The promise by Singh, India’s first Sikh prime minister, came during heated debate on a report which said a junior minister, Jagdish Tytler, “very probably” helped organise the riots in which nearly 3,000 Sikhs were killed.

“Wherever the commission has named any specific individual as needing further examination and cases needing reopening, the government will take all possible steps to do so within the ambit of law,” Singh told parliament.

Earlier the Congress-led government which was in power at the time of the riots ruled out investigating Tytler’s actions during the riots, saying “probability” was insufficient to reopen the case against the minister.

The refusal to act had created uproar in parliament and loud protests from the Sikh community, outraged at what it said was a denial of justice for two decades.

There was growing media speculation late Wednesday that Tytler, who has denied any involvement in the riots, would bow to demands from Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and resign.

The probe ordered by the then BJP government in 2000 was the ninth to be held into the carnage, in which witnesses said police turned a blind eye as roving gangs wielding iron rods and sticks invaded homes, dragging out Sikh families and killing men and boys.

Some victims were set ablaze, others bludgeoned to death.

Defending Congress’s role in the riots, Singh said the fact the commission, named by the previous BJP government, cleared Congress of official involvement had “nailed the lie” after a long “whispering campaign.”

Singh appealed to members not to score “partisan points on a national tragedy” and said “our collective effort should be to ensure that such tragedies never take place in our country.”

However, the report’s clearing of the Congress party of any blame has led to cries of “whitewash” from critics.

“The fact is it was a very cynical, diabolic act perpetrated by the state,” Rahul Bedi, a Sikh who covered the riots as a young reporter, told AFP.

Bedi, now a journalist for Jane’s Defence Weekly, recalled the riots as “a numbing experience — everything just fell apart, except the rule of the mob.”

Gandhi’s assassination came in revenge against her sending the army to evict Sikh separatists from Sikhism’s holiest site, the Golden Temple, in Punjab state. The government says 2,733 people were slain in reprisal for her killing, but Sikhs say the toll was at least 4,000.

One part of the capital New Delhi has since been known as “Widows’ Colony”, where some wives of Sikh men who died live in poverty. Many of their children grew up angry and alienated.

“Who’ll compensate us for the childhood we lost?” said school dropout Kishore Singh, 21, now a vegetable seller.

India’s media said it was vital to punish the guilty.—AFP