D.K. Aggarwal

D.K. Aggarwal, spelt Agrawal in the committee's own report, is a retired officer of the Indian Police Service who had been Director-General of Police of Uttar Pradesh. He is named in this record as a member of the committee, with Justice J.D. Jain as chairman, that checked how the Delhi Police had dealt with the cases arising from the November 1984 killings of Sikhs in Delhi. The committee was one of those set up to follow up the recommendations of the Justice Ranganath Misra Commission of Inquiry (chapter 2 of its report).

The Delhi Administration reconstituted the committee a second time on 1 October 1990 by appointing him as member in place of P.A. Rosha, who had left office with the chairman, Justice P. Subramonian Poti, on 22 September 1990. On 30 November 1990 Justice J.D. Jain, a retired Delhi High Court judge, became chairman in Poti's place, and the committee started work in the first week of December 1990 (paras 3.12 and 4.1).

Key moments

• December 1990: the committee takes over 1,084 affidavits from its predecessor, on 30 of which recommendations had already gone to the Lieutenant Governor. It sorts the remaining 1,054, giving first priority to murders (para 4.2). Most of the affidavits had been filed before the Misra Commission and were in Punjabi script, so they had to be translated (para 4.3).
• 5 February and 9 August 1991: it meets the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi. It proposes special investigating teams in the Delhi Police and a review of the work of the three special courts, and the August meeting decides that cases against station officers and sub-inspectors should be investigated by a deputy superintendent of the special team and that deponents be called to confirm their affidavits (paras 4.8 and 4.9).
• 1993: a summary printed with the online copy of the report says the committee's term ended in 1993, and that it highlighted omnibus FIRs, solitary witnesses, untraced cases and the deletion of the names of important persons.

The committee went through more than a thousand affidavits and the police case files on the killings of Sikhs in Delhi in November 1984. It examined how the Delhi Police had investigated the cases and found its investigations sadly lacking in efficiency, purposefulness and compliance with the Code of Criminal Procedure and the Evidence Act (paras 6.1 and 6.2). The committee also said that in some cases the integrity of investigating officers appeared suspect, and that it found no sign that senior officers had given the investigators any leadership. The report speaks throughout as "the Committee", so these findings are the committee's as a body, not his alone.

What he is remembered for. He is remembered as the police officer on the committee that, after the Misra Commission, went back through the affidavits of the families of those killed in November 1984 and put on record how the Delhi Police had handled them.