Poti-Rosha Committee, 1990

Who: Justice P. Subramanian Poti, a retired Chief Justice of the Gujarat High Court, chaired it, with P.A. Rosha, a retired IPS officer, as member. The CBI and Sajjan Kumar also figure in the story.

What: The Delhi Administration appointed the committee on 22 March 1990 to replace the Jain-Banerjee Committee, whose notification the High Court had struck down on 4 October 1989. It could examine whether offences of 31 October to 7 November 1984 had been left unregistered or badly investigated, and recommend to the Administrator that cases be registered and investigated; unlike its predecessor, it had no power to monitor the investigation or instruct the police. On 12 April and 18 May 1990 it asked for copies of all 403 FIRs and the case diaries, and on 6 June reported that nothing could proceed without them. At a meeting called by the Lieutenant Governor on 8 May it was agreed that the records would be made available and that cases showing direct police complicity could go to the CBI. The records came only in July and August, and many answers from DCPs and station house officers about which FIR a complaint had been linked to proved incorrect. The committee sent 11 affidavits to the Administrator on 9 August and 19 on 11 September, 30 in all, and its members relinquished office on 22 September 1990 (Jain-Aggarwal report).

It recommended that the CBI take up Anwar Kaur's case, and the CBI registered a case on 7 September 1990 against six accused including Sajjan Kumar (Delhi High Court, 2018). On 11 September a CBI party went to Kumar's house in Paschimpuri to search it and arrest him. According to the affidavit of a CBI deputy superintendent, G.S. Kapila, quoted in the bail order of that night, Kumar "managed to organize a huge crowd" that damaged the party's cars and barred the exit gate, and senior police officers said they could not send help "without inflicting heavy casualties". The party left only when the anticipatory bail order was announced over a loudspeaker. The judge confirmed bail and called the CBI's fear of obstruction "totally misplaced". Ensaaf and the 1984 Sikh Archive say the committee's members then decided not to renew their tenure; the Jain-Aggarwal report says they left at the end of their six months.

Where: Delhi.

Why it mattered: The committee had to dig records out of police stations before any case could move, and the case it sent to the CBI over Anwar Kaur's affidavit met a crowd outside the accused's house and an order of anticipatory bail. In 2018 the Delhi High Court said the investigation "never went anywhere" and nothing of consequence followed from that case.