For victims and survivors of Delhi’s 1984 anti-Sikh riots, the death of former Congress leader Sajjan Kumar brought little comfort.
She has appeared in court several times over the years. “I wanted to kill him myself. Sitting in the office of the Victims of 1984 Anti-Sikh Riots Society in Tilak Vihar, she recalled the violence in Sultanpuri, where her husband, Swaroop Singh, was killed. For Atma Singh Lubhana, 66, Kumar’s death left a sense of an unfinished battle. Lubhana was 27 and working as a Haryana Police constable when the riots broke out. He had returned to his home in Sultanpuri as violence spread and said he saw Kumar, then a Congress MP, at a meeting inside a house in Mangolpuri on the evening of October 31, 1984.
After four decades of waiting for justice, many said his death in jail felt like an abrupt end to a battle they had hoped would culminate in the harshest punishment. But I couldn’t take the law in my hands,” she said. “We wanted him to get the death penalty,” said Lubhana, vice-president of the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Committee and chairman of the victims’ organisation.
The family, she said, could not even perform his last rites. “All the bodies were just thrown in the Yamuna,” she said.
Sajjan Kumar, who was lodged in Tihar Jail, died at Safdarjung Hospital. “He died a natural death. He had been sentenced to life imprisonment by the Delhi High Court in December 2018 for his role in the killing of five Sikhs and the burning of a gurdwara during the riots.
She said Kumar’s death offered limited satisfaction. If he was sentenced to death, we would have felt better,” she said.
