Narula Committee reviews the 1984 inquiries

Who: The Delhi government of Chief Minister Madan Lal Khurana of the BJP, which set up the committee, and Ranjit Singh Narula, a retired Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, who chaired it. Ensaaf calls it an advisory committee.

What: ThePrint and the 1984 Sikh Archive date the committee to December 1993; Ensaaf says Khurana's government appointed Narula in 1994. Wikipedia says it was asked to “review the status” of the recommendations of the Potti-Rosha, Kapur-Mittal and Jain-Aggarwal bodies, the earlier inquiries into the November 1984 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi. ThePrint says its report of January 1994 recommended registering cases against Bhagat, Kumar and Tytler. Ensaaf names only Bhagat and Sajjan Kumar and says the recommendation rested on 21 affidavits.

As an advisory body it could only recommend, and Khurana tells what followed. In his affidavit to the Nanavati Commission he said that when he became Chief Minister the Union Home Ministry took the affidavits of 21 persons, on which the Jain-Aggarwal Committee had based its advice, out of his reach and returned them only after he threatened to approach the National Human Rights Commission, and that cases against Bhagat were registered only after his efforts with the Lieutenant Governor (Nanavati report, Vol. I, p. 126). Ensaaf, quoting the same affidavit, adds that in 1991 Lieutenant Governor Markandey Singh had ordered the cases registered and sent them to the CBI, which returned them saying it had no time, and that in 1995 Khurana asked the Centre to act against the two leaders. The 1984 Sikh Archive says the recommendations went to the Rao government at the Centre, which held them for two years and then said the matter belonged to the Delhi Administration.

Narula himself later gave an affidavit to the Nanavati Commission. He said he returned to Delhi from Nepal on 31 October 1984 and that on 3 November a friend told him, on the word of “Congress friends”, that “this programme was for three days”. He also said that Ved Marwah's handwritten notes of his inquiry against police officers had been destroyed on the instructions of higher authorities (Nanavati report, Vol. I, p. 127).

Where: Delhi.

Why it mattered: It was one more official body asked to look again at who should be prosecuted for the killings of November 1984. Ensaaf records that the Jain-Banerjee Committee of 1987 first recommended a case against Sajjan Kumar, that the Delhi High Court stopped that committee, and that the Poti-Rosha Committee of 1990 recommended a case against him again. The Narula Committee brought the same names back, and its advice, like theirs, was only advice.