3 get life-term in 1984 anti-Sikh riot case

NEW DELHI: A Delhi court on Thursday sentenced three people to life imprisonment for lynching three members of a family, including an on-duty Delhi Police Head Constable, during the infamous riots that broke out in the Capital against the Sikh community in 1984 following the assassination of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. 

Denying that the incident could be considered as ‘rarest of rare’ cases, the court said that rigorous imprisonment would meet the ends of justice. 

Niranjan Shah, the Delhi Police head constable, was on duty at a railway station in east Delhi when a mob led by Harparsad Bhardwaj, RP Tiwari and Jagdish Giri chased him and later lynched him outside his house on November 1. The brutality by the mob continued for the second day on November 2 when they came back to Shah’s house and killed his 17-year-old son Maninder Singh and son-in-law Gurpal Singh but spared Shah’s wife Harminder Kaur. 

Two others, Kamlesh and Suraj Giri, who were also named in the police complaint were let off by the court for lack of evidence against them.

Kaur had filed the FIR in 1996 when the government had constituted the Jain and Banerjee Committee to look into the riot cases.