SC rejects Sajjan Kumar’s bail plea in 1984 anti-Sikh riots case

Satya Prakash
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, September 4

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The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed a bail plea of former Delhi Congress leader Sajjan Kumar who is serving a life sentence in a 1984 anti-Sikh riots case.

“This is not a small case… We cannot grant you bail,” a three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice of India SA Bobde told senior advocate Vikas Singh, who represented Kumar.

The Bench – which also included Justice AS Bopanna and Justice V Ramasubramanium – also declined his plea for hospitalisation, saying his medical reports suggested he didn’t need to be sent to a hospital.

As Singh contended that it was a faulty judgment and testimonies of witnesses were completely reversed, the top court said his appeal against the Delhi High Court’s judgment convicting him in the case will be heard when the court reopened for in-person hearings.

On behalf of riot victims, senior counsel HS Phoolka opposed Kumar’s bail plea, saying he was being looked after properly in the jail.

Earlier, the court had refused to give him interim bail on May 13 this year after Solicitor General Tushar Mehta had submitted that “it’s a case genocide and he was leading a mob.”

Kumar (73)—who had sought interim bail on the ground of his poor health conditions—is in jail since December 31, 2018, when he surrendered after being convicted and awarded life imprisonment by the Delhi High Court in a 1984 anti-Sikh riots case.

He has challenged the Delhi High Court’s verdict of December 17, 2018, that awarded him life imprisonment for the “remainder of his natural life”.

The case relates the killing of five Sikhs in Delhi Cantonment’s Raj Nagar Part-I area of southwest Delhi on November 1-2 in 1984, and burning down of a Gurudwara in Raj Nagar Part-II.