New York: An Indian-American lawyer representing the Congress party has accused a Sikh group of resorting to improper practices while filing lawsuits in the US against leaders like Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh over the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. Lawyer Ravi Batra said Sikhs for Justice (SFJ) had indulged in "improper judge-and-venue-shopping" while filing lawsuits against the Congress and its leaders, including party chief Sonia Gandhi, Singh and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kamal Nath, in several federal courts. Batra said in a statement filed in the court of the Eastern District of New York that contrary to claims by SFJ, Gandhi was not properly served court summons in a 1984 anti-Sikh riots case during her reported treatment at Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital here last month.

According to Batra's statement, a security manager at the hospital has said that Gandhi had not been served with the lawsuit by hospital staff. "Three men came in the middle of the night and started throwing papers on every nursing station on all five floors, saying 'you have been served.' Nobody picked them up," the security manager said, adding that the men created "quite a commotion during the night while people were sleeping." He also said SFJ has "wholly failed to alert the respective federal district courts of the prior pending and related cases," when they commenced the related action against Gandhi in the Eastern District Court and related identical actions against Singh in the court of District of Columbia and the Southern District of New York.

Batra said Gandhi has "not been served with process" in the anti-Sikh riots case. Appearing as counsel for Gandhi, Batra said the Congress leader "reserves all of her rights to contest any assertion of jurisdiction or attempts by plaintiffs to pursue this matter, including, by way of motion to dismiss for a lack of subject-matter jurisdiction, lack of personal jurisdiction for insufficient process, insufficient service of process." SFJ had filed cases against the Congress for shielding and protecting party leaders allegedly involved in the anti-Sikh riots that erupted in Delhi following the 1984 assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards.