An analyse of the events in the Indian state of Punjab, during the period of the insurgency, 1984-1993.
Following Operation Bluestar, the Indian army began a crackdown on Sikhs across Punjab under the code name ‘Operation Woodrose’. Initiated baptised Sikhs were particular targets as the following Indian Army publication illustrates:
Terror Laws
The Terrorism & Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act allowed for the detention of a person on mere suspicion. Special courts were held in secret by executive magistrates who were appointed centrally. Only 1% of people were ever convicted of a crime under the act.
Amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code allowed a person to be presumed guilty if he were found at the scene of a crime and to be held without charge for a year. The state could close down a newspaper or seize a book, or any other material considered prejudicial to national integration. Under the National Security Act an individual could be preventively detained for a year if judged to be likely to behave in a manner inimical to the interests of the country.[2]
Human right activists, lawyers, teachers and journalists were also targeted, harassed, detained and even murdered.
‘Justice in Punjab had been crucified on the cross of the law’.
Krishna Iyer, retired Supreme Court Justice.[3]
As a consequence, Ram Singh Biling, a newspaper reporter and secretary of the Punjab Human Rights Organisation (PHRO) was ‘picked up and unceremoniously executed.’ Justice Ajit Singh Bains, chairman of PHRO and retired judge of the High Court was illegally arrested, handcuffed and humiliated in April 1992. The 70-year-old heart patient, admired for his integrity and independence, was held without trial for weeks, and only released after the Bar Association of India, Fali Nariman, the Bar Association of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, and the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists protested at his arrest. Jagwinder Singh, a human rights lawyer, was picked up on September 25, 1992. ‘Although the Chief Minister and the Chief Secretary promised to intervene, Jagwinder Singh never returned’.
The right to life of citizens is at the heart of India’s Constitution Article 21. But in 1988, the Indian Parliament passed a 59th amendment which enabled the suspension of Article 21 on the grounds of ‘internal disturbances’. Punjab was declared a ‘Disturbed Area’ under the Disturbed Areas Act of 1991. This move meant that India was legally suspending protection of the right to life against arbitrary violation in the state where the majority of Sikhs lived.
After 1987, the army and security forces penetrated into the heart of many rural homes in search of the young. Third degree methods were employed by the police. The UK-based Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture documented Sikh torture victims who had fled India. The methods used by the security forces in torturing Sikhs were termed barbaric. The rape of women was used systematically as a form of torture.[4]
The missing
Jaswant Singh Khalra and the mass cremations
In the early 1990s, Human rights activist, Jaswant Singh Khalra, set about uncovering a dark secret in the Punjab. He discovered that missing Sikhs in their thousands had been executed without trial by police and security forces and that most of the bodies had been secretly disposed of through mass cremations. Just by examining three of these cremation grounds, Durgiana Mandir, Patti and Tarn Taran, records showed that police cremated three thousand bodies. It is generally believed that there were a total of fifty such cremation grounds used by police across Punjab.
Khalra’s incisive and damning investigative work, provoked a vicious reaction from the police. On 6th September 1995, following an international tour to expose the human rights atrocities in Punjab, he was abducted by the police and never seen alive again. He had previously been warned by the police that if he persisted, ‘he too would become one of those missing names’. The findings of a subsequent inquiry by the Central Bureau of Investigation on the issue of illegal cremations have been kept secret by the Indian government. Amnesty International has long expressed its serious concern about the ‘disappearance’ of Jaswant Singh Khalra.[5]
On 18 Nov, 2005, six mid-level police officers were convicted of Khalra’s murder but police chief, KPS Gill went unpunished even though during the trial it emerged he had interrogated Khalra.
Many bodies were dumped in the rivers and canals of the Punjab and neighbouring states. The Rajasthan state government went on record in complaining to the then Chief Secretary of Punjab about the large number of bodies being carried into their state through the canals. Eyewitnesses often spoke of bodies of young men with hands tied behind their backs. Similarly in 1988, when serious floods stuck the Punjab, bodies were washed into neighbouring Pakistan. Radio Pakistan referred to 1,700 bodies being carried by the flood waters coming from India.
When faced with evidence collected by the Criminal Bureau of Investigation Inquiry into the Cremations Case, expressed ‘horror and shock’ and described the mass cremations as ‘worse than genocide’.[6]
‘Our empirical findings indicate that the intensification of coordinated counterinsurgency operations in the early 1990s was accompanied by a shift in state violence from targeted enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions to large-scale lethal human rights violations, accompanied by mass ‘illegal cremations’.
Ensaaf and the Benotech Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 2009. [7]
A reign of violence and repression became persistent until at least 1994. Amnesty International noted that:
‘Thousands of suspected members and supporters of Sikh opposition groups advocating the creation of a separate Sikh state (Khalistan) in Punjab have been arrested by the Indian security forces and detained under special legislation suspending normal legal safeguards. In many cases the arrest of the detainees has remained unacknowledged for weeks or months, and there have been numerous reports of torture during interrogation’.
Ensaaf and the Benotech Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 2009. [7]
Scores of those arrested have been tortured to death or have otherwise been deliberately and unlawfully killed in custody (although official reports sometimes say they have died in ‘encounters’ with the police or while ‘trying to escape’), while others have simply ‘disappeared’, the security forces refusing to acknowledge that they had ever been arrested.’[8]
Case studies
Satvinder Kaur & Sarabjit Kaur
Police officer-in-charge of a post at village Bham, in Batala subdivision of Gurdaspur district, kidnapped two teenage girls, Satvinder Kaur and Sarabjit Kaur, in front of eyewitnesses in his official jeep. The officer-in-charge of the police station in Har-Gobindpur denied their custody. Four days later their naked dismembered bodies were recovered from a nearby canal. Officers of Har-Gobindpur police station tried to pressurise the parents to sign a declaration that the bodies were unidentified and unclaimed and were threatened that they would be eliminated… if they disobeyed.[9]
‘There is plenty of evidence to show that extra-judicial killings are perpetrated on a large-scale by the police and security forces in Punjab, and that the conspiracy to mass murder extends up to the highest levels of government’.
Lord Avebury, Chair, British Parliamentary Human Rights Group. 1993. [10]
Between 1984 and 1994, thousands of persons ‘disappeared’ and were believed to have been illegally cremated in Punjab as part of a brutal police crackdown to quash insurgency. Police counter-insurgency efforts included torture, forced disappearances, and a bounty system of cash rewards for the summary execution of suspected Sikh militant. By early 1993, the government claimed normalcy had returned to the state. Police abuses continued, however, and there was no effort to account for hundreds of forces disappearances and summary killings.’[11]
Pragat Singh
Sixty-five-year-old Baldev Singh from Amritsar had retired from the 9th Punjab Regiment of the Indian Army after suffering serious injuries during the war with Pakistan in 1965, which he fought at the Poonch sector in Jammu and Kashmir. Baldev Singh’s eldest daughter Manjit Kaur had been India’s star female weightlifter, earning 19 gold medals. She had also represented India in many international events, including the Asian Games held in Beijing.
His youngest son, 25-year-old Pragat Singh, earned his livelihood by running a dairy farm. The police began to harass him, picking him up for interrogation and torturing him in illegal custody. Unable to put up with the harassment, Pragat Singh ran away from home but was arrested on 19 September 1990 while he was watching a film along with his cousin Chayan Singh at Sandhu Talkies, a cinema hall in Amritsar. On 5 November 1992, newspapers reported Pragat Singh’s death in a supposed armed encounter with the police near Raja Sansi, a suburb of Amritsar. Baldev Singh spoke to an employee at the General Hospital in Amritsar where the post-mortem of the body had been conducted. The employee’s description of the body matched Pragat Singh’s. Baldev Singh reached Durgiyana Mandir cremation ground just as the police lit the pyre. The head was already burning, but the rest of the body was still intact. Although Baldev Singh was allowed to carry the ashes for the last rites, the abduction and the illegal cremation of Pragat Singh remained officially unacknowledged. Baldev Singh’s affidavit also said that his daughter Manjit Kaur was so traumatised by the incident that she decided never again to represent India in any competitive sport.[12]
Disappearances in Punjab, Ram Narayan Kumar and Lorenz Skerjanz ©1995
‘Impunity in India has been rampant in Punjab, where security forces committed large-scale human rights violations without any accountability. No one disputes that the militants were guilty of numerous human rights abuses, but the government should have acted within the law instead of sanctioning the killing, ‘disappearance,’ and torture of individuals accused of supporting the militants.’
Ensaaf and Human Rights Watch. 2007. [13]
Gurdev Kaur & Gurmeet Kaur
On the afternoon of 21 August 1989, a party of Batala Police (One was in uniform, five others were in plain clothes) picked up Gurdev Kaur and Gurmeet Kaur, both employees of the Prabhat Financial Corporation, from their offices opposite Khalsa College, Amritsar. Many bystanders witnessed the arrest. The women were pushed into the vehicle and whisked away to Batala, another district altogether. There they were taken to a makeshift interrogation centre which had been set up in the abandoned factory premises of Beiko Industries. It was 6pm.
Gurdev Kaur watched Senior Superintendent of Police Gobind Ram beat a Sikh youth with an iron rod then he suddenly turned and struck her with the rod across the stomach. He rained blows on her stomach until she began to bleed through her vagina. Then Gurmeet Kaur was beaten in the same way. Gurdev fainted but was revived and beaten again. The two women were taken to the Batala Sadar police station at about 11.30pm. The next morning, they were taken to the Beiko factory again. Their limbs were massaged followed by further beating. With their legs crippled by rollers, they were molested and threatened with death.[14]
Even the governor of Punjab, S.S. Ray, had to admit that the police had become ‘sadistic’. Yet in the West, Indian officials would paint a different picture:
A suggestion from any quarter that there is torture in India, political torture, is really not acceptable. We have rule of law and an independent judiciary, we have a vibrant and free press which is vigilant and we have a national human rights commission. Judicial protection is available to all Indian citizens.
Nareshwar Dayal, Indian High Commissioner, London. August 2000. [15]
Kulwinder Singh
Tarlochan Singh described the hurdles he has faced in his now 18-year struggle before Indian courts for justice for the killing of his son, Kulwinder Singh: ‘I used to receive threatening phone calls. The caller would say that they had killed thousands of boys and thrown them into canals, and they would also do that to Kulwinder Singh’s wife, kid, or me and my wife…’[16]
Balvinder Singh
On 30 August 1991, three unnumbered police jeeps carrying eight or nine men each went to Jatana village in Ropar district, Punjab. On the pretext of arresting Balvinder Singh, they killed his 95-year-old grandmother, his maternal aunt, her teenage daughter and his polio-affected infant cousin. The police then set the bodies on fire and departed.[17]
Members of the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab secretly taped the following conversation with a Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) about what used to happen in the days before the SSP’s periodic meetings with Director General of Police K.P.S. Gill:
‘You can check that up! Before such a meeting with K.P.S. Gill, 300 to 400 Sikhs used to die in Punjab. Every SSP had to report: I have killed 14. The other who said I have killed 28 was appreciated more. The third SSP who had to outsmart the first two had to report 31. The night before the meeting with Gill, the Sikhs used to die so that the SSPs could vie with each other in showing their anti-terrorist achievements’.
Reduced to Ashes – The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab. 2003 [18]
The Chittisinghpora massacre (March 2000)
On the eve of U.S. President Bill Clinton’s visit to India, on 20 March 2000, thirty-five innocent Sikhs were murdered in the village of Chittisinghpora in Kashmir. The Indian authorities were quick to blame a Pakistani-trained militant group for the massacre and days later killed five muslim youths in an encounter.
Yet to this day, there has been doubts about the official version. An independent investigation by the Punjab Human Rights Organisation and the Movement against State Repression concluded the Indian intelligence were behind the killings. The Indian Human Rights Organisation accused a renegade force within the Indian counterinsurgency with the deaths. The U.S. President himself came to the same conclusion:
During my visit to India in 2000, some Hindu militants decided to vent their outrage by murdering thirty-eight Sikhs in cold blood. If I hadn’t made the trip, the victims would probably still be alive.
Former U.S. President, Bill Clinton. In the forward to Madeleine Albright, the former Secretary of State’s memoirs: The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs (2006).
According to the sole survivor, Nanak Singh, the killers were:
Calling each other with the names Pawan, Bansi, Bahadur and then finally they left while shouting ‘Jai Hind’. In that incident I lost my son, brother, four cousins and uncle.
Sole survivor, Nanak Singh.
Retired Lt-General, K.S. Gill, who investigated the massacre stated that Indian army officers up to the rank of a captain were involved:
After obtaining information about the Sikhs in the village, ‘they lined them up and shot them dead’.
Retired Lt-General, K.S. Gill.
Useful resources
Disappearances in Punjab by Ram Narayan Kumar and Lorenz Skerjanz.
[1] Baat Cheet Serial No. 153 (July 1984), Department of Defence, Government of India, quoted in Amritsar, Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle (1985), Mark Tully & Satish Jacob, page 204.
[2] This legalised the detention of a person on mere suspicion of ‘terrorism’. According to Amnesty International, the term ‘terrorist’ or ‘extremist’ in India is ‘so broadly defined that it may include people who non-violently express their political opinions’.
Amnesty International, Death Penalty Report, 25th April 1990.
[3] Siege of the Sikhs – Violations of Human Rights in Punjab (1988), Ajit Singh Bains, page 27.
[4] Lives Under Threat – Sikhs coming to the UK from Punjab (1999), Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture.
[5] A Mockery of Justice – The case concerning the ‘disappearance’ of human rights defender Jaswant Singh Khalra severely undermined (1998), Amnesty International.
[6] Indian Supreme Court Judges Justice Kuldip Singh and Justice Saghir Ahmed.
[7] Violent deaths and enforced disappearances during the counterinsurgency in Punjab, India. Ensaaf and the Benotech Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 2009.
[8] Wrongful Detention of Asylum-Seeker Raghbir Singh (February 1996), Amnesty International.
[9] It’s Never too late to uncover the Truth, (2000), Sikh Review, Patwant Singh.
[10] Lord Avebury, Chair, British Parliamentary Human Rights Group in a letter to Mark Lennox Boyd, Junior Foreign Minister, UK. 9 April 1993.
[11] Justice eludes families of the disappeared in Punjab. Human Rights Watch. 10 June 2003.
[12] Reduced to Ashes – The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab. Ram Narayan Kumar, Amrik Singh, Ashok Agrwaal and Jaskaran Kaur. The Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab, page 6. 2003.
[13] Protecting the Killers – A Polity of Impunity in Punjab, India. Brad Adams. Ensaaf and Human Rights Watch. 2007.
[14] The Sikhs (1999), Patwant Singh, page 246.
[15] Nareshwar Dayal, Indian High commissioner to the UK. BBC Radio 4. August 4, 2000.
[16] India: Time to Deliver Justice for Atrocities in Punjab. Ensaaf and Human Rights Watch. 19 October 2007.
[17] The Sikhs (1999), Patwant Singh, page 245.
[18] Reduced to Ashes – The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab. Ram Narayan Kumar, Amrik Singh, Ashok Agrwaal and Jaskaran Kaur. The Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab, page 107. 2003.
The cases of the disappeared during the Punjab insurgency of the 1980s and 1990s.
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