Former Congress MP Sajjan Kumar, who was convicted in two cases related to the 1984 anti-Sikh massacre, died at a Delhi hospital on Thursday, PTI quoted unidentified officials as saying. He was 80.

The cause of his death was not immediately clear.

Kumar was serving life imprisonment in Tihar jail. He was convicted by the Delhi High Court in December 2018 in a case involving the murder five members of a Sikh family in Delhi Cantonment’s Raj Nagar area on November 1, 1984.

The court found him guilty of murder, promoting enmity between groups, and defiling public property.

Large-scale violence had broken out in Delhi on October 31, 1984, after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, who was then the prime minister, by her Sikh bodyguards. Mobs, allegedly helped by some Congress leaders, had attacked Sikhs and torched their homes.

Nearly 3,000 Sikhs were killed in Delhi alone. To date, only 28 cases have ended in convictions out of the 587 first information reports filed in the national capital. Thirteen of these convictions have been in murder cases.

Kumar was a three-time Lok Sabha MP from the Outer Delhi seat, and was representing the constituency during the anti-Sikh massacre. He resigned from the Congress after the 2018 conviction.

He was convicted a second time in February 2025 by a Delhi court and sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of two men during the violence.

The family members of the victims had alleged that a mob led by Kumar burnt the two men alive on November 1, 1984, in the Saraswati Vihar area in the national capital.

They also alleged that Kumar, who was then the Congress MP in Outer Delhi, “instigated and abetted the unruly mob” which set their house on fire.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

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