Arun Nehru

Arun Nehru was a Congress politician, a cousin and close confidant of Rajiv Gandhi, and a Union minister of state in the first Rajiv Gandhi government. In the record of the Panth he is the man a retired senior official named, in 2014, as having given the clearance for the killings of Sikhs in Delhi in November 1984. That account is second-hand, and none of the reports opened for this profile says it was tested in a court. It is set out here as reported and attributed.

Who he was. He was born in Lucknow on 24 April 1944. He sat in the Lok Sabha for Rae Bareli from 1980 to 1989 and held the internal security and energy portfolios as minister of state from 1984 to 1986. In 1987 he left the Congress with V. P. Singh to form the Jan Morcha, and was commerce and tourism minister in 1989 and 1990. After he fell out with Rajiv Gandhi the CBI accused him of causing a loss to the exchequer in a pistol deal with Czechoslovakia. He died in a Gurgaon hospital on 25 July 2013, aged 69.

The account of 1984

• Hartosh Singh Bal wrote in The Caravan, in the cover story Sins of Commission (October 2014, with an excerpt republished on 3 November 2017), that in March 2014, while reporting on Operation Blue Star, he met Avtar Singh Gill, a former petroleum secretary, at his Delhi home.
• Gill told him that months before Blue Star, Arun Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi's close confidant, had sounded him out on how the Sikh community would react if the army entered the Golden Temple, and had told him with some pride that he was a hawk on Punjab.
• Gill said that on 1 November 1984 the hotelier Lalit Suri, whom he called an errand boy for Rajiv Gandhi, came to his ministry office and told him that Arun Nehru had given clearance for the killings in Delhi, that they had started, and that the plan was to catch Sikh youth, fling a tyre over their heads, douse them with kerosene and set them on fire. Suri said it would last three days, and that the mobs had been given the Delhi gurdwara voters' list.
• The Caravan says Gill's statement was the first time a senior government official had put the accusation on record, and that Nehru's role had long been widely rumoured. In the excerpt, Suri's own words come only through Gill.

What the commissions found. The same article quotes the Nanavati commission's finding that after about 10 am on 1 November the nature and intensity of the attacks changed, that slogans such as khoon ka badla khoon se lenge were raised, and that the attacks were made in a systematic manner, almost as if the mobs had been assured of safety. The Caravan reads this as pointing to orders from a single point of command, and calls Gill's account the first coherent explanation of the pattern. That is the magazine's inference.