Anti-Sikh riot report kicks up storm in India

NEW DELHI - India's parliament was disrupted on Tuesday as rival lawmakers clashed over a report on anti-Sikh riots in 1984 which named ruling Congress party leaders in connection with the violence that left nearly 3000 Sikhs dead.

Opposition lawmakers want the government to take action against a junior minister, Jagdish Tytler, who the report said may have instigated rioters after then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was killed by her Sikh bodyguards more than 20 years ago.

But the Congress party-led coalition government headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, himself a Sikh, said it was not taking action against Tytler as the panel did not have conclusive evidence against him.

Tytler has denied the charges.

The inquiry report by retired judge G.T. Nanavati, which was tabled in parliament on Monday, probed one of India's worst religious riots, which broke out across northern India after Gandhi was assassinated on October 31, 1984.

Media reports and human rights groups say the Congress party -- which was ruling the country at the time as well -- had a hand in organising the anti-Sikh killings, a charge denied by the party.

On Tuesday, deputies from the opposition National Democratic Alliance -- including members of a small Sikh party -- demanded an immediate discussion on the report in the lower house of parliament but the speaker said a time had to be agreed upon first for such a debate.

"I deeply mourn the occasion (the riots)," speaker Somnath Chatterjee said as opposition lawmakers shouted anti-government slogans. He then adjourned the house.

The upper house was also adjourned for an hour as an uproar erupted over the Nanavati report.

"The Nanavati Commission has held the Congress party responsible for the killing of Sikhs," Sushma Swaraj of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party said in the upper house.

But the government said it would investigate whether legal action could be taken against another Congress leader, Dharam Das Shastri, also accused of instigating riots.

The media said that the government needed to act on the Nanavati report if it wanted to heal the wounds of the Sikh community, who make up around two percent of Hindu-majority India's one-billion-plus population.

The uproar in parliament is an embarrassment for the government, but is not a threat to its survival, analysts said.

"For the Congress , it is an important moment," the Indian Express wrote in an editorial. "Its credibility is on test. Will it seek to brazenly protect its own or will it choose serve the ends of justice?"

At least 2733 people were killed -- many of them burnt alive -- in reprisal killings after Indira Gandhi's assassination.

The former prime minister's killing was to avenge her decision to send troops to flush out Sikh separatists from the Golden Temple, Sikhism's holiest shrine, in north India.

Most of the Sikhs killed in the 1984 riots died in New Delhi where about 600 cases of arson, killing and rioting were registered, but police closed half of them, ostensibly for lack of evidence. Only around 10 people have been convicted of murder.

- REUTERS