Trilokpuri Massacre

Who: Sikh residents of Trilokpuri, East Delhi, a Congress stronghold whose people were mostly poor Sikhs who had voted for Indira Gandhi's party. Survivors' affidavits to the Misra Commission name local Congress leaders Dr Ashok and Rampal Saroj, the Union minister H.K.L. Bhagat and the station house officer, Tyagi, as directing the mobs. According to a summary of its 1990 report, the Kusum Lata Mittal Committee held Kalyanpuri's SHO Shoorveer Singh Tyagi and DCP Sewa Dass responsible. Bhagat was not convicted and died in 2005.

What: On 1 November 1984, at about 10 a.m., a mob set fire to the gurdwara at Block 36. Sikhs who had gathered to defend the neighbourhood were told by police to go home, and attacks on their houses followed, continuing until the evening of 3 November. In Block 32, Darshan Kaur, then 19, lost 12 relatives, among them her husband Ram Singh, who was burned alive. Human Rights Watch reports that police allegedly confiscated Sikhs' kirpans, that J.P. Narayan Hospital recorded seven rape cases, and that journalist Manoj Mitta found about 30 women abducted and held for over 24 hours in Chilla village. Survivors say trucks carried the bodies away and that some were thrown into the Yamuna.

Where: Blocks 30, 32, 36 and others in Trilokpuri, and the Kalyanpuri police station area, East Delhi.

Why it mattered: Human Rights Watch says Trilokpuri had the largest number of killings and some of the most brutal violence in Delhi. Police admitted to 95 dead in Blocks 30 and 32; the 1984 Sikh Archive, drawing on survivors' affidavits, puts the toll in those two blocks above 350. The Ahuja Committee counted 2,733 Sikhs killed across Delhi.

Few were punished. Kishori Lal, a former butcher, was sentenced to death seven times; the Supreme Court reduced this to life imprisonment in 1998. In February 2012, on the recommendation of Delhi's Sentence Review Board, Lieutenant Governor Tejinder Khanna approved the release of Kishori Lal and 14 other life convicts, each on a surety and personal bond of Rs 10,000. Sikh Siyasat News, reporting on 13 February, called this a commutation of their life sentences and said he "will soon be a free man". In a separate case, a 1996 trial court convicted men on the Penal Code charges of "rioting" and arson, the Delhi High Court upheld this in November 2018, and on 30 April 2019 a bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi set aside 15 convictions, saying there was no direct evidence and witnesses had not identified the men. Of 80 accused in that case, none faced a murder charge. Many survivors were resettled at Tilak Vihar, where flats are now decaying.