Supreme Court of India

The Supreme Court of India sits in Delhi and is the country's highest court, established on 28 January 1950 (Wikipedia). For the Panth its record falls in three places: the cases after Operation Blue Star and the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Punjab cases of the Kharku years, and the effort to reopen the November 1984 cases.

Key moments

• 1984: after Operation Blue Star, a habeas corpus petition by the social worker Kamla Devi Chattopadhyaya reached the Court. Reduced to Ashes says Justices Chinnappa Reddy and V. Khalid ruled that there was "no justification for detaining" 22 children held in Ludhiana jail, as they were pilgrims.
• 3 August 1988: in Kehar Singh v. State (Delhi Administration), a bench of Justices Oza, Ray and Shetty confirmed the death sentences of Satwant Singh and Kehar Singh in the Indira Gandhi case and acquitted Balbir Singh. On 16 December 1988 the Court upheld the rejection of Kehar Singh's mercy petition, and both men were hanged on 6 January 1989.
• 11 March 1994: in Kartar Singh v. State of Punjab the Court decided the challenges to TADA and the Terrorist Affected Areas (Special Courts) Act 1984 in one judgment; Reduced to Ashes headlines its account "Supreme Court Upholds TADA".
• 11 September 1995: Justice Kuldip Singh treated a telegram from SGPC president Gurcharan Singh Tohra as a habeas corpus petition on Jaswant Singh Khalra's abduction. On 15 November 1995 the Court gave the CBI the inquiry into the abduction and into Khalra's press note on secret cremations.
• 12 December 1996: Justices Kuldip Singh and S. Saghir Ahmad noted a CBI report of 585 identified, 274 partly identified and 1,238 unidentified bodies, said it "discloses flagrant violations of human rights on a mass scale", and left the matter to the National Human Rights Commission. On 11 October 1999 the Court refused to interfere with the Commission's proceedings, which the book's authors, themselves petitioners, say approved its narrower reading.
• 1 December 1998: in Kishori v. State of Delhi, Justices G. T. Nanavati and S. Rajendra Babu upheld Kishori Lal's conviction for murder in the November 1984 attacks but reduced his death sentence to life imprisonment, holding that the case was not one of the "rarest of rare".
• 11 January 2018: in the petition of Gurlad Singh Kahlon, a bench led by Chief Justice Dipak Misra ordered a new special investigation team for 186 cases in which closure reports had been filed, headed by the retired Delhi High Court judge S. N. Dhingra. Its report went to the Court in a sealed cover on 29 November 2019.
• 22 April 2026: Justices Vikram Nath, Sandeep Mehta and Vijay Bishnoi gave the Centre two weeks to reply to Balwant Singh Rajoana's plea to commute his death sentence.

Where it stands: on 6 May 2025 Justices Abhay S. Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan issued notice in six Delhi Police petitions against the acquittal of 14 accused in 1984 cases; no outcome was found. Rajoana's plea was listed for 28 October 2026, LawBeat reported on 7 October.