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After 7 judges' refusal, Delhi HC admits
appeal against Sajjan verdict
WSN Network
 New Delhi: In 1984, they were killed. In
2002, the court acquitted the accused. In 2003, the CBI appealed
against the acquittal, saying the court never heard the evidence
properly and the case was very strong. But one after another, seven
Indian judges either refused or declined to hear the appeal.
On March 5, the Delhi High Court finally admitted the CBI’s appeal
against the acquittal of Congress MP Sajjan Kumar in a 1984
anti-Sikh riot case and issued notice to him and several other
accused. The case will be heard on a day-to-day basis.
He was acquitted by the trial court in 2002 after five of the eight
eyewitnesses had turned hostile while the trial judge had not
accepted the evidence of Anwar Kaur, the widow of Navin Singh for
whose murder CBI had chargesheeted the Congress MP.
The admission of the appeal after five years of his acquittal by a
Bench of Mr Justice Manmohan Sarin and Justice S L Bhayana was due
to several procedural questions that had been surfacing in the case
one after the other during the past 23 years of the riots.
After admission of the appeal, the court granted bail to Sajjan
Kumar, subject to his executing requisite bail bond of Rs 15,000.
However, the Bench said that it would hear the appeal on day-to-day
basis to expedite the matter. The court clubbed the CBI's appeal
with the ones filed by the families of those who were killed during
the riots.
Besides, the Navin Singh’s murder case, registered on the orders of
the Jain-Banerjee and Poti-Rosha committees that had probed the
riots initially, the Justice G T Nanavati panel, set up by the NDA
Government, had also ordered the registration of cases against
Sajjan Kumar and another Congress MP Jagdish Tytler pertaining to
some other incidence of violence, that engulfed the national capital
after the assassination of Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984.
Besides the CBI, Anwar Kaur and the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak
Committee had also challenged the acquittal of Sajjan Kumar on the
ground that at least two of the eyewitnesses had recognised him in
the court during cross-examination, which was sufficient to convict
him and other co-accused.
They also had said that Anwar Kaur’s evidence could not be ignored
as being an illiterate she could not articulate her replies during
her cross-examination.
7 March 2007
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