NEW DELHI: The government has adopted contrasting positions on the allegations against political leaders and police officials in the 1984 riots in Delhi.
The government is dithering over the registration of six cases naming among others H.K.L. Bhagat and Sajjan Kumar. They were recommended over six months ago by the Jain Aggarwal committee looking into the victims affidavits
The home minister S.B. Chavan announced two days ago that any case related to file carnage would be registered only when the government was sure of securing convictions.
This is evidently an afterthought because the Delhi administration had originally asked the CBI to register those very cases involving Bhagat and Kumar.
Besides the Delhi police have already registered over 150 riot case in the last 20 months without applying the criterion mentioned by Chavan Similarly the CBI registered a case against Kumar in 1990 (this is till now the only case against a Congress leader).
More Importantly legal expert’s point out that Chavans statement militates against the law of the land. As per the Criminal Procedure Code the police have no option but to register a case of cognizable offence and then investigate it.
As for the allegations against the police the government is in the process of initiating departmental proceedings against some 40 officials who have been indicted by fan inquiry officer without any hearing.
The inquiry officer Kusum Lata Mittal who retired as secretary to the Union government was part of a two member administrative committee appointed in February 1987 to identify the delinquent Police officials. However the other member Dalip Kumar Kapur former chief justice of the Delhi high court declined to indict anybody and submitted a separate report.
This is because the Rajiv Gandhi government had turned down his request to confer the committee with the power to examine the official’s concemed Mittal made the indictments on the grounds that the officials would anyway get an opportunity to defend themselves once the departmental proceedings were initiated.
But two senior IPS officers Chandra Prakash and Sewa Dass have obtained a stay from the Delhi high court on any action being initiated against them on Mittals findings. The ground for the stay in both the cases was that she had not given them any hearing.
Since this ground applies as much to the other officials as well they too can easily obtain similar stays and scuttle the governments be lated move to initiate departmental proceedings. It is precisely because of this serious infirmity that successive regimes have over Mittals report since she submitted it in March 1990.
The Rajiv Gandhi government set up the Kapur Mittal commits use at the instance of the Justice: Ranganath Misra Commission which had inquired into the 1984 carnage. But the Rajiv Gandhi government never the less disregarded the Misra Commissions Recommendation that the officials needed to be given a before they could be indicted.
Article extracted from this publication >> January 24, 1992
