Kanpur Massacre

Who: Sikh families of Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, attacked by mobs after Indira Gandhi's assassination on 31 October 1984. Accounts of the violence say local Congress leaders soon led the mobs. Decades later a Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Uttar Pradesh police named 96 people as prime suspects; 22 of them had died by 2022.

What: From about 7 a.m. on 1 November 1984 mobs in Kanpur vandalised Sikh shops and looted homes, and the killings went on for days. Reports on the SIT's work put the dead at 127. One attack the SIT has pursued took place at Nirala Nagar, where dozens of men arrived in a couple of buses and set fire to the house of Gurudyal Singh. Twelve tenant families lived there and three people were burnt alive. A man in the mob, Rajesh Gupta, was shot dead in cross-firing. The SIT also took blood samples from a locked house in Govind Nagar that a mob had attacked.

Where: Kanpur city. A 2017 petition to the Supreme Court says the 127 Sikhs were killed across several police station areas, and that cases at the Bazaria and Nazirabad police stations were among those closed.

Why it mattered: PTI described Kanpur as one of the worst-hit cities, yet for over three decades nobody was prosecuted. The petitioners said police closed at least seven cases for want of evidence and that none of the police stations had acknowledged the deaths. In April 2017 the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee president Manjit Singh GK and Kanpur victims asked the Supreme Court for an SIT. On the court's orders the Uttar Pradesh government formed one on 27 May 2019, headed by DIG Balendu Bhushan Singh. It arrested four men in their sixties from Ghatampur on 15 June 2022 over the Nirala Nagar fire, booking them under the Indian Penal Code section for dacoity with murder. Two more were arrested on 21 June and five more on 22 June, which The Tribune counted as 11 arrests in all by 23 June. Two further arrests followed on the night of 5 July, according to ETV Bharat. It traced witnesses in Delhi, Punjab and Rajasthan.

The 1985 Rajiv-Longowal Accord had already promised to extend the Misra Commission's inquiry to Bokaro and Kanpur. The SIT's arrests of June 2022 came 37 years after the Accord.