An Indian court on 20 November 2018 handed down a rare death sentence in connection with the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, a wave of violence that left nearly 3,000 people dead after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
Relatives of victims reacted with joy in Delhi after the judge announced the sentence, the first of its kind since 1996. The ruling came after a special probe was set up in 2015 to revisit the long-running case.
The riots broke out within hours of Gandhi being killed by her Sikh bodyguards. Over the next three days, Sikhs were raped and murdered, while homes and businesses were set on fire.
Much of the violence took place in New Delhi, where people were dragged from their homes and burned alive. Despite the scale of the killings, few people have ever been brought to justice, and earlier government-appointed commissions failed to secure more than a handful of minor prosecutions.
Gandhi was shot dead after she ordered Indian troops to storm the Golden Temple in Punjab, Sikhism’s holiest shrine. The operation was intended to flush out separatists from the minority faith who were holed up inside.
Sikh leaders say the official death toll of 3,000 understates the scale of the pogrom and accuse leaders of Gandhi’s Congress party of encouraging the violence. India’s top investigating agency had blamed senior Congress leader Sajjan Kumar for inciting mobs, but he was acquitted by a court in 2013.
The case sits against a wider history of delayed accountability in India. In 2011, judges in Chennai postponed the execution of three men convicted over the 1991 assassination of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.
Sikhs in India number about 20 million, just under two percent of the country’s 1.25 billion people. Worldwide, the community is estimated at around 27 million.
Related background ¶
The 1984 riots remain one of India’s most politically sensitive episodes, with victims’ families continuing to press for convictions decades later.
