However much the Delhi Police might try to project a citizen friendly image with its public relations advertisements in newspapers, it will be long time before it can erase memories of criminal collaboration between policemen and the looters and killers of 1984 riots.
Those memories have been revived once again, in the report of the Jain Aggarwal committee which was set up by the Government to examine the affidavits filed before the Justice Rangnath Mishra Commission which had probed the riots.
In its report submitted to Delhi’s lieutenant Governor on Aug.6, the Jain Aggarwal committee has re confirmed what has been known all along, that the Delhi Police showed a “colossal indifference towards the loss of human life and property of the Sikhs” in 1984. Specific instances have been cited in which killing and carnage took place in the presence of police officers. These officers and their colleagues later joined hands in a cover up operation.
The Jain Aggarwal committee recounts in great detail how the police either did not register FIRs, or deliberately mis-registered them and subsequently sabotaged the investigation so that the cases could not stand up in court, as many did not. In view of these findings, the Jain Agarwal committee has recommended severe punishment for 298 “dishonest” police officers, the registration of 333 fresh cases and reinvestigation of 129 other cases to undo the misdeeds of the earlier investigators,
All this point to a cover-up of monumental proportions, but this is not the first time this charge has been made, Apart from the obvious inaction and involvement of the Delhi Police, several other commissions and committees have in past nine years indicted local Congress functionaries, who later went on to become MPs and ministers, for instigating and leading the rioters. But as long as these Congress VIPs remain in positions of power there is little chance that they will allow their collaborators in the police to be punished.
The guilty men of 1984 go right to the top. At the very top is P.V.Narsimha Rao, the then Home Minister, whfiddled while Delhi burned. A senior Delhi Police officer charge sheeted for his role in the riots, has, in memorandum to the Home Ministry, charged that the decision not to call in the Army when the situation was getting out of hand was taken at Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s house on the nightofOct.31,1984 at which Rao was present Several enquiry committees have suggested that thousands of deaths could have been prevented if the Army had been called out that night. But it was not, perhaps deliberately,
No wonder no action has been taken against officials like the then Police Commissioner S.C Tandon who was rewarded by crustal appointments after retirement. As Jong as the guilty men of 1984 remain unpunished, police elsewhere to will take sides in communal situations, as they did in Ayodhya, Bhopal and Bombay. If that becomes the rule we could be headed for institutionalized anarchy,
{Courtesy: The Pioneer, New Delhi}.
Article extracted from this publication >> October 29, 1993
