Justice, adjourned: the SIT that never was

Six years. That is how long the petitions lay before the Delhi High Court, asking for one thing: an independent investigation into the violence that killed more than fifty people in north-east Delhi in February 2020, and into the police action at Jamia Millia Islamia two months earlier. On Monday, the court answered. No. The bench of Justices Vivek Chaudhary and Manoj Jain dismissed the batch — and with it, pleas to register FIRs against political leaders of every stripe for the hate speeches that lit the fuse, and against police officers accused of standing by, or worse, while the city burned. The detailed reasoning, the court said, will follow. The dismissal came first; the explanation can wait. That order of operations tells its own story. Consider what the court has protected. Leaders named across the petitions — Parvesh Verma, Kapil Mishra and Anurag Thakur on one side of the aisle; Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Owaisi and a dozen others on the other — will face no FIRs from these pleas. Power, it turns out, is the best legal defence, and it works for every party. Now consider who remains in a cell. Umar Khalid has been in custody since 2020. Last week the same court denied him bail. The accused wait years for trial; the petitioners waited six years for an answer; and the answer is that the investigation they never trusted will never be independently examined. Periyar taught that justice which bows to power is not justice but ceremony. Anna warned that law in the hands of the powerful becomes a stick to beat the powerless. On Monday, the ceremony was performed flawlessly: petitions heard, petitions dismissed, reasons to follow. The court has closed the book. But the families of those who died in February 2020 did not get to close theirs. A verdict can end a case. It cannot end the question — who set Delhi on fire, and who let it burn? Until that question is answered by an investigation the people can trust, justice in this case stands adjourned. Sine die.