Supreme Court orders a new SIT on the 186 closed 1984 cases: the Dhingra SIT

Who: The Supreme Court; the petitioner S. Gurlad Singh Kahlon and his counsel H.S. Phoolka; the SIT of the retired Delhi High Court judge S.N. Dhingra, the IPS officer Abhishek Dular and the retired IPS officer Rajdeep Singh, who did not continue; and the Centre.

What: The Court's SIT took over the 186 cases where the Home Ministry's SIT of 2015 had done no further investigation. It stands in a long line of official inquiries into the November 1984 killings of Sikhs. The petitioner, S. Gurlad Singh Kahlon of the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee, had challenged the closures in the Supreme Court in 2016.

• 11 January 2018: A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A.M. Khanwilkar and D.Y. Chandrachud held that the first SIT had not done further investigation in 186 cases where closure reports had been filed. A new three-member SIT, headed by the retired Delhi High Court judge S.N. Dhingra, was to file a status report in two months (WION). ThePrint dates the order to 10 January; the Delhi High Court records it as of 11 January. LiveLaw gives a second count: when the team began work in early 2019, 199 cases had been referred to it, including some that Pramod Asthana's Home Ministry panel had examined, so 199 is not the same set as the 186 of the order. The Tribune's account of the report in January 2020 again speaks of 186 cases. On 4 December 2018 the Court let a two-member team carry on (Delhi High Court, para 152).
• 29 November 2019: The SIT filed its report in a sealed cover. The Court sent Dular back to the CBI without winding the team up, and said it would decide whether the petitioner could see the report (LiveLaw).
• 15 January 2020: Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the Court that the Centre accepted the SIT's recommendations and would act as the law required (The Tribune; Law Times Journal).

The Tribune's account of the report: the efforts of the police and administration seemed aimed at hushing up the cases. Complaints were clubbed into omnibus FIRs, one covering 498 incidents with a single investigating officer, and forensic evidence for identifying bodies was not preserved. The report cites evidence that Shoorveer Singh Tyagi, then station house officer of Kalyanpuri, was involved in a conspiracy with the mobs, and the SIT advised referring his case to the Delhi Police "Riots Cell". Trial courts tried rioting, murder, arson and looting together, did not order separate trials, and acquitted in a routine manner. The SIT advised appeals, with applications to condone delay, against some acquittals.

On 3 November 2022 Justices A.S. Bopanna and P.S. Narasimha took a summary of the report on record. Senior Advocate H.S. Phoolka argued for Kahlon and read from it that in one Kalyanpuri case a single challan covered the murder of 56 people but charges were framed for five. On 6 May 2025 Justices Abhay S. Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan issued notice on six appeals against the acquittal of 14 accused; the Additional Solicitor General said the SIT had recommended eight special leave petitions, two of which had been filed earlier and dismissed (LiveLaw).

Where: The Supreme Court, New Delhi; the cases come from Delhi, among them Kalyanpuri.

Why it mattered: The report, The Tribune says, found failures by the police, the administration and the trial courts, and held that the culprits went unpunished mainly because police and authorities showed little interest in pursuing the cases. The Delhi High Court, in its Sajjan Kumar judgment of 17 December 2018, said the Supreme Court had acknowledged that many cases remained to be properly investigated.