Kishori Lal

Kishori Lal, a former butcher from Trilokpuri in east Delhi, is one of the few people convicted and sentenced for killing Sikhs in Delhi in the November 1984 pogrom. Sikh Siyasat News counted him among 25 people convicted by city courts for such offences, and treated his case as a rare exception in a record of impunity.

The court record

• A Delhi sessions court convicted him of murder in the November 1984 attacks on Sikh families and sentenced him to death. Two co-accused received life terms. The High Court upheld his death sentence and acquitted the two.
• 1 December 1998: the Supreme Court, in Kishori v. State of Delhi, upheld his conviction but reduced the sentence to life imprisonment. A summary of the judgment says the court weighed the emotional turmoil after Indira Gandhi's assassination and mob behaviour, and held the case was not one of the "rarest of rare". The Bench was Justices G.T. Nanavati and S. Rajendra Babu. Three prosecution witnesses had identified him as part of the mob that attacked their families.
• Ensaaf, in a 2004 post on its Human Rights in Punjab blog, criticised the reasoning. It reports that the bench called the killings spontaneous and said he merely picked up a weapon that was close by. Ensaaf calls him the "butcher of Trilokpuri" and says he killed at least eight Sikh men.

The 2012 remission

Sikh Siyasat News reported on 13 February 2012, citing news reports of the day before, that Delhi's Lieutenant-Governor Tejinder Khanna had commuted the sentences of Kishori Lal and 14 other life convicts on the recommendation of the state Sentence Review Board. Jail authorities had cited his "excellent conduct" as an inmate and his age. He was said to have been held in Tihar jail since 1996, was then 48, and had to furnish a bond of Rs 10,000. The report said he "will soon be a free man", so it does not confirm that he had left jail.

Remembered for: Sikh Siyasat News presents his conviction as a rare exception in a record of impunity for the 1984 killings, and argues that the violence was planned by officials and the ruling Congress party. That is the outlet's position, not a finding of a court.