Express Focus -- HUMAN RIGHTS -- by Indian Express

December 14, 2000

Unearthing the disappeared

Ever since the first convention of the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab was held on December 10, 1997, several clandestine cremations of ‘‘unidentified’’ bodies carried out by security forces between 1984 and 1994 have been unravelled. Ram Narayan Kumar, a member of the committee, talks to SIDDHARTH SURESH about the committee’s role in exposing some hard facts about the killings and cremations

What was the National Human Rights Commission’s (NHRC) stand in bringing out the facts on killings in Punjab?
FOUR years after the NHRC received its mandate, the matter is reaching an ignonimous conclusion. On January 13, 1999, after two years of wrangling on preliminary issues, the commission decided to limit the inquiry to 2,097 cases of cremations in Amritsar district, as mentioned in a CBI report. With its emphasis on cremations, the commission was rejecting the view that the inquiry had to cover all incidents of police abduction, enforced disappearance and custodial execution and illegal disposal of dead bodies in Punjab.

Did the committee object to this?
THE Coordination Committee pointed out that illegal cremations, burials, entombment or quartering and drowning of bodies must remain secondary to the principal concern for violation of fundamental rights. Technical, territorial and numerical restrictions on the inquiry will degrade the universality of the right of life under Article 21. They will further vitiate the principal of equality before the law under Article 14.

What has been the committee’s work so far?
WE have been able to acquire evidence of illegal cremations in six districts in Faridkot, Kapurthala, Ludhiana, Mansa and Moga. The co-ordination committee moved the Supreme Court after attempting to persuade the NHRC to review its order on the scope and modalities of inquiry. Our attempts to acquire evidence of secret cremations unearthed records that showed the burning of 934 bodies, labelled as unidentified.

We also completed a survey of 838 reports of illegal abductions leading to disappearances all over Punjab. The survey showed that in 222 of the 838 incidents, one or more members of families either committed suicide in despair or died under trauma. In 500 out of 838, family members reported morbid psychological effects, including clinical psychiatric symptoms. In 224 cases, the security forces had destroyed, damaged, confiscated family properties.

In 129 cases, the surviving relative possessed sensitive information on 390 other incidents of enforced disappearancem, as disclosed by the CBI report and endorsed by the Supreme Court itself. We asked that these findings could not be confined to the NHRC’s limited scope of inquiry. But the SC rejected the petition in October.

Were only pro-Khalistani activists executed?
ACCORDING to police figures published in 1993, security forces in Punjab killed 2,119 militants in 1992 under the euphemism of encounters. A large number of people in the border districts were picked up by the police for interrogation. The disappeared were killed and their bodies quietly disposed of. There were initial reports that Punjab’s irrigation canals had become dumping grounds for bodies of killed militants and their sympathisers. Newspapers of the time reported that the Rajasthan government formally complained to Punjab’s Chief Secretary that these canals were carrying several bodies, with their hands and feet tied together.

What was the response of human rights activists?
JASAWANT Singh Khalra from Amritsar, then general secretary of Shiromani Akali Dal’s Human Rights Wing, produced incriminating evidence in the form of official records from the cremation grounds in Amritsar, Patti and Tarn Taran for the year 1992. Police had burnt more than 1,400 bodies in these three cremation grounds alone, saying they were unclaimed or unidentified. Khalra himself was later picked and killed by security forces before the Supreme Court took note of the matter and ordered a CBI inquiry. But while he was alive, his campaigns for accountability and justice were met with disdain, ridicule and finally death. When Khalra went with his records to the Punjab and Haryana High Court through writ petition No. 990 of 1995 to ask for an independent investigation, the court dismissed the petition, remarking that it was too vague and the petitioner had no locus standi in the matter.

Please continue.
FOLLOWING dismissal of the petition, Khalra and I travelled extensively through Amritsar. Records from the office of the registrar of births and deaths showed that 300 bodies were cremated as unidentified or unclaimed in 1992 alone at Durgiana Mandir cremation grounds. A firewood purchase register maintained at the Patti municipal cremation grounds showed that 523 bodies were cremated between 1991 and 1994. Two attendants of the cremation ground at Patti told me that the police would often buy firewood for the cremation of one or two persons, but would cremate several bodies at one go on a single pyre. The Chief Medical Officer of the civil hospital at Patti confessed that a post-mortem was completed in less than five minutes.

Did you discuss this with state officials?
I interviewed many serving police officers who, on conditions of anonymity, provided details on the abductions, custodial torture, summary executions and illegal cremations as aspects of a strategy to weed out Sikh militancy from its roots.

Now that the dust has settled over the idea of Khalistan, what do you think about the idea?
The state is formed around the concept of rule. It seeks authority, which implicitly means taking away the rights of some people you want to rule over... I don’t see Khalistan as an answer or even as a conceptual antitheis to the Indian state. Because the moment you postulate it as a state against a state, it ceases to be a fight for a fight for fundamental rights to reforms.

The idea of Khalistan was never a serious idea. People believed in it as it gave them the impression that they would get power after they created Khalistan. But it never happens that way. The movement became a symbol for those fighting against injustice and oppression by the Indian state.