 by the Special Investigating Team, both families were ostracized by the community as a whole.

Though Jasvinder says he could understand the local Sikh community’s reluctance to maintain contact with his family fearing interrogation and harassment by the police, his voice betrays his underlying disillusionment with some of his father’s friends who made no bones about keeping them away from social occasions.

Social boycott

He laments bitterly, “Everybody wants to save their skin. But what rankles is our social boycott by even some of my father’s close friends and colleagues. Today, I certainly do not carry a positive impression of them.”

Apprehending action from the SIT, the Sikh community in Bombay maintained a studied silence over the detention of the professors for the last eight months, and it was largely left to civil liberties organizations to press for a public trial.

Jasvinder, Dalip Singh’s only son, has been frequenting Delhi to look up his father who has been “confined to a dark and dingy cell all this while. They installed bulbs in his room only last month,” he says.

Bombay

Reminiscing over his painful imprisonment, Dalip Singh said he had to undergo solitary confinement 22 and a half hour every day for eight months. During the one and-a-half hour break allotted him, he was not allowed to even talk with the co-accused Jagmohan Singh Toni. Dalip said he had been incarcerated in a cell 10 feet by 14 feet strategically placed on death row. Just 40 feet away on the right were the gallows while to the left was the visible grave of Maqbool Butt, the hanged Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front leader. Dalip revealed that it was Only after a lot of cajoling that the authorities had erected a wall to cover the pitiful sight (Indian Post, Dec. 5, & 14).

Article extracted from this publication >> February 2, 1990