Justice S.N. Dhingra

Justice S.N. Dhingra is a retired judge of the Delhi High Court. Before he reached the High Court he sat as a trial judge at the Karkardooma courts in Delhi, where, Outlook reports, he handled several cases of the November 1984 killings of Sikhs; Outlook counts at least 16 of them as ending in convictions, among them that of Kishori Lal. Ensaaf's report quotes him, as Additional Sessions Judge, in State v. Ram Pal Saroj writing that "there is no investigation done by the police except recording the statements", and, in another case, declining to make truth and justice a casualty to "the vicious nexus between the police and accused persons".

The Supreme Court's SIT

• January 2018: a Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice Dipak Misra ordered, ThePrint reports, that "a fresh SIT be constituted for carrying on further investigation" into 186 cases closed by the Home Ministry's SIT, and named Dhingra to head a new Special Investigation Team to supervise further probes (The Tribune dates this to 11 January; ThePrint dates the order to 10 January). Its other members were IPS officer Abhishek Dular and retired IPS officer Rajdeep Singh, who did not continue, so the team worked with two members. When work began in 2019, 199 cases had been referred to it.
• 29 November 2019: the SIT filed its report in the Supreme Court in a sealed cover, before a bench of Chief Justice S.A. Bobde and Justices B.R. Gavai and Surya Kant.
• 15 January 2020: Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the Court that the Centre accepted the SIT's recommendations and "will act accordingly as per law", without saying what actions it would take.

What the report said, as The Tribune and Bar and Bench reported it in January 2020: the efforts of the police and administration "seem to have been to hush up the criminal cases"; complaints were clubbed into single FIRs, one covering 498 incidents with a single investigating officer; forensic evidence was not preserved; and trials were dragged out, with judges and public prosecutors criticised for lacking objectivity. It found evidence that Inspector Suvir Singh Tyagi (Shoorveer Singh Tyagi in other accounts), the Kalyanpuri station house officer in 1984, conspired with the mobs, and recommended referring his case to the Delhi Police Riot Cell. It also recommended appeals, with applications to condone the delay, against some acquittals.

What he is remembered for: a trial judge who recorded in the 1990s how poorly the police had investigated the 1984 cases, and then the head of the team whose report in 2019 described the same pattern.