By SIDHARTH MISHRA
Former Congress MP Sajjan Kumar died in Tihar Jail while serving a life sentence for the 1984 anti-Sikh violence, leaving behind a deeply contested political legacy.
New Delhi, August 20, 2026 — Former Lok Sabha member Sajjan Kumar died on Thursday, August 20, 2026, at the age of 80, while serving a life sentence in Tihar Jail in connection with the 1984 anti-Sikh violence. He was taken to Safdarjung Hospital, where he was declared dead. He would have turned 81 next month.
It is difficult to write an obituary for Sajjan Kumar without confronting the enormous contradiction that defined his public life. The criminal convictions arising from the 1984 violence are an indelible part of his legacy. He was convicted in the Raj Nagar case over the killings of five Sikhs and the burning of a gurdwara and was serving a life term. In 2025, he received another life sentence in the Saraswati Vihar case for the killings of Jaswant Singh and his son Tarundeep Singh. At the same time, in January this year, a Delhi court acquitted him in a separate case concerning violence in Janakpuri and Vikaspuri, holding that the prosecution had failed to establish the charges beyond reasonable doubt.
Kumar always maintained his innocence in the riot cases and alleged political vendetta. But the acquittal in one case does not erase the convictions in others. Nor can his long and consequential career in Delhi politics be understood without acknowledging the suffering of the victims and the decades-long quest for justice that followed the 1984 violence.
I first saw Sajjan Kumar sometime in 1985. He had been denied a ticket to contest the Lok Sabha election and was then functioning as general secretary of the Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee, headed by Tajdar Babar.
We had joined Delhi University in the summer of 1985 and, as was the wont then, we freshers were “escorted” to meet senior leaders of the two principal student organisations: the Congress’s NSUI and the BJP-backed ABVP. A few of us visited Keshav Kunj with the ABVP, escorted by the present Delhi Education Minister, Ashish Sood. There we met the pracharak in charge of Delhi University, if I recall correctly, Nanduji. We were adequately briefed. Some years later, Jagat Prakash Nadda was to replace him.
The NSUI volunteers took us to the Delhi Congress office, then on Talkatora Road. It was there that I first saw Kumar.
He was slim and smartly dressed — white trousers, white sports shoes and a yellow T-shirt. Beneath the T-shirt, one could see the outline of a bullet-proof vest.
The security was not for show. Kumar, like other prominent Delhi Congress leaders such as HKL Bhagat and Jagdish Tytler, was living under threat from Sikh militants. All had Z-plus security. Another leader of that generation, Lalit Maken, also had heavy security. It did not save him. Maken was assassinated along with his wife, Gitanjali, by militants.
Over the next few years, we saw Kumar, Bhagat and Tytler regularly visit the DU campus for various functions. Kumar was particularly visible and immensely popular among NSUI activists. He was, for many of them, the go-to man.
Journalism gave me a closer look at him, particularly during the 1998 Delhi Assembly elections.
There was a churn in the Congress. Sheila Dikshit had been brought into the Delhi unit to end factionalism. Bhagat was on his way out, and interestingly, both his protégé Kumar and his rival Tytler backed Dikshit in the internal tussle.
The alliance did not last. Both eventually fell out with Dikshit as she came to exercise increasingly complete command over the Delhi Congress. Kumar may no longer have fitted comfortably into the new power structure, but he retained his clout in his constituency and among the organisation’s workers.
His political career had begun with an emphatic victory in rural Delhi. In the 1980 Lok Sabha election, he defeated former chief minister and towering Delhi leader Chaudhary Brahm Prakash. His later rivalry was with the indefatigable BJP leader and former chief minister Sahib Singh Verma. Kumar won the Outer Delhi seat from Verma in 2004.
By 2009, however, the 1984 cases had become an insurmountable political liability and he was denied a Congress ticket. He responded by getting his brother Ramesh Kumar to contest the seat on a Congress ticket; Ramesh won. Kumar’s own electoral career was effectively over.
His political eclipse became complete after the BJP came to power at the Centre in 2014 and the old riot cases were reopened and pursued with renewed vigour. Kumar eventually resigned from the Congress after his 2018 conviction and spent the remaining years of his life in prison. He had surrendered in December 2018 after the Delhi High Court awarded him a life sentence.
Yet if one is writing about Kumar as a politician, there is another side that cannot simply be wished away.
In the nearly two decades that I followed his politics, I found him remarkably patient with reporters. He seldom reacted angrily to an unfavourable story. If something particularly pinched him, he would call the reporter and tell him or her that they had been unnecessarily harsh.
The converse was also true. If something favourable about him appeared in print — something that was, admittedly, not very frequent — he would positively call to thank the reporter. At times, it was that phone call that made a journalist realise that he or she had inadvertently written a positive story about Sajjan Kumar.
His principal strength was organisational. He knew how to build and maintain a political network. Over the years, he groomed a large number of leaders in Outer and East Delhi, among them legislators and ministers such as Arvinder Singh Lovely, Rajkumar Chauhan, Mukesh Sharma, the late Jaikishan, Bijender Singh, Anil Bhardwaj, Nand Kishore, Sumesh Shokeen and Balram Tanwar, besides, to an extent, Rambabu Sharma. Some of his protégés later became dissidents; others crossed over to rival parties. Lovely and Chauhan are today with the BJP.
Kumar himself, despite his differences with Dikshit and the changing equations within the Congress, never deserted the party. His loyalty to the organisation was one of the more enduring features of his political career.
He would also be remembered for his annual winter lunch in the first week of January. It was a great jamboree of journalists, all cordially invited well in advance. For years, it was one of the small rituals of Delhi’s political calendar.
But political skill, organisational loyalty and personal accessibility cannot balance the historical weight of 1984.
For Sikhs who lost relatives, homes and livelihoods in those terrible days, Sajjan Kumar’s name came to represent something much larger than one politician’s career. His eventual convictions were, for many victims and their families, an important acknowledgment that accountability could come even decades after the violence. His acquittals in some cases, meanwhile, demonstrated the other fundamental principle of criminal justice: allegations must be proved with evidence. Both facts belong in his obituary.
Kumar died a lonely man in jail, his political career having ended years before his death. But loneliness at the end should not obscure the extraordinary influence he once exercised over Delhi’s Congress organisation, just as his organisational achievements cannot obscure the crimes for which courts ultimately held him responsible.
That is perhaps the uncomfortable truth about Sajjan Kumar: he was at once a formidable political organiser, a loyal Congressman, a leader who commanded considerable affection among sections of his workers, and a politician whose name became inseparable from one of the darkest episodes in independent India’s history.
There will be many in Delhi politics who will continue to talk about him. They will remember different Sajjan Kumars — the politician, the organiser, the mentor, the adversary, the man in the bullet-proof vest, the familiar voice on the telephone, and, ultimately, the convict who died behind bars.
An obituary does not have to choose between those memories. It has to hold them together.
(This is an opinion piece. Views expressed are the author’s own.)
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