NEW DELHI, Aug 11: Eager to limit damage to his Congress party, India’s first Sikh prime minister, Manmohan Singh, apologised on Thursday for riots two decades ago that killed nearly 3,000 Sikhs and were blamed on the Congress.

Mr Singh’s apology, the first by a senior Congress leader in years, came after angry protests following an inquiry report into the riots released this week that named some party leaders for their involvement in the violence.

The prime minister told the upper house of parliament he was responding to demands by many groups, including opposition parties and Sikh bodies, for an apology from the government which was seen initially as trying to brush the report aside.

“I have no hesitation in apologising, not only to the Sikh community, but to the whole Indian nation because what took place in 1984 is the negation of the concept of nationhood enshrined in our constitution,” he said.

“So I am not standing on any false prestige. On behalf of our government, on behalf of the entire people of this country I bow my head in shame that such a thing took place.”

Mr Singh’s comments came a day after a junior minister in his government, Jagdish Tytler, resigned after the report said he was one of the Congress leaders who might have instigated party activists to target Sikhs.

On Thursday, another Congress lawmaker named by the report quit as head of a government body. The government says 2,733 people died in reprisal attacks on Sikhs after prime minister Indira Gandhi, also of the Congress, was killed by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984.

The assassination was in revenge for Gandhi’s decision to send the army to flush Sikh separatists out of the Golden Temple, Sikhism’s holiest shrine.—Reuters