HS Phoolka

Harvinder Singh Phoolka is a Senior Advocate who has spent nearly four decades in court for the survivors of the November 1984 pogrom in Delhi. He is also a politician: he sat in the Punjab Assembly for the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), and on 1 April 2026 he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

1984 and the courts. Phoolka was a young lawyer newly arrived in Delhi in November 1984. He told The Tribune that a Hindu landlord hid him and his wife in a storeroom, and that afterwards he went to a relief camp and began filling in claim forms. In 1985 he helped form the Citizens' Justice Committee, which represented victims before the judicial commissions. He calls himself a “single-point resource centre for victims”. In a Tribune interview in early 2014 he said that of the 2,733 deaths in Delhi only 28 had led to convictions, and that police had closed 241 FIRs as untraced, with no chargesheet and no trial. With the journalist Manoj Mitta he co-wrote When a Tree Shook Delhi, a book on the carnage and its aftermath.

Key moments

• 30 April 2013: a Delhi court acquits Sajjan Kumar in the Delhi Cantonment case. Phoolka calls the verdict only a beginning and says victims need some form of symbolic justice.
• 2014 to 2015: he argues that closed cases need a Special Investigation Team (SIT) led by an officer from outside Delhi Police. The Centre sets up an SIT on 12 February 2015, on the recommendation of a committee headed by Justice (retd) GP Mathur. He also objects that the CBI's third closure report in the Jagdish Tytler case, filed on 24 December 2014, was filed without notice to the complainant.
• 2017: elected from Dakha for AAP, he is made Leader of the Opposition in the Punjab Assembly, then resigns that post and later his seat. He leaves AAP in January 2019 to concentrate on the 1984 cases.
• 17 December 2018: the Delhi High Court convicts Sajjan Kumar and sentences him to life. Phoolka says “we have got the biggest catch” and that the verdict tightens the noose around Kamal Nath.
• 25 January 2019: he is named among the Padma Shri awardees.
• December 2024: he backs the idea of a stronger regional party in Punjab and had considered joining the Shiromani Akali Dal; that does not happen.
• November 2025: in the Delhi High Court he argues for Manjinder Singh Sirsa, who wants a police report placed on record that allegedly shows Kamal Nath at Gurdwara Rakab Ganj on 1 November 1984.
• 1 April 2026: he joins the BJP in Delhi. He says his long legal fight for the 1984 victims led him there and credits the party with backing that fight. Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann of AAP calls it a breach of trust of the people who elected him.

His own assessment. In a February 2025 interview he said only 50 to 60 people had been booked and punished against an estimated 10,000 participants, argued that “no mass killing is possible without the active support of the police”, and said the Sikh leadership had “totally failed the community”. These are his views, not findings of a court.

Remembered for. Phoolka is known as the lawyer who kept the 1984 cases alive against Congress leaders HKL Bhagat, Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler in a record where police closed hundreds of FIRs as untraced. His 2026 move to the BJP drew criticism from AAP's Punjab leadership; he says it follows from the support he received for the 1984 cases.