‘No time can be too long to satisfy the need for truth’

New Delhi: Crimes that go unpunished for several years due to the failure of police to prosecute require the court to adopt a different approach, a special court emphasised on Wednesday, while convicting former Congress MP Sajjan Kumar for the murder of a Sikh man and his son in Saraswati Vihar during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots . In the order, Special Judge Kaveri Baweja referred to Delhi High Court's 2018 conviction of Kumar in another riots case. Quoting the high court order, the special court underlined that "no amount of time can be too long to satisfy the needs for truth and some measure of accountability, nor can some arbitrary legal time limit be set. The argument that some wounds are too old to be exposed has little moral integrity... the wounds are still there for all to see." The special judge said the testimony of the complainant, who lost her husband and son to mob frenzy, had to "be read keeping in view certain observations" of the high court in 2018, such as how there was "abject failure by police to investigate the violence" following the assassination of then PM Indira Gandhi. It also said that delay of several decades hadn't deterred courts and referred to a court in the United Kingdom that dispensed justice to a man 56 years after the alleged killing of Polish Jews during the Nazi era. Following this, the European Court of Human Rights also upheld the conviction in 2001. In its 139-page order, the special court echoed the high court's observations on the "obligation to prosecute crimes against humanity , no matter the lapse of time", while giving the example of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh which dealt with the case of acquittal of a man accused of mass killing of Bangladeshi citizens when the trial began 38 years after the incident. The court, taking a leaf out of the high court judgment that termed the anti-Sikh riots cases "extraordinary", said it required a different approach. "The mass killings of Sikhs between Nov 1 and 4, 1984, in Delhi and the rest of the country, engineered by political actors with the assistance of the law enforcement agencies, answer the description of ‘crimes against humanity' that was acknowledged for the first time in a joint declaration by the govts of Britain, Russia and France on May 28, 1915, against the govt of Turkey following the large-scale killing of Armenians by the Kurds and Turks with the assistance and connivance of the Ottoman administration," the court recorded the high court as having observed. Dealing with Kumar's argument on the delay in lodging a complaint against him, the court said, "It is clearly discernible that she (complainant) neither had the occasion nor the trust to confide in police officials even though she joined the investigation. This can certainly be said to be a natural reaction keeping in view her prior experience of complete inaction and lack of any sympathy towards the victims by police during the horrific incident of Nov 1, 1984."