It was the first major terrorist attack in northern India. Twenty-one years later the trial is still to begin. In the intervening years, some of the accused have died, judges, investigating officers and lawyers have had their turns and the victims have moved on. If there’s anything that hasn’t really moved, it’s the trial in the nine related cases. In the latest development —if one can call it that—on May 7 this year, charges were framed against four accused in three cases—in 2004 charges were framed for the first time in three cases. Charges are yet to be framed in the remaining three.

Over a fortnight in early May 1985, a series of explosions rocked the Capital and cities in Northern India. In Gandhinagar, Khayala, Ghaziabad, Panipat, Meerut, on trains and buses heading out of Delhi, citizens found and picked up transistor radio sets. The sets were rigged to blow up when the transistor circuits were completed.

Although the explosives were of low intensity, the serial blasts, more than twenty-five in total, left 69 dead and 127 injured and succeeded in spreading terror among citizens.

On May 12 that year, Patel Nagar police raided the house of Kartar Singh Narang at Delhi’s West Patel Nagar and seized several cabinets of transistor radios, explosive substances, detonators and handguns. Narang, an income-tax lawyer and a member of the bar association at Tis Hazari courts, allegedly confessed to the police that he had masterminded the terror strikes to avenge the 1984 massacre of Sikhs. Investigations were later to reveal the alleged role of expatriate Sikhs as well.

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