Aug 25, 2026 13:32 pm IST

Opinion | Sajjan Kumar, Congress, And How To Keep Messing Up An 'Apology'

A sitting Congress MP has termed Sajjan Kumar's death an "irreparable loss", calling him a man whose bond with the people of Delhi was "an example". This was a tribute, delivered in full sentences, to a convicted killer of Sikhs.

Harmeet Shah Singh Harmeet Shah Singh Columnist

Harmeet Shah Singh Columnist

A courtroom in India once wrote something that should have changed the country forever. In December 2018, Justices S Muralidhar and Vinod Goel of the Delhi High Court upheld Sajjan Kumar's conviction for engineering the murder of Sikhs in the aftermath of the assassination of the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, in 1984. Paragraph 367.6 of that order reads like a warning flare shot into the future.

The judges counted 2,733 Sikhs slaughtered in Delhi alone, nearly 3,350 across the country per official data, and named a pattern repeated from Mumbai in 1993 to Gujarat in 2002, Kandhamal in 2008, and Muzaffarnagar in 2013. Dominant political actors organised every mob in that list, the bench wrote, and law enforcement stepped aside every single time. India needed a law against genocide and crimes against humanity urgently, the judges said, or the killers of tomorrow would simply wait out the decades until memory grew tired.

Eight years later, in August 2026, the man that judgment convicted died in prison. A sitting Congress MP, Deepender Hooda, stood at the fresh grave of that verdict and termed Sajjan Kumar's death an "irreparable loss", calling him a man whose bond with the people of Delhi was "an example".

This was a tribute, delivered in full sentences, to a convicted killer of Sikhs. If that wasn't enough, the Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee's official X handle mourned Sajjan Kumar as 'punya atma', or a "noble soul".

वरिष्ठ कांग्रेस नेता एवं पूर्व सांसद श्री सज्जन कुमार जी के निधन का समाचार अत्यंत दुःखद है।ईश्वर पुण्यात्मा को अपने श्रीचरणों में स्थान प्रदान........

© NDTV