Haunted by the ghosts of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, which clouded much of his political career, former Congress MP Sajjan Kumar died on Thursday while serving two concurrent life sentences at Tihar Jail.Kumar, 80, was declared dead at Safdarjung Hospital after being taken there following complaints of uneasiness. Ironically, he died on the same day the Supreme Court was to hear his parole application. Kumar had sought three weeks’ parole to tend to his ailing wife.A former three-time Lok Sabha MP from Outer Delhi, Kumar remained the only high-profile Congress leader to ever face justice for his role in the riots that led to the killing of more than 2,700 Sikhs in the aftermath of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination on October 31, 1984.Kumar was sentenced to life imprisonment in two separate cases. The first involved killings of five members of Jagdish Kaur’s family, who resided in Delhi’s Palam Colony’s Raj Nagar at the time of the crimes on November 1 and 2, 1984. The second was for the murders of Jaswant Singh and his son in the Saraswati Vihar area.Jagdish Kaur, whose relentless quest for justice led to Kumar’s first conviction on December 17, 2018, when the Delhi High Court convicted him in the Raj Nagar murders, said she had always wanted Kumar to be hanged.“Sajjan Kumar should have been hanged to death or lynched in full public view for the crimes he committed. I will never be able to make peace with the fact that he died a natural death in jail. The brutality he heaped on my family members will stay with me like a festering wound which will never heal. The mobs he incited crushed my husband’s head till he dropped dead. My young son was made to run for his life and then torched to death. My three cousins were also burnt alive. Humanity had died,” Kaur told The Tribune, speaking on Kumar’s demise.Settled in Amritsar with her only surviving son, who was six years old at the time of the murders, Jagdish Kaur broke down on Thursday as she recalled the anguishing moments that followed the killings.“No one helped me even with the last rites. I prepared the pyres myself, using furniture lying at home. I remember going to the police station to get help for the cremations and the officer in-charge telling me: ‘Abhi toh aur marenge, phir sabka ek saath karenge’ (more will die, we will perform mass cremations),” Kaur said, adding that Kumar was delivering speeches from inside police stations asking mobs to kill Sikhs as well as Hindus who sheltered Sikhs.In February 2025, Kumar was convicted in the second case involving the murders of Jaswant Singh and his son Tarundeep Singh in Saraswati Vihar and handed a second life sentence.As survivors continue to live with the consequences of the violence, activists who helped them find closure continue to lament that Kumar became a living symbol of how the wheels of justice turn slowly in India. They were referring to his first conviction, which came 34 years after the crime.It was only on December 18, 2018 — one day after the Delhi HC awarded him the first life sentence in the riots case — that Kumar eventually resigned from primary membership of the Congress. Rising from the ranks of municipal council politics to the Lok Sabha, Kumar remained a key figure in the Delhi Congress for years even as court battles in anti-Sikh riot cases dragged on.It was in the 2009 General Election that the Congress denied Kumar a ticket for the first time, fielding his brother Ramesh Kumar instead. Ramesh Kumar won that election but lost in 2014. That marked the end of the Kumar family’s political career.