A Delhi-based lawyer on Saturday wrote a letter to President Ram Nath Kovind seeking reopening and reinvestigation by a Special Investigation Team (SIT) into the target killings of Kashmiri Pandits during 1989-90.
In his letter, Vineet Jindal, a practicing Supreme Court lawyer, stated that thousands lost their lives in the target killings.
After the massacre, successive governments assured Kashmiri Pandits of justice, but nothing happened, the lawyer said in his letter.
He further said that 215 FIRs had been registered and the cases were investigated by the Jammu & Kashmir Police but but to no avail.
“Therefore, it surely builds a doubt about the kind of investigation that was done for these FIR’s and the Union government too failed to take any measures to ensure justice to the families of victims or punish ‘terrorists like Yasin Malik’ who was one of the proactive participants of the massacre.”
The letter went on to say that there were are many others like Malik who were actively involved in the massacre and are supposed to be behind bars but due to the ignorant attitude of police officials and the lenient attitude of the previous governments, the victims were yet to get justice.
It also contended that while the investigations pertaining to FIRs lodged in the massacre cases yielded no fruitful results, manipulation of data of the victims can be observed in various reports.
There have been contradictions about the number of Kashmiri Pandits killed in the massacre as per the reports by different sources which reveal a vast variation in the data.
Describing the horrors of the incident, Jindal said in his letter that it was a terrifying incident when the life of Kashmiri Pandits spiraled into one of the worst nightmares with murders, gang rapes, grenade blasts, encounters, arrests, disappearances, which left the victims in utter shock and immense trauma leaving them vulnerable in every sense.
Highlighting the 30 years of delay of delivering justice in the matter, the letter said in such a shattering situation, the onus of investigation and punishing the culprits largely lay upon the police officials of Jammu and Kashmir, as well as the administration.