Madan Lal Khurana

Madan Lal Khurana was a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Delhi, popularly called the "lion of Delhi". In 1984 he was General Secretary of the Delhi BJP and Leader of the Opposition in the Metropolitan Council of Delhi, as the Nanavati Commission records. As Chief Minister of Delhi from December 1993 he set up the committee that again recommended cases against Congress leaders over the November 1984 killings of Sikhs.

Key moments

• 1 November 1984: according to the Nanavati Commission's summary of his affidavit, he telephoned Additional Commissioner of Police H.C. Jatav and asked him to take immediate steps for calling the Army. Jatav replied that "nothing much was happening", and, when Khurana said innocent Sikhs were being killed, that "when an important personality dies there is bound to be some reaction".
• December 1993: Khurana became Chief Minister of Delhi. In the same month, ThePrint says, his government appointed retired Chief Justice Ranjit Singh Narula of the Punjab and Haryana High Court to head a committee on the 1984 cases; Ensaaf dates the appointment to 1994.
• February 1996: he resigned as Chief Minister amid the Hawala controversy (ThePrint).
• 16 May 2001: he gave his statement to the Nanavati Commission, which records him as Witness W-8 (Ensaaf's citation of the date).

What he told the Nanavati Commission. He said that a BJP survey, made at the instance of Atal Behari Vajpayee, found 2,800 Sikhs killed in Delhi; a note introducing the Ahooja Committee report puts the survey at about 2,700. He said that the Jain-Aggarwal Committee had recommended criminal cases against Sajjan Kumar and H.K.L. Bhagat on affidavits of 21 persons but that no action was taken by the Delhi Government, and that when he became Chief Minister the Home Ministry took the affidavits over so that they were "out of his reach", returning them only after he threatened to approach the National Human Rights Commission. The Commission's summary says cases were registered against Bhagat only after his "vigorous efforts" with the Lieutenant Governor. Ensaaf, citing his affidavit, says he finally persuaded the Lieutenant Governor to register the cases, and elsewhere that the CBI could file its charge sheet against Sajjan Kumar in December 1994 only after he began to push for the sanction to prosecute, which it had sought in 1992.

The Narula Committee. ThePrint says its report of January 1994 recommended registering cases against Bhagat, Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler. Ensaaf says it recommended cases against Bhagat and Kumar on 21 affidavits, and that Khurana asked the Centre in 1995 to act against the two.

Later: he was Union Minister for Parliamentary Affairs and Tourism in 1998 and 1999, was briefly Governor of Rajasthan in 2004, and died on 27 October 2018 at the age of 82.