Justice G.P. Mathur

Justice G. P. Mathur is a retired judge of the Supreme Court of India. In December 2014 the Government of India asked him to chair a committee on the unfinished cases of the November 1984 killings of Sikhs. Its recommendation led to the Home Ministry's Special Investigation Team (SIT) of 2015.

The committee: The Government set it up on 23 December 2014, ahead of the Delhi Assembly election, after the Union Cabinet had approved, on 10 December, enhanced compensation of Rs 5 lakh for each person killed (PTI, 24 December 2014). Its brief was to examine whether an SIT could be formed to re-investigate the cases, to look into victims' grievances and to oversee payment of the enhanced compensation. A Home Ministry official said it would report within three months.

What it found: ThePrint reports that the committee noted that “a proper investigation of the offences committed was not conducted” and that “some kind of sham effort had been made to give it the shape of investigations”. It recommended an SIT to examine whether other closed cases should be reopened.

Key moments

• 23 December 2014: the committee is appointed.
• 13 February 2015: the Home Ministry announces a three-member SIT, headed by the police officer Pramod Asthana with Rakesh Kapoor, a retired district and sessions judge, and Kumar Gyanesh, an Additional DCP, set up after the Government accepted the recommendations of the Justice G.P. Mathur Committee. It was to report within six months (Home Ministry press release).
• 11 January 2018: on the petition of S. Gurlad Singh Kahlon the Supreme Court holds that “it would be appropriate that a fresh SIT should be constituted” and names a team headed by the retired Delhi High Court judge S. N. Dhingra (WION). The bench, led by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, agreed that the first SIT had not done a detailed probe in many cases (LiveLaw, 29 November 2019).

What he is remembered for: for a short committee whose finding, that the first investigations were not proper and that some kind of sham effort had been made, led the Government to set up an SIT to re-investigate the closed cases. Whether the reopened cases ended in justice is a separate record.