Justice P. Subramanian Poti

Justice Padmanabhan Subramanian Poti (the committee reports also spell his middle name Subramonian and Subramaniam) was a judge from Kerala who became Chief Justice of the Gujarat High Court and, after retiring, chaired the committee that took over the Jain-Banerjee Committee's work on the cases of the November 1984 killings of Sikhs in Delhi. The Gujarat High Court's profile says he was born in Trivandrum on 2 February 1923, enrolled as an advocate in September 1945, became Advocate General of Kerala in 1967 and a judge of the Kerala High Court in 1969, and was Chief Justice of the Gujarat High Court from 28 September 1983 until 1 February 1985.

The Poti-Rosha Committee

• 22 March 1990: after the Delhi High Court had quashed the Jain-Banerjee notification, the Delhi Administration appointed a fresh committee with Justice Poti as chairman and P.A. Rosha, a retired IPS officer, as member, in replacement of Justice M.L. Jain and A.K. Banerji. Poti took charge on 22 March and Rosha on 27 March 1990, with six months to work.
• Its first step was to read the High Court's judgment of 4 October 1989. In Poti's summary, it could seek information through affidavits but could not act on fresh allegations against individuals. It had 1,084 affidavits to scrutinise: 669 filed before the Misra Commission and 415 before its predecessor.
• 8 May 1990: at Poti's request the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi called a meeting that decided that all the police records must be made available, that Delhi Police would set up investigation teams for the cases the committee recommended, and that on a selective basis cases could go to the CBI.
• 9 August and 11 September 1990: it sent the Administrator recommendations on 11 and then 19 affidavits, 30 in all.
• 22 September 1990: Poti and Rosha relinquished office after six months. Justice J.D. Jain became chairman under an order of 30 November 1990.

The Jain-Aggarwal Committee's report says the Poti-Rosha Committee "had to do a lot of spade work" to get the records from police stations, because every case diary had to be read to see whether an incident in an affidavit had been dealt with. The Delhi High Court's judgment of 17 December 2018 records that the committee recommended that a case be registered and investigated by the CBI over the offences alleged in Anwar Kaur's affidavit. When a CBI party went to Sajjan Kumar's house on 11 September 1990 to search it and arrest him, the judgment says, the High Court granted him anticipatory bail that night, and it quotes a CBI officer's affidavit that a crowd gathered outside and the party could leave only after the bail order reached it.

What he is remembered for: his committee sat for six months and sent 30 cases forward, and the system it built for checking each affidavit against the police records was kept by the committee that followed it.