Justice J.D. Jain

Justice J.D. Jain was a retired judge of the Delhi High Court who chaired the third of the committees set up to look into how the police had handled the cases of the November 1984 killings of Sikhs in Delhi. The Delhi High Court's own profile of Justice Jagmandar Dass Jain, who appears to be the same man, says he was born on 21 March 1924, joined the Punjab judicial service on 4 August 1950 as a sub judge at Amritsar, became an additional judge of the Delhi High Court on 19 October 1979 and retired on 21 March 1986.

The Delhi Administration named him chairman by an order of 30 November 1990, in place of Justice P. Subramonian Poti, with D.K. Agrawal (Aggarwal), a retired IPS officer and former director general of police of Uttar Pradesh, as member. The committee, known as the Jain-Aggarwal Committee, began work in the first week of December 1990. It was set up to follow up the Misra Commission's recommendation of committees for the unregistered and badly investigated cases. It examined how the Delhi Police had investigated these cases and what became of them.

Key moments

• December 1990: the committee takes over 1,084 affidavits from its predecessor, the Poti-Rosha Committee, 30 of which had already gone to the Lieutenant Governor with recommendations. It sorts the other 1,054, giving first priority to murders. Most were in Punjabi script and had to be translated (paras 4.1 to 4.3).
• 1991: it meets the Lieutenant Governor on 5 February and 9 August and proposes special investigating teams in the Delhi Police (para 4.8). It examines the case files of 403 FIRs and, after the August meeting, calls the deponents to confirm their affidavits, sending its secretary to Chandigarh to record four who had settled in Punjab (paras 4.4, 4.9).
• 1992: the Delhi High Court's judgment of 17 December 2018 in the Sajjan Kumar case records, in its account of the prosecution case, that the committee's report of 1992 recommended further investigation into the attack on the house of Jasbir Singh and into the deaths of five men named in that case (para 45).
• August 1993: The Tribune's 2005 chronology says the committee was wound up, that it had recommended registering cases against H.K.L. Bhagat, Sajjan Kumar, Dharamdas Shastri and Jagdish Tytler, and that the police did not even register them.

What it found: the report says the Delhi Police had recorded "general, vague and omnibus" FIRs instead of a separate FIR for each offence (para 5.1). It says the investigations were "sadly lacking in efficiency, purposefulness and even in compliance" with the law, that in some cases the integrity of the investigating officers "appeared suspect" (para 6.1), and that senior officers gave the investigators no leadership (para 6.2). The Nanavati Commission's report names the reconstituted committee of Justice J.D. Jain and D.K. Aggarwal and says it identified 90 police officials for lapses; it gives 147 as the total indicted by that committee and the Kusum Lata Mittal Committee, which named 72, although 72 and 90 add up to 162 and the report does not say why the totals differ.

What he is remembered for: as the retired judge who chaired the committee that, after the Misra Commission, went back through the families' affidavits and put on record how the Delhi Police had handled them. He is not Justice M.L. Jain, who sat on the earlier Jain-Banerjee Committee.