Mathur Committee and the 2015 SIT on the closed 1984 cases

Who: The Union Home Ministry; Justice (retired) G.P. Mathur; the three-member SIT of Pramod Asthana, IPS, the retired judge Rakesh Kapoor and Kumar Gyanesh of Delhi Police; S. Gurlad Singh Kahlon and his counsel H.S. Phoolka; and the Supreme Court.

What: The committee and the SIT stand in a long line of official inquiries into the November 1984 killings of Sikhs. In order:

• 23 December 2014: The Government set up a committee headed by retired Supreme Court judge Justice G.P. Mathur, to say whether an SIT should reinvestigate the cases, to look into victims' grievances and to oversee payment of Rs 5 lakh for each person killed, which the Cabinet had approved on 10 December. It was to report in three months. PTI noted that the Nanavati Commission had recommended reopening only four of the 241 cases the police had closed, and that H.S. Phoolka argued that reopening the other 237 cases would bring more convictions.
• By February 2015: ThePrint reports that the committee found that a proper investigation of the offences was not conducted and that a sham effort had been made to give it the shape of investigations. It recommended an SIT.
• 13 February 2015: The Home Ministry announced a three-member SIT, set up, it said, after the Mathur Committee's recommendations were accepted. Pramod Asthana chaired it, with Rakesh Kapoor and Kumar Gyanesh. It was to re-investigate serious Delhi cases that had been closed, reviewing station records and the files of the Justice J.D. Jain and D.K. Aggarwal Committee, to file chargesheets where evidence allowed, and to report in six months (Home Ministry press release).
• 2017: The Attorney General told the Supreme Court that the SIT had taken up 293 cases: 199 closed after scrutiny, 59 sent for further investigation, 35 taken up for preliminary inquiry, and chargesheets filed in four. The Centre later gave other figures to the Court: 250 cases probed and closure reports filed in 241 (WION). On 16 August 2017, on a petition by S. Gurlad Singh Kahlon, a bench headed by Justice Dipak Misra appointed a supervisory body of two former Supreme Court judges, J.M. Panchal and K.S.P. Radhakrishnan, to examine the closure of the 199 cases and 42 more, and report in three months.
• January 2018: The Court held that the SIT had not carried out further investigation in 186 cases where closure reports had been filed, and ordered a fresh SIT (WION; the Delhi High Court records the order as of 11 January 2018).

ThePrint ties one conviction to the reopened work: in November 2018 a Delhi sessions court convicted Naresh Sherawat and Yashpal Singh of murder in a case the SIT had reopened.

Where: New Delhi: the Home Ministry, the Supreme Court and the Delhi cases.

Why it mattered: A committee the Government itself appointed found, as ThePrint reports it, that the first investigations were not proper. The SIT it led to was in turn found by the Supreme Court to have done no further investigation in 186 cases where closure reports were filed, which brought the Court's own SIT under Justice S.N. Dhingra.