SHAMBIR & ORS Vs. STATE

JUDGEMENT

(1.) That the criminal justice administration may falter or crumble, or lose its potency, is no longer a distant doomsday scenario. It appears to have arrived and stares at us in the face. The question as to whether the guilt of the appellants for complicity in rioting and mischief by fire was correctly concluded or not has come up for determination thirty-four years after the crimes were committed and twenty-two years after the trial court had rendered its decision. The whole exercise is reduced to the level of academic.

(2.) On 31.10.1984, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India, was assassinated by her bodyguards. Riots broke out on the same day in the capital city of Delhi and other parts of the country which, in no time, turned communal, they being directed against the Sikh community. Carnage followed for several days in which thousands suffered physical harm or damage to the property. A large number perished. Semblance of law and order returned, albeit after several days, in the wake of the armed forces being called in aid of the civil administration.

(3.) The failure of the police, and the civil authorities, in controlling the situation, or meeting the challenge, by enforcing the law has been chronicled not only in the media reports but also found to be a fact in decisions of the courts of law, in various cases brought at almost each level of the judicial hierarchy, as indeed recorded in the reports of numerous Commissions of inquiry or Committees that were set up in the decades that have followed. The circumstances that prevailed during riots are the harsh reality of which judicial notice may be taken.