New Delhi: A Delhi sessions court on Monday sentenced three persons to life imprisonment for lynching three members of a Sikh family during the anti-Sikh riots in 1984.
Additional Sessions Judge Rajender Kumar Shastri had on Monday held the three — Harparsad Bhardwaj, R P Tiwari and Jagdish Giri — guilty of killing three members of a Sikh family, including a Delhi Police head constable. The accused were convicted under various Sections of IPC, including 147 (rioting) and 302 (murder).
According to the prosecution, the accused had led a mob on November 1 and 2 and attacked the house of complainant Harminder Kaur in 1984 in an East Delhi locality after anti-Sikh riots broke out.
Kaur's husband Niranjan Singh, a head constable with the Delhi Police, who was on duty at Shahdara Railway Station on November 1, 1984, was lynched and set ablaze by a violent mob led by the accused.
"Killing of innocent persons due to communal reasons is an indelible blot in the history of human civilisation," said ASJ Shastri wrote in the order. He termed the anti-Sikh riots as "a virtual holocaust in Independent India".
The ASJ, however, acquitted a woman accused Kamlesh and Suraj Giri of the charges due to lack of evidence.
After hearing the arguments of both sides on the quantum of punishment, the judge, however, rejected the prosecution's contention that the case falls in the "rarest of rare" category and warranted the death sentence for the convicts.
Immediately after the sentence was pronounced, Tiwari shouted slogans glorifying former prime minister Indira Gandhi, prompting security personnel to take him out of the court room. Tiwari and Giri also said they were not given a fair trial and even asked they be given the death penalty.
"More excruciating were the incidents after the assassination of Gandhi in which thousands of ingenuous citizens were butchered merely because they took birth in the community to which said bodyguards belonged," the judge said in his 22-page judgement.
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