Last Updated:
Verma shared the horrors of the riots as former Congress leader Sajjan Kumar was awarded life imprisonment for the murder of a father-son duo in Saraswati Vihar in the national capital in 1984
Parvesh Verma, who is the son of senior BJP leader late Sahib Singh, said his father saved 22 Sikhs by hiding them in his house. (PTI)
Delhi cabinet minister Parvesh Sahib Singh Verma on Tuesday recalled the horrors of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots when he was just seven years old as former Congress leader Sajjan Kumar was awarded life imprisonment for the murder of a father-son duo in Saraswati Vihar in the national capital during the riots.
Verma, who is the son of senior BJP leader late Sahib Singh, also said his father saved 22 Sikhs by hiding them in his house.
“We were staying in Keshav Puram at that time. I was just seven years old. I saw everything. One day I woke up and there was fire everywhere. People were being killed. My father hid 22 Sikhs in our house for a few days to save them,” he recalled, addressing the media at the Delhi Assembly.
Verma also recalled the horrors of how Sikhs were burnt alive by putting burning tyres around their necks.
As news of Sajjan Kumar’s sentencing broke, Verma’s cabinet colleagues MS Sirsa also praised the sentence in the Assembly, where the first session was underway after the BJP came back to power in the city for the first time after 1993.
Special judge Kaveri Baweja on Tuesday pronounced the judgement for the alleged killing of Jaswant Singh and his son Tarundeep Singh on November 1, 1984. Jaswant’s wife was demanding death penalty for Kumar.
The prosecution alleged a huge mob, armed with deadly weapons, resorted to large-scale looting, arson and destruction of properties of Sikhs to avenge the assassination of former Prime Minister late Indira Gandhi. The men in the house were killed, the wife claimed.
Kumar was being accused of leading the mob that burned alive the two men.
At that time a senior Congress leader, Kumar has been in jail as he is already serving a life sentence from the Delhi High Court since 2018 in another case where five Sikhs were killed at Palam’s Raj Nagar on November 1-2, 1984.
He was also been accused of burning down of a gurdwara in Raj Nagar Part II.
Post the assassination of Gandhi in 1984, riots broke out in several parts of the country, including Delhi, as the then PM was killed by her two Sikh bodyguards.
Her killing was widely seen as a response to her government’s decision to deploy the Army in the Golden Temple in Amritsar in June 1984 to remove militants hiding inside.
