Nikhil Kumar

Nikhil Kumar is a retired Indian Police Service officer who later sat in the Lok Sabha and served as a state Governor. He is a living person; what is said of him below is attributed to those who said it. Wikipedia gives his birth date as 15 July 1941.

Career

• 1963: joins the IPS and is assigned to Delhi.
• January 1995 to April 1997: Commissioner of Police, Delhi. He then headed the Indo-Tibetan Border Police in 1997 and, from 30 June 1999 to 31 July 2001, the National Security Guard.
• 2004 to 2009: Congress member of the Lok Sabha for Aurangabad, Bihar, chairing the Parliamentary Committee on Information Technology.
• 15 October 2009 to 21 March 2013: Governor of Nagaland. From 23 March 2013 to March 2014 he was Governor of Kerala, resigning to contest the Lok Sabha election.

November 1984. Kumar's name is tied to the killings in Block 32 of Trilokpuri in east Delhi, where Sikhs were killed over about two days from 1 November. The PUDR gives an official toll of 95 and cites another report that puts it at about 450. The sources record the following, and they do not tell one story.

• The evidence: Joseph Maliakan, an Indian Express reporter, told the Nanavati Commission that around 5 pm on 2 November he told Police Commissioner Subhash Tandon and Kumar, whom the report calls Additional Commissioner of Police, about Block 32. According to Maliakan, Kumar said he was a "mere guest artist" whose only job was to inform the police control room.
• The complaint: the PUDR reports that Maliakan and his colleague Rahul Bedi lodged a complaint with the Police Commissioner on 5 November 1984, alleging criminal negligence by H. C. Jatav, Additional Commissioner of Police, Nikhil Kumar, Additional Commissioner of Police, East district, and Sewa Das, Deputy Commissioner of Police, East district. Bedi wrote in 2014 that appeals to senior policemen including Tandon and Kumar to stop the Block 32 killings came to nothing. Shekhar Gupta wrote in ThePrint that Sikh officers accused Kumar, Jatav and Sewa Dass of negligence in a later inquiry, and that Kumar was reported to have said he was on leave and only visiting police headquarters. Gupta adds that Kumar later denied this.
• Kumar's explanation, as the Nanavati Commission recorded it: he was Additional Commissioner until 8 October 1984 and was on joining time and leave to take up duties in Mizoram. He had come from Patna to pay homage to Indira Gandhi, and the Police Commissioner asked him to help with the telephones at police headquarters, which he did from the afternoon of 2 November. He was not posted with the Delhi Police at the time. Volume I of the report mentions him only in this explanation and in Maliakan's evidence.
• What followed: the PUDR reported that the Mittal committee recommended action against 72 policemen, including summary dismissal of six, among them Sewa Das and H. C. Jatav. It did not say Kumar was among those named. Of the three officers in the 5 November complaint it wrote that "all of them in the meantime got promotions". The Nanavati report records that the Mittal and Jain-Aggarwal committees together indicted 147 police officials, and that the inquiry against Jatav ended with a 30 percent cut in his pension for five years.

What he is remembered for: a career that ran from the Delhi Police to the National Security Guard, Parliament and two Raj Bhavans, and, for Sikhs, a name that appears in the record of the first days of November 1984 in east Delhi.