NEW YORK: A US judge has ruled that Manmohan Singh is immune from allegations that he “supported genocide of Sikhs” during his tenure as head of Indian government but does not enjoy “head of state immunity” for claims arising from his tenure as finance minister, from 1991 to 1996.

In his verdict, Judge James Boasberg of the District of Columbia said: “Although he is no longer a head of state, (Mr) Singh is entitled to residual immunity for acts taken in his official capacity as prime minister."

“Because such residual immunity does not cover actions (Mr) Singh pursued before taking (the) office, however, the allegations stemming from his time as finance minister survive.”

A US-based human rights group, the Sikhs for Justice (SFJ), and Inderjit Singh had alleged in the 2013 lawsuit that as finance minister Mr Singh “funded several counter-insurgency operations in Punjab in the 1990s, resulting in the extrajudicial killing of more than 100,000 Sikhs”.

According to the plaintiffs, during his tenure as prime minister, Mr Singh was “complicit in the torture and killing of hundreds of thousands of Sikhs and for shielding the perpetrators of the Sikhs’ genocide”.

During the course of the trial, the US government, although not a party in the litigation, filed a Suggestion of Immunity which claimed that Mr Singh, as the sitting prime minister, was entitled to ‘head of state’ immunity. Although at the time when the document was filed Mr Singh was indeed prime minister, he left the office three weeks later.

The plaintiffs subsequently said that Mr Singh was no longer entitled to immunity.

Judge Boasberg ruled that the US law barred former heads of state from being sued for actions they took while in office, but not for private acts or those taken in prior government posts.

“While (Mr) Singh’s alleged acts as finance minister are not ‘private’ per se, they did not occur in the course of his official duties as head of state,” he wrote in the verdict.

Describing the judgment as “a ray of hope” for the plaintiffs, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the SFJ’s legal adviser, said it marked the start of a long and uphill battle for making the former prime minister accountable for funding “counter-insurgency operations across India in which hundreds of thousands of Sikhs were kidnapped, murdered and buried in mass graves during the 1990s”.

Published in Dawn, August 21st, 2014