Justice Ranjit Singh Narula

Justice Ranjit Singh Narula was a judge who rose to be Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court. According to Wikipedia he was born in 1915, became a judge of that court in 1965 and was its Chief Justice from 11 May 1974 until he resigned on 31 October 1977, and he also acted as Governor of Punjab in September 1977. The Haryana government's list of former Governors gives him that office for Haryana from 27 March to 13 August 1976. He died in New Delhi on 1 June 2005, and The Tribune reported his cremation the next day.

Key moments

• 31 October to 3 November 1984: in his affidavit to the Nanavati Commission, as the report summarises it, he returned from Nepal to Delhi on the evening of 31 October, could not get to his house in Defence Colony and was taken to his daughter's house in the Northern Railway Colony. On 3 November a friend, S. Manmohan Singh, advised him not to step out until the next day, because Congress friends had told him that "this programme was for three days". Narula produced reports by the Citizens Commission and by the PUDR and PUCL, among others, and said that Ved Marwah's handwritten notes of his inquiry against police officers had been destroyed under instructions of higher authorities.
• Ensaaf, citing his affidavit, says he watched Doordarshan on the morning of 1 November and was amazed that the crowd outside Teen Murti House chanted "Khoon Ka Badla Khoon" while officials watched. It says he also learned that police officers had told Marwah of orders from their seniors to cover up or take part in the killings, which Marwah noted but the officers left out of their written statements.
• December 1993 to January 1994: ThePrint says the Delhi government under Chief Minister Madan Lal Khurana set up a committee headed by Narula in December 1993, and that its report of January 1994 recommended registering cases against H.K.L. Bhagat, Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler. Ensaaf says that Khurana's government appointed Narula in 1994 to head an advisory committee, which reviewed the findings of the earlier committees and again recommended cases against Bhagat and Kumar, on 21 affidavits.

What he is remembered for: as a former Chief Justice who put on the record, as a witness, what he was told in Delhi in the first days of November 1984 and the fate of Marwah's notes, and who then led the government's review that again asked for cases against senior Congress leaders. The sources opened give no outcome of the cases his committee recommended beyond the registration Khurana describes.