1984 riots — 10,000 affidavits filed

in 1985-86, was widely alleged to have “whitewashed” the role of the then Rajiv Gandhi administration and Congress leaders in the carnage.

Another reason for the appointment of the Nanavati Commission has been the following dichotomy: While the official toll of the three-day massacre in Delhi is as high as 2,733, the number of persons actually serving sentence for murder is only six.

Given the seriousness of the matter, the Commission is likely to be in the spotlight as it will be recording evidence of the carnage in public. This is in contrast to the secretive functioning of the Misra Commission which had passed a gag order against the Press and conducted all its proceedings in camera.

Out of the 10,000-odd affidavits received by the Nanavati Commission, about 3,500 are those that had been filed before the Misra Commission. And among the fresh affidavits, about 3,000 are nothing more than claims for compensation from the victims. H.S. Phoolka, counsel for the November 1984 Carnage Justice Committee, estimates that among the old and new affidavits, there are at least 3,000 that give detailed evidence of how the massacre took place and who the culprits were.

Some of the new affidavits have come from a range of prominent personalities, including Khushwant Singh, Jaya Jaitly, Madan Lal Khurana, Madhu Kishwar, Lt Gen J.S. Aurora, Patwant Singh, Justice R.S. Narula and Swami Agnivesh. These people have for the first time put on record what they had already said in public speeches or published works. Some of the highlights of the affidavits are:

* During the riots, President Giani Zail Singh was apparently so helpless that he called up Khurana, then an Opposition leader, to help recover the body of a relative from the police in west Delhi.

* When he became Chief Minister of Delhi, Khurana had to exert a lot of pressure on the P.V. Narasimha Rao Government to get the police to register riot cases against Congress leaders H.K.L. Bhagat and Sajjan Kumar.

* When Patwant Singh, who is a historian, and Lt Gen J.S. Aurora met the then home minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, in the initial stages of the riots, they found him reluctant to act on their suggestion of deploying the Army immediately.

* Narula, who is a former Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, brought out the role of the courts and Misra, who is now a Congress MP, in shielding the culprits.