‘A familiar pattern of mass killings in Mumbai in 1993, in Gujarat in 2002, in Kandhamal, Odisha, in 2008, in Muzaffarnagar, UP, 2013 to name a few’

NEW DELHI: Lamenting repeated targeting of minorities “engineered by political actors” and “facilitated by indifferent law enforcement agencies”, the Delhi HC has called for revisiting crime laws. Neither “crimes against humanity” nor “genocide” are part of India’s crime laws. This “loophole” needs to be “addressed urgently” and handled differently. This calls for “strengthening the legal system, a bench of justices S Muralidhar and Vinod Goel who awarded a life sentence to Congress leader Sajjan Kumar in an anti-Sikh riot case said in its ruling.
To buttress its observation, the court cited instances of “collective painful” memories from Partition to the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots in UP that claimed over 60 lives. Among the mass killings cited in the judgment included the Gujarat riots in 2002. “Political patronage” and “indifferent law enforcement agencies” are common denominators in such instances where it becomes difficult to bring criminals to justice, the court said.

“The mass killings in Punjab, Delhi and elsewhere during the country’s Partition remains a collective painful memory as are killings of innocent Sikhs in November 1984. There has been a familiar pattern of mass killings in Mumbai in 1993, in Gujarat in 2002, in Kandhamal, Odisha, in 2008, in Muzaffarnagar in UP in 2013 to name a few”, the court said.

“Common to these mass crimes were the targeting of minorities and attacks spearheaded by the dominant political actors being facilitated by the law enforcement agencies.” Citing the 1984 riots as a case in point, the court said “decades pass by” before such perpetrators can be made answerable. The court also cited legal systems of Bangladesh and United Kingdom “grappling with crimes against humanity”.