Sikh Human Rights Abuses

Enforced Disappearances, Arbitrary Executions and Cremations:
Victim Testimony and India's Human Rights Obligations
Interim Report

by Ram Narayan Kumar, Amrik Singh Muktsar, Harshinder Singh
For the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab

Contents:

INTRODUCTION: COMPLEX DENIAL AND THE CONTEXT OF DOCUMENTATION pp. 4 - 36
THE AGENDA - A DISAPPEARANCE AND THE INQUIRY REPORTS - A FUNNERAL ORATION - BLITZKRIEG AND BLACKOUT: TRICKS OF A MEDIA WAR - NATIONAL SECURITY AND UNIVERSAL METAPHORS - SIDESHOWS OF A DEMOCRACY - A CASE FOR EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE - PROBLEMS OF CONSTRUCTION AND THE INITIATIVE OF COORDINATION - AMBITIOUS PROPOSALS - EARLY DISAPPOINTMENTS - A SERIOUS MISUNDERSTANDING - LAW AND ORDER - CONTEMPT OF COURT - THE IRISH EXAMPLE - DEADENDS OF MILITANT CRIMES - PRINCIPLES OF A JUST WAR - THE WEAKNESS OF AMBIVALENCE - THE ROOTS OF UNREST - INDIAN FREEDOM AND INSPIRATIONS FROM PUNJAB - BRITISH LESSONS - TURNING A BLIND EYE - THE REIGN OF DESPAIR AND THE URGENCY OF DOCUMENTATION - OUR SURVEY AND ITS METHODS - THE REPORT FORM - THE INTERVIEW PROCESS - A CASE FOR EXCLUSION - INCIDENT-REPORTS - COURT CASES - FURTHER EVIDENCE OF SECRET CREMATIONS - APPENDICES OF CREMATIONS: SIX LISTS: Faridkot, Kapurthala, Ludhiana, Mansa, Moga, Zira - ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INCIDENT REPORTS: SOME HIGHLIGHTS: pp. 37 - 44

THE ISSUES AND THEIR HISTORY: pp. 45 - 140

A PARADIGMATIC CASE - THE ORDEAL OF SURVIVAL - ABORTION OF A PEACE ACCORD - UNDERCOVER OPERATIONS: CONSTRUCTION OF THE LABYRINTH - THE LEGISLATIVE APPARATUS OF COUNTERINSURGENCY - EARLY INVESTIGATIONS AND THE FIRST REPORTS ON STATE ATROCITIES - POLITICAL CONSENSUS ON STATE TERRORISM - BULLETS AGAINST THE BALLOT - POLL BOYCOTT: ENGINEERING OF A MANDATE - SILENCING THE HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS - DECIMATION OF THE GUERILLA GROUPS - THE WAR WITHOUT QUARTER - EVIDENCE OF MASS CREMATIONS - FURTHER INVESTIGATIONS - THE CASE BEFORE THE SUPREME COURT - DISAPPEARANCE OF JASWANT SINGH KHALRA - FOUR AFFIDAVITS IN THE CREMATIONS MATTER: Pyre hunting of a father, a clean sweep, teaching a lesson, a frivolous pledge - AN INVESTIGATION INTO A GORY TALE - INTERIM REPORT AND THE PUBLIC NOTICE - ABDUCTIORS OF KHALRA IDENTIFIED - COMPENSATION FOR THE "WORST CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY" - THE REFERENCE TO THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION - CONFLICTS ON THE SCOPE OF THE INQUIRY - PROBLEMS WITH THE PROTECTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS ACT - FORMULATION OF THE PRELIMINARY ISSUES BY THE COMMISSION - SUBMISSIONS BY THE COMMITTEE - SUBMISSIONS BY THE STATE OF PUNJAB & THE POLICE - SUBMISSIONS BY THE UNION OF INDIA - THE COMMISSION'S COUNSEL - THE ORDER ON THE PRELIMINARY ISSUES - SALIENT POINTS OF THE ORDER - OUR SUGGESTIONS ON THE MODALITIES OF PROCEEDINGS - THE UNION GOVERNMENT GOES BACK TO THE SUPREME COURT - THE SECOND VERDICT OF THE SUPREME COURT - ARGUMENTS IN A VICIOUS CIRCLE - DECONSTRUCTION OF A MANDATE - STRANGE EMPHASIS ON KHALRA'S PRESS NOTE - THE COMMISSION RENDERS THE GRIEVANCE - THE TERMS OF REFERENCE: NEW INTERPRETATIONS - SOME ABSURD CONCLUSIONS - THE EXCLUDED ISSUES - THE PROBLEM WITH THE TERRITORIAL LIMITATION - EMPTY EMPHASIS ON COMPENSATION - THE BURDEN OF PROOF - OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE MANDATE - THE COMMISSION REJECTS OUR REVIEW APPLICATION - THE GROUNDS FOR MOVING THE SUPREME COURT - THE LIGHT OF FURTHER EVIDENCE - INCIDENT REPORTS AND VICTIM TESTIMONY - THE OBLIGATION OF A THOROUGH INQUIRY - STANDARDS OF INVESTIGATION - THE IMPERATIVES OF INDIAN CONSTITUTIONAL GUARANTEES: Articles 21, 32, 14 - THE RIGHT TO RESTITUTION UNDER INDIA'S INTERNATIONAL OBLIGATIONS - INDIA'S OWN STAND - PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES OF NON-DEROGATION - THE MEANING OF THE STATE OF EMERGENCY - THE RIGHT TO LIFE: THE MECHANISM OF PROTECTION - THE BINDING OBLIGATIONS - THREE LEGAL RIGHTS OF VICTIMS - THE RIGHT TO KNOW - THE RIGHT TO JUSTICE - THE RIGHT TO REPARATION - VALASOUEZ RODRIGUEZ CASE - FINDINGS OF THE UN HUMAN RIGHTS MECHANISMS - A FACTUAL APPRAISAL OF INDIAN POSITIONS - SOVEREIGNTY IN TRANSITION AND UNIVERSAL JURISDICTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS - THE TRUE REFERENT OF SOVEREIGNTY - EFFECTS ON THE PRINCIPLE OF NON-INTERVENTION - HUMANITARIA INTERVENTION & THE QUESTION OF IMPUNITY - UNIVERSAL JUSTICE & THE STATIST BIAS: CONTRADICTIONS IN THE UN REGIME - SOME QUESTIONS TO THE INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMNITY - EVIDENCE OF HYPOCRISY - SOME STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS - FORCES OF IMPUNITY & THE INCOMPLETE STRUGGLE FOR UNIVERSAL JURISDICTION - SOME CONCLUSIONS FROM THE PEOPLE'S PERSPECTIVE

VICTIM TESTIMONY: ABSTRACT OF CASE STUDIES:
TEN EXAMPLES pp.141 - 239
RELATIVES WHO EITHER COMMITTED SUICIDE OR DIED UNDER TRAUMA - RELATIVES DO NOT KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO DEAD BODIES - OUTSIDE AMRITSAR - POLICEMEN WHO THEMSELVES BECAME VICTIMS - SOLDIERS OF THE INDIAN ARMY - DESTRUCTION OF PROPERTY - FURTHER DISCLOSURES

FURTHER EVIDENCE OF SECRET CREMATIONS: SIX LISTS:
APPENDIX A: FARIDKOT pp. 240 - 241
APPENDIX B: KAPURTHALA pp. 242 - 247
APPENDIX C: LUDHIANA pp. 248 - 252
APPENDIX D: MANSA pp. 253 - 255
APPENDIX E: MOGA pp. 256 - 258
APPENDIX F: ZIRA pp. 259 - 272

APPENDIX G: SURVEY CHART: ALPHABETICAL LIST OF 838 DISAPPEARED PERSONS: pp. 273-295

APPENDIX F: INCIDENT-REPORT FORM pp. 296 - 302

APPENDIX G: JASWANT SINGH KHALRA'S PRESS NOTE: pp. 303 - 306
DATED 16 JANUARY 95 - DISAPPEARED: CREMATION GROUNDS

INTRODUCTION:
COMPLEX DENIAL AND THE CONTEXT OF DOCUMENTATION

THE AGENDA:
This is an interim report on one of the unfinished tasks of the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab (CCDP), a representative body of eighteen human rights organizations and other individuals, which came into existence on 9 November 97 with the following agenda:

(a) To develop a voluntary mechanism to collect and collate information on disappeared people from all over the State, and to ensure that the matter of police abductions leading to illegal cremations of dead bodies proceeds meaningfully and culminates in a just and satisfactory final order;
(b) to evolve a workable system of state accountability, and to build up the pressure of public opinion to counter the bid for immunity;
(c) to lobby for India to change the domestic laws in conformity with the UN instruments on torture, enforced disappearances, accountability, compensation to victims of abuse of power and other related matters;
(d) to initiate a debate on vital issues of state power, its distribution, accountability and to work for a shared perspective on these matters with groups and movements all over India.

This interim report summarizes our documentation on disappearances in the State. It bears directly on the matter of illegal abductions and secret cremations of dead bodies, carried out by the State agencies in Punjab, which the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) is supposed to be investigating on remit from the Supreme Court. The next chapter will discuss the immediate background to the phase of repression documented in this report, and will explain the present legal position of the matter before the NHRC. It will also deal with the broader historical context of human rights concerns, which shape the Committee's documentation of the subject. This prefatory note will be limited to few issues of "denial" and the requirements of documentation, which led to the formation of the Committee. It will also explain the methods that have guided our investigations, the analysis of our findings, and the writing of this report.

A DISAPPEARANCE AND THE INQUIRY REPORTS:
In January 1995, Jaswant Singh Khalra, who was then the General Secretary of the Akali Dal's Human Rights Wing, released some official documents which established that the security agencies in Punjab had been secretly cremating thousands of dead bodies labelled as unidentified. Khalra suggested that most of these cremations were of people who had earlier been picked up in the State on suspicion of separatist sympathies. In September 1995, it was Khalra's turn to disappear: he was kidnapped from his Amritsar home by officers of the Punjab police. In November 95, a bench of the Supreme Court under Justice Kuldip Singh instituted two inquiries to be conducted by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The first inquiry aimed to determine what happened to Khalra. The second inquiry intended to establish the substance in the allegations, which Khalra had made before himself disappearing. In July 96, the report of the first inquiry held nine officers of the Punjab police responsible for Khalra's abduction. In December 96, the report of the second inquiry disclosed "flagrant violation of human rights on a mass scale." The Supreme Court referred the matter to the NHRC for a broad and thorough investigation. But as will be shown in the next chapter, the State agencies continued to passionately deny that there had been systematic human rights abuses.

A FUNNERAL ORATION:
On 24 May 1997, newspapers reported that Ajit Singh Sandhu, former Superintendent of Tarn Taran police district, committed suicide by throwing himself before a running train. Sandhu had been imprisoned for few months on charges, established by judicial inquiries, that involved illegal abductions, torture and elimination in custody of people like Jaswant Singh Khalra and Kuljit Singh Dhat, a relative of Bhagat Singh, the famous revolutionary from the pre-independence era. The circumstances of his reported suicide were suspicious. He had consumed alcohol, had driven to the railway track in his own car, and a short suicide note which he left behind said "it is better to die than to live in this shame".

Sandhu had been a trusted lieutenant of KPS Gill, former Director General of Punjab police who had led India's ruthless war against the Sikh secessionist militancy in the State. Charged with all these extra-judicial executions and hasty cremations, Sandhu would have had no choice but to establish the line of command under which he had acted. There should have been an inquiry into his reported suicide. But KPS Gill, now retired, seized the opportunity to launch his campaign against "an utterly compromised human rights lobby".

He called a press conference on 24th evening "not to express grief", but to discuss the larger political and policy issues that arise from Sandhu's suicide. And discuss them he did - with passion, emotion, and high drama. The newspapers across the country dutifully carried the full text of his statement. It held the nation to shame for its ingratitude towards "heroes" like Ajit Singh Sandhu who had saved India from the brink of disintegration. It castigated the people for permitting human rights activists to thrive on India's soil - those busibodies "who will work with any cause that serves their personal ends, whether criminal, political or secessionist". The statement also chided the State for not "educating itself on how to tackle individuals and groups trying to destroy it", and went on to ask the parliament to vote for the legal amendments needed to protect other courageous officers of Punjab from the kind of humiliation that apparently drove Sandhu to suicide. The statement said that the evil weed of Khalistan had been nipped in the bud by officers like Sandhu, whose determination had prevented the loss of Kashmir and the eventual balkanisation of India.

BLITZKRIEG AND BLACKOUT: TRICKS OF A MEDIA WAR:
On 27 May, our Delhi-based Committee for Information and Initiative on Punjab issued a press statement to discuss, from its human rights perspective, the issues raked up by K. P. S. Gill. The Committee, which had been singled out for attack by Gill, had not only filed the petition on enforced disappearances and hasty cremations, it had also been involved in the issues of justice to Punjab for almost a decade. But no newspaper, with one or two exceptions, carried the statement. Some journalists called back to say that although, personally, they liked the statement, it did not harmonise with their editorial guidelines. Others wanted to go through the original documents on illegal cremations, to be sure that our arguments were based on "concrete and established facts". They copied documents from our files, wasting many hours, and vanished. Promised stories did not appear.
Meanwhile, the campaign launched by Gill was avalanching into a crusade. Responsible political leaders began to accuse the National Human Rights Commission of being prejudiced against the police. There were warnings of police revolt, and threats to break the Punjab government if the Akali Dal, which was leading a coalition with the Hindu right wing party called Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), did not unambiguously declare itself for the police. The leader of the BJP's parliamentary group in Rajya Sabha - Upper House of Parliament - wrote: "Sandhu was not just left to fend for himself, the State abandoned him and - to my mind, much worse - his incarceration and humiliation were used to deflect attention. Tavleen Singh, a senior journalist, explained in her column: "Murderers of Sandhu are the "human rightswallahs". They have been unable to see that it was war in Tarn Taran: In fighting it if Sandhu broke few rules, there was no other way.

In his subsequent letter to the Prime Minister, also published in its entirety, KPS Gill asked for a legislation that defines "appropriate criteria to judge the actions of those who fought this war on behalf of the Indian State". "Until the necessary criteria are sufficiently debated, defined and legislated, immediate steps should be taken to ensure that the pattern of humiliation through litigation and trial by the media is prevented forthwith". He repeated the insinuation that "for those who were comprehensively defeated in the battle for Khalistan, public interest litigation has become the most convenient strategy for vendetta."

NATIONAL SECURITY AND UNIVERSAL METAPHORS:
Provocative as these arguments are, they have a familiar ring to them: they are the stock-in-trade of those who, all over the world, want to save their societies from "subversives" by genocidal methods. In January 1973, the American puppet in South Vietnam, was telling Oriana Fallaci that he prayed for the bombing of Hanoi to continue. "They have a purpose, and if we want to achieve that purpose, we have to bomb. Mademoiselle, speaking as a soldier, I tell you that the shorter the war the less atrocious it is."
Nguyen Van Thieu was a Vietnamese, even if of the South. K. P. S. Gill is a Punjabi, and an Indian. He told the Indian Express: "it was an error that terrorism was brought to an end too quickly". He went on to add: "the fight against militancy in Punjab was one of the most humane operations ever". Both stalked the same logic: "What are fifty thousand or hundred thousand people dead for a country? Don't few hundred thousand people die every few minutes on this planet without any cause?"

It was the same logic that provided the ideological backbone to the "Dirty War" in Argentina between 1976 and 1983 when the junta murdered thousands, imprisoned and tortured scores of thousands, and exiled almost half a million citizens. The doctrine defines the strategy of counterinsurgency "as an interlocking system of actions - political, economic, psychological, military." Because the rebel organisations are clandestine, their destruction requires unconventional and ruthless pursuits. A captured terrorist must be tortured for the knowledge of his organisation, and if he cannot be intimidated or induced to become a stooge, must be killed. The groups which do not sympathise with these imperatives of national security, particularly human rights groups, are subversives who wish to destroy the pristine power and the moral supremacy of the Nation-State.

SIDESHOWS OF A DEMOCRACY:
The vehemence of this campaign for impunity did not hurt us so much as the pervasive sympathy, which it seemed to receive from supposedly enlightened sections of Indian public opinion. From the very beginning of my researches in Punjab, I have been meeting important officers of the government, politicians, journalists and other members of the intelligentsia who eloquently argued that the "excesses" were a small price to pay for upholding the territorial integrity of India. These views, mouthed so glibly and so casually, were filling us with dark forebodings, for we felt that a country's institutions, particularly in a democratic set-up, cannot for long remain unaffected by such negative collective perceptions as the brandmarking of minority groups as enemies and the orchestrated clamour for their repression. Several authoritative studies on the holocaust, after examining how Nazism fitted into the ideational matrix of the then German society, conclude that the perpetrators could never have carried out their plans with such ease if the ordinary Germans hadn't been so indifferent to the fate of the Jews, and that such indifference in turn sprang from a widely shared feeling that the Jews didn't deserve to be protected.

I had myself witnessed the bloody pogrom in Delhi which had broken out after Indira Gandhi's assassination on 31 October 1984 to claim more than three thousand innocent Sikh lives in less than a week. I had watched how hundreds-strong bands of absolutely ordinary people, with policemen looking on, had swarmed into Sikh houses, hacking the occupants to pieces, chopping off the heads of children, tying Sikh men to tires set aflame with kerosene, burning down the houses after sacking them.
In the previous years, I had also observed how the relentless advocacy, by Hindu right-wing groups, of military option, had influenced Indira Gandhi to launch the army attack on the Golden Temple of Amritsar in June 1984.
In March 1988, I noticed how the combined opposition in both houses of Indian parliament forced the Treasury Bench to modify the proposals of the 59th Amendment to the Indian constitution to say that the imposition of an Emergency and the attendant suspension of fundamental rights would be limited to the State of Punjab.

In 1994, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutional validity of Terrorist and Disruptive (Prevention) Act (TADA), which not only conflicted with the elemental principles of due process but also eliminated the existing legal safeguards of free and fair trial, by beseeching the principle of "legislative competence", the doctrinal mainstay which has been historically available to the judiciary to withdraw fundamental human rights and the legal tenets of procedural fairness to the politically dissenting sections of the Indian population.

A CASE FOR EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE:
What should we do then to prevent India from becoming ever less of a democracy, and its leaders from receiving a blanket mandate for repression whenever they wish for one? At this point, we would like to make an important point: it appeared to us that the large segments of our public who watched the anti-Sikh pogroms, those who knew of, or suspected, State atrocities and seemed to approve of them, didn't in fact approve truly and knowingly, or rather, that they were approving so to speak out of equivocation: their knowledge of events was second-hand. It rested on the distorted reports and representations dished out in the media. It was tainted by the meta-narratives of the "national cause", which they had very little reasons to question. - "It is only a few traitors and terrorists, acting under inducement from Pakistan, who are getting a somewhat rough handling". - The common assumption is that India is a "just society", in which innocent people would never suffer.

Should we condemn all who lived under the influence of this view, as the worshippers of the Moloch?
And what about us? Without our special exposure to the reality of repression, would we have so completely disputed the "contextualization" of Punjab in the mass media? Would we have so readily seen through the grand narratives of our nationalists, who were making out that the standard repertoire of legal guarantees simply would not apply in the crisis situation obtaining in the state? Doesn't not the public, misinformed as it is about the ground realities, first require a solid, reliable knowledge of the real happenings, through victim testimony, along with the hard evidence of the State crimes, before it can rectify its position, change its heart, and begin to press for more humane policies?

PROBLEMS OF CONSTRUCTION AND THE INITIATIVE OF COORDINATION:
Unfortunately, those who try to raise awareness for human rights have to contend with legalistic and political frameworks, which are slow-moving, often unresponsive, and which above all do not sufficiently expose the target audiences to raw facts. The people working in the field are, no doubt, aware of the many ways, subtle and blatant, in which the media "manufacture social consent", by suppressing information and by twisting the truth. Again, there are those sections of the media and academia which do not mind to carry the human rights positions, but on condition that these be couched in the aseptised jargon, known as "UN-speak". Stanley Cohen characterises this internal dialect as "bland, technocratic, legalistic and designed not to offend. The language is so abstract, non-pictorial and non-specific that it is often unclear what exactly is being talked about."
This kind of presentation about the human rights agenda cannot possibly impress the non-specialised groups of people whose sympathies we badly need. Unless presented with hard facts and with an honest, vivid, objective reinterpretation of the context, these "laymen" simply won't respond.

We must acknowledge another serious difficulty here: the target audience we have in mind - normal middle class Indians - do not routinely experience illegal detention, custodial torture and arbitrary executions. So they tend to be sceptical of extreme statements that berate the State institutions to be calculatedly inhuman, specially when they come from habitually anti-establishment characters. We must also admit that the meta-narrative of Punjab problem has been so successfully "contextualized" that it generally conjures up a picture of cynical forces, bent on violence and disruption, which the security forces somehow managed to contain.

For all these reasons, the true facts about Punjab, as presented by the human rights groups, have not percolated to a large enough section of the public, and have failed to shape the moral and political debate. The arguments about the State's obligations and the rights of victims to restitution can have force only when the information on the violations and their magnitude is available in objective, accurate, systematic and standardised form. This applies particularly to the matter of police abductions and illegal corpse disposal, now before the National Human Rights Commission: In the face of stout denials by the State agencies and of a vehement campaign for impunity, a fault-proof case must be presented if we want the litigation to reach a just and satisfactory conclusion.

The simple objective was, however, impossible to achieve unless all the main human rights groups working in the field came together on the basis of a definite program. The task of monitoring the progress of the investigations which the Supreme Court had remitted to the NHRC, could not be fulfilled without a vigorous injection of voluntary initiative and effort: we had to fashion an effective mechanism to undertake thorough investigative work at the grass-root level. This was how the idea to form a Coordination Committee of various human rights groups involved in Punjab took shape. Preliminary discussions with the human rights leaders of the community culminated in a meeting at Chandigarh on 14 November 1997. It saw the formation of the Coordination Committee and the adoption of the aforementioned agenda. A position paper that spelt out the issues, the programs and the conceptual framework was circulated to all the affiliate organisations and individuals. The following organisations joined:
Committee for Information and Initiative on Punjab, Punjab Human Rights Organisation, International Human Rights Organisation, Movement against State Repression, World Human Rights Protection Council, Human Rights and Democracy Forum, Lawyers for Human Rights, Khalra Action Committee, Bhartiya Kisan Union, Akali Dal (Wadala),
Akali Dal (Mann), Akali Dal (Panthik), Punjab Janata Morcha, Bahujan Samaj Party
Internationalist Democratic Party, Sikh Students Federation, (Mehta, Chawla),
Babbar Akali Dal, Akal Federation, World Sikh Council.
Those who joined the Committee in their individual capacity are:
Dr. (Mrs.) Sukhjeet Kaur Gill, Amrik Singh Muktsar, Harshinder Singh, Baba Sarabjot Singh Bedi, Sukhjinder Singh, Mokham Singh, former IAS Gurtej Singh, Gurdarshan Singh Dhillon, Dalbir Singh, Col (rtd) Bhagat Singh, Jaspal Singh Siddhu, Maj. Gen. (rtd) Narinder Singh, Gurdip Singh, Editor Az Di Awaz, Gurbachan Singh, editor Des Punjab and Joginder Singh, editor Spokesman.
Gurtej Singh offered one part of his house in Sector 8 of Chandigarh to be used as the Committee's headquarters.
A Secretariat under the Convenor was constituted to implement and supervise the progress of the adopted programs.
Baba Sarabjit Singh Bedi, Kuldip Wingh Wadala, Jasbir Singh Rode and Mokham Singh became members of the Fund Raising Committee. It was decided that the Committee would not accept foreign donations and anonymous contributions.
An Accounts Committee, with Dr. (Mrs.) Sukhjeet Kaur Gill, Maj. Gen. (Rtd.) Narinder Singh and Rajwinder Singh Bains as members, was formed to maintain the records of contributions and expenditure. All expenses had to be supported with proper bills and receipts. It was also decided that any member of the Coordination Committee can scrutinise the work and the records of the Accounts Committee.

AMBITIOUS PROPOSALS:
The first Convention of the Committee was held in Chandigarh on 10 December 97, with former Supreme Court Judge Kuldip Singh presiding. The Convention, attended by thousands of people from the victims' families, adopted the position paper that had been circulated earlier; also a design for the Incident-Report to document all cases of enforced disappearances and arbitrary executions leading to illegal corpse disposal. The Convention called on the Punjab government to set up a Truth Commission to investigate all complaints of human rights violations, as it had pledged in its election manifesto, and requested Justice Kuldip Singh to establish a People's Commission if by 13 April 1998 the government failed to keep its electoral promise.

The Convention also decided to organise workshops to train volunteers in the documentation work. All the organisations affiliated with the Committee were asked to promptly identify their workers who would participate in the workshops. They were also asked to appoint one qualified member of their parties to liaison with the Committee on field research and documentation. The idea was to use their organisational strength to compile all cases of enforced disappearances and arbitrary executions within a period of six months. The lawyers belonging to the Committee who had filed cases involving human rights abuses before the Punjab and Haryana High Court, mainly petitions for writs of habeas corpus, were requested to give their copies to be included in the Committee's documentation. As a quid pro quo, the Committee offered to provide research inputs to follow up on those cases that were still pending.

EARLY DISAPPOINTMENTS:
Most of these ideas turned out to be far too ambitious to be feasible.
The training workshops never materialised. The political organisations failed to identify their workers who would learn interview techniques. They also did not appoint anyone to liaison with the Committee on its documentation work.
Only four lawyers sent in some of their cases.
By the end of March 1998, more than four thousand Incident-Report Forms had been distributed. But only one hundred filled forms had come back to the Secretariat.
The lawyers from Delhi, who committed to help with the legal work, never showed up.
In six months, the Committee was not able to raise sufficient money to even acquire a computer and a telephone for the office. The organisations affiliated with the Committee failed to make their monthly financial contributions.
Eventually, the Committee found few sympathetic individuals who gave enough money for the basic work. The outlines of the investigation and research were revamped and attended almost entirely by the core members of the Secretariat.
The history of our failures, the diagnosis of their causes, also the long series of official intimidation and harassment that aimed at frustrating our work - all these must be left for some other volume. But before moving on, we must briefly discuss another episode that illustrates a basic weakness within the human rights movement in Punjab.

A SERIOUS MISUNDERSTANDING:
On 26 April 1998, following the refusal by the Punjab government to form the Truth Commission as beseeched by 10 December 97 Convention, the Committee announced the formation of a panel of three judges to constitute a People's Commission on Human Rights Violations in Punjab. The Commission was to be headed by D. S. Tewatia, former Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court, with H. Suresh and Jaspal Singh, retired judges of Bombay and Delhi High Courts, as the other members.
The Committee debated the issues of the inquiry and their terms of reference on the basis of a draft, circulated by the Convenor, which suggested that in addition to the State atrocities, the Commission should also investigate why the security forces in Punjab failed to enforce the law, despite being equipped with extraordinary powers to counter violence and restore order.
At this point, one member organization of the Committee decided to attack the circulated draft on the ground that it conveyed absence of sympathy for the Sikh militant movement.

The controversial part of the draft said: "The individual and group violence in Punjab has taken a heavy toll of human lives. As is common knowledge, the security forces in Punjab were equipped with extraordinary powers to counter the situation of separatist violence. Yet, the law and order machinery not only failed to contain the menace, it also failed to prosecute suspects arrested under such law as TADA, in spite of their draconian provisions. The Commission would examine these incidents of individual and group violence with the view to determine the reasons for the failures of the law and order machinery in curbing and punishing the guilty."

LAW AND ORDER:
We had proposed the issue as a subject of investigation because we thought it important for understanding the collapse of social order in Punjab. Protagonists of the Indian establishment habitually repeated the claim that "excesses" had become inevitable because terrorism had completely paralysed the courts of law, which would not convict the terrorists brought before them for trial.
The merits of this claim have not been seriously scrutinised with factual reference to the cases that had been brought before the courts, which are supposed to operate on the rules of evidence. Terrorist And Destructive Activities (Prevention) Act - in short TADA - modified the established norms of criminal trial system in India, going to the extent of commanding the presumption of guilt against the accused. It even allowed custodial confessions as admissible evidence. These provisions were extremely odious in destroying traditionally established safeguards of the criminal procedural regulation. Punjab registered 17,529 cases under the TADA since its promulgation in 1985 up to 31 July 1994. In how many cases did the prosecution marshal the minimum necessary evidence to procure conviction?

Sleeman and his team had succeeded in eradicating the menace of thugee under William Bentinck. It was a slow, laborious and dangerous work. It would have been easy to catch hold of thugs and to eliminate them without legal ceremony. But Sleeman and his team opted for the arduous way, compiling lists of the members of each gang, building up accounts of the incidents, procuring witnesses, and collating evidence that would stand judicial scrutiny against discrepancy. Their work bore fruit. Between 1831 and 1837 more than three thousand thugs were convicted. Hundred of them were hanged, and thousands transported for life.
Violent crime is not new to Punjab. The minutes of British officials who served in the state are full of references about their difficulties in handling the problem by the book. But they rose to the challenge.
The system of maintaining a surveillance register No. 10 of bad characters was created in 1861 by E. A. Prinsep, the Commissioner of Amritsar division. Another District Officer posted at Jullundhur gives elaborate description of the police campaign against crime, based on careful selection of Station House Officers, cultivation of reliable informers, and persuasion of villagers to testify.

Gerald Savage worked with the "Special Cell" to deal with organized crime. "This meant living in rest houses and never really gaining civilization for months on end".
In our opinion, these standards of police work, actually evolved in Punjab, had been given short shrift by the team of officers under KPS Gill who had the aptitude for drama, but little training, inclination or the compulsion to do the dog's work. With the result, Punjab in the beginning of insurgency became a stage for their vainglory. In the end, they could only catch and kill.

CONTEMPT OF COURT:
Judiciary has often come under attack for exposing police misdeeds. Aubrey Pennell, the District Magistrate of Noakhali in 1904, sentenced Reilly, his Superintendent of Police, to a jail term for his slackness in investigating a darogha's role in murder. Pennel was forced to quit.

In 1942, a Punjab District Officer R. M. K. Slater sentenced a Sub-Inspector to a term of imprisonment on a private complaint of causing grievous bodily hurt. Slater reports: "The reaction from the British Superintendent of Police was instant and explosive. I had struck, it seemed, a mortal blow at the whole fabric of law and order".
It is possible to glean more examples of this kind, and to compile a volume of interesting anecdotes. Those who have studied the relations between the judiciary and the executive organs of the State in comparable situations of social unrest would testify that the phenomenon is not unique to India.

THE IRISH EXAMPLE:
In the context of the troubles in Ulster, every one knows about the Lord Lane's October 89 judgement in the case known as Guildford four. These four suspects had been charged with terrorist crimes and sentenced to life imprisonment. They had to remain for fifteen years behind the bars before the new evidence convinced the Secretary of State Douglas Hurd that the case merited a fresh appeal, and that it would be morally wrong for the Crown to defend the convictions. The evidence exposed failings in the police investigation process, the forensic science service and even the lower judiciary, all developing from political bias.
The result had been a grave abortion of justice.

When the case led to a spate of similar appeals and acquittals, the government set up a full-blown Royal Commission on Criminal Justice for a thorough revamping of the police establishment and a critical reappraisal of its ways of working. The public criticism had been sharp. The Independent wrote to say "when fish start to rot, they rot from the head." In the beginning, the police were embarrassed and actually admitted mistakes of "noble cause corruption", as John Woodcock, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary put it in his memorable phrase. But when the campaign for reforms threatened to become radical, the attitudes changed again with many accusing the judiciary of loading the process in favour of suspects.

It is also possible to criticise the Indian judiciary on many counts. However, the tardiness and corruption of the Indian judiciary cannot be the main issue when the law-enforcing officers accused of gross human rights violations clamour for immunity with the suggestion that on this hinges the national unity and sovereignty. When Nero argued in like terms, Seneca committed suicide.

DEADENDS OF MILITANT CRIMES:
These are the issues that we wanted the People's Commission to investigate when we proposed the failure of the State agencies in prosecuting the individuals and the groups suspected of involvement in terrorist crimes as a subject of reference. But the member organization of the Committee, which attacked the draft on the terms of reference, had clearly decided to misrepresent our objectives. They must have felt that our objective was to investigate and denounce human rights abuses committed by armed militant groups in Punjab. And this they clearly found upsetting.

In fact, we would have eagerly pursued this line of investigations if there had been any real possibility of determining the facts. But there was not. The First Information Reports (FIR) registered by the police about the terrorist crimes did not identify the perpetrators. The hapless victims of these crimes were themselves unable to report or even suggest the identities of aggressors.
Young Sikhs belonging to various radical organisations and suspected of having instigated or committed terrorist crimes had either been arbitrarily killed by the security forces or locked up in prisons without fair trials. In these circumstances, we could not get far by investigating human rights offences committed by the armed separatist groups and individuals.

However, the member organisation that chose to misrepresent our objectives had correctly assumed that we had nothing but abhorrence for the crimes that had taken the lives of so many innocent people - often from among the poorest of the poor, or among honest opponents of separatism.

STANDARDS OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE ABERRATIONS OF PUNJAB MILITANCY:
From an early stage, the Sikh militant movement had become infected by many obnoxious traits. This was because its leaders were unable to strictly enforce and themselves practice the prohibition against the taking of innocent lives, an absolute moral imperative for all revolutionary movements. Indiscriminate violence cannot be justified. It ignores the individual identities of the oppressors and the oppressed. It operates instead with blanket descriptions and stereotypes. In a word: it is blind. It also undermines the very foundation of justice, by mocking the notion of people as concrete moral agents. Besides, those who seriously take Guru Gobind Singh's exhortation "to pursue justice to the last recourse", must also accept that revolutionary strategies can only be resorted for ending the abuse of political power and for reinstating law and righteousness.

When they become means of snatching political power, they can only breed sin within and chaos without. World history bears this out on almost all its pages.

PRINCIPLES OF A JUST WAR:
The concept of Just War, has a long history and has assumed many forms. But it never was a blanket license for violence. It enjoins proper protocols of declaration. It requires the combatants to spell out their motives, to say what the rights are which they want to defend, what wrongs they want to rectify, what crimes they wish to punish. It also imposes stringent obligations towards the non-combatant population.

Article 3 of 1949 Geneva Conventions and the terms of the second Protocol of 1977 forbid willful killing, torture, inhuman treatment and indiscriminate attacks on civilian population. They apply to all belligerent sides, and to all armed conflicts, whether internal or between nations.

More than a question of law, this is fundamentally a matter of moral legitimacy: Any group of people who are opposed to a system of governance for reasons of justice, must themselves pay attention to justice! As Archbishop Tutu explains in the foreword to the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: "A venerable tradition holds that those who use force to overthrow or even to oppose an unjust system occupy the moral high ground over those who use force to sustain that same system. That is when the criteria of the so-called "just war" come into play… This does not mean that those who hold the moral high ground have carte blanche as to the methods they use…"

Apart from generally concluding that, generally speaking, the liberation movements were not paragons of virtue and were often responsible for egging on their people to behave in ways that were uncontrollable", the South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report held Ms Madikizela Mandela and the members of her United Football Club responsible for heinous crimes, and also announced that the ANC was accountable for them. For a Commission that would never have been created without the ANC in the government, it was a rather courageous finding to give. We must also remember that the ANC was an internationally recognized liberation movement that was conducting a legitimate struggle against the apartheid, a crime against humanity under international law. And yet, even before the overthrow of the racist regime, the ANC had set up three internal Commissions of inquiry - the Stuart, Skweyiya and Motsuenyane Commissions - to investigate, and eventually confirm, the reports of gross human rights violations committed by its own cadres. These were public and independent inquiries. Altogether, they amounted to a rare exercise in honesty, almost unprecedented in the history of liberation movements.

THE WEAKNESS OF AMBIVALENCE:
In comparison, the human rights movement in Punjab has for far too long shied from making a clear denunciation of the crimes committed by the armed underground groups against innocent and non-combatant civilian population. In our opinion, this reluctance has exposed them to accusations of double standards, which have only strengthened the forces of impunity on the other side.

The member organization which attacked the draft on the terms of reference indirectly played a very useful part in compelling the entire coalition of human rights organizations to take a clear stand on this important issue. The next meeting of the Committee held on 8 June 98 adopted a unanimous resolution to propose that the terms of reference for the People's Commission must remain wide enough to include allegations of atrocities committed also by individuals unconnected with the State.

THE ROOTS OF UNREST:
As the next chapter would contextually show, the unrest in Punjab and its bloody repression have deep historical roots. They can be traced to the trauma of Partition and, farther back, to the terrible violence which the process of State-creation in the waning years of the British empire, which particularly affected the people of India's periphery, their identities, their land, their frontiers, their rights over their natural resources and their sense of culture. These people, divested of their past, estranged from their culture, bereft of their traditional rights, have now become, as it were, corporate possessions of the Central State. Such a situation is fraught with conflicts.

No wonder then if, ever since independence, India's periphery has been seething with discontent and unrest. For these, the Center always had one answer: repression. And sure enough, these ethno-national movements pose a serious challenge to the traditional understanding of State sovereignty, with its disregard for popular consent. This situation is not peculiar to India. It is the same world-wide.

The chapter of unrest-cum-repression in Punjab is particularly woeful for the reason that, had not the Sikhs been so loyal to India in 1947, our famed "granary" and "shield-arm" would now be in Pakistan, with an international border meeting the outskirts of Delhi. The Indian establishment could have paused to remember this contribution of the Sikhs to the making of a modern India and their sacrifices for its defense, and it could also have tried to understand their grievances before unleashing its repressive might.
As for the attitude of the Sikhs, the questions to ask are: What accounted for the evaporation of their faith in India's capacity for justice? What were the commitments and the ideals of the independence movement, which bound the Sikhs and the other peoples of the subcontinent to their common struggle against the British imperialism? Have the leaders of the Indian State, and its institutions, betrayed those commitments and ideals? Did they ever sincerely try to understand the hardcore of the Sikh grievances, including their demand for a radical restructuring of the Center-State relations? What scope is there for reconciliation now, and in which framework?

In our view, no serious reflection on the Punjab problem can dispense with a sincere inquiry into these questions.

INDIAN FREEDOM AND INSPIRATIONS FROM PUNJAB:
As all know, Punjab lost its national sovereignty in 1849 to the British combination of deceit and intrepidity. Later on, the people of Punjab were often found in the forefront of Indian people's struggle. Our human-rights bashers in the Indian establishment are all too prone to forget Gandhi's position on the Rowlett Bills, and Punjab's role in the first satyagraha after the first World War, which played such an important part in developing India's freedom struggle. Brigadier Dyer, who supervised the massacre at Amritsar's Jallianwala Bag in 1919 to suppress the movement, would openly brag about his "feat", necessary in his view to restore law and order. Jawaharlal Nehru, who chanced to overhear the brigadier's ranting during a train travel, was taken aback by so much brazenness. He was also appalled by the "cold-blooded approval of that deed" in England. He wrote: "I realised then, more vividly than I had ever done before, how brutal and immoral imperialism was and how it had eaten into the souls of the British upper classes."

The Punjab events had no less an impact on the younger Subhash Chandra Bose. He had passed the ICS in 1920 but, seeing the depth of British support for the repression in Punjab, he decided "to chuck this rotten service" and dedicate himself "whole-heartedly to the country's cause".

Today, many "Indian patriots" are proud to air the view that the people of Punjab had to be killed by the thousands in order to save India's territorial integrity. But even the British - except precisely in the Jallianwala Bag episode, which showed them at their worst - have rarely been so callous of fundamental human rights in India.

BRITISH LESSONS:
Viceroy Minto had wanted a free hand to put down the wave of terrorism which swept India at the partition of Bengal in 1905. John Morley, the Secretary of State, asked if his government was going to be equally harsh with Englishmen who committed violence against Indians. Otherwise: "our pharisaic glorification of the stern justice of the British raj is windy nonsense... Is it not idle for us to pretend that we wish to understand their sentiment, and yet silently acquiesce in all these violent sentences?" Those days, the police did not fake encounters, but deported the revolutionaries. Even then the question of evidence, as the following letter from Morley shows, was a matter of scrutiny: "Meanwhile I quake as to the hideous perils of Deportation. Of course, I know that you will take all possible pains not to seize the wrong men... Your evidence which is to reach me soon, will be scanned by me with sharp eye; and by others whose eyes will be still sharper (and more unfriendly) than mine." At the end of the first world war, Chelmsford demanded similar powers to deal with the communist, Pan-Islamic and other revolutionary groups in Punjab like the Gadhr. Edwin Montogu, then secretary of State, called for reflection: "Revolutionary crime exists; Rowlatt legislation becomes inevitable... But are we not moving in a vicious circle? Are we doing enough to prevent the existence of the crime? There is nothing so easy at any particular moment as to govern through the police. It is far simpler than any other method. It requires less thought, less circumlocution." The Secretary of State also insisted on a thorough probe into the ways of the secret police: "And then again I shall never be satisfied myself until some investigation is made of the methods and powers and the use of the powers of the CID. The statements that I have heard ever since I have been connected with India about shadowing of innocent people, about records, about the whole activities of the Department and about the use made of it by the Government, make me think that an impartial investigation of its activities now that the war is over is very much and urgently called for..."

TURNING A BLIND EYE:
That is exactly what the people of Punjab are clamouring for today: An impartial investigation into the reports of human rights abuses over the last decade and a half. The evidence gathered by us, further corroborated by the Central Bureau of Investigation (which submitted its report to the Supreme Court in December 96) establishes widespread, systematic and cynical violation of human rights. The Supreme Court remitted the matter to the National Human Rights Commission to determine all the issues arising from the report which "discloses flagrant violation of human rights on a mass scale." But under the pressure of the forces of impunity, the Commission has so whittled down the meaning of the inquiry in a way that it becomes a travesty.
The Akali government in Punjab, under Chief Minister Badal, had made an electoral pledge to set up a Truth Commission to investigate all reports of human rights violations in the State. But once in office, it reneged on its pledge.

Later on, when the Committee constituted the People's Commission, it met with a barrage of adverse publicity and with vociferous demands for its ban. The Director General of Punjab Police indicated that the government was contemplating to move the High Court to ban the People's Commission. This apparently took the form of a Public Interest Litigation Petition, seeking to restrain the People's Commission from holding public hearings on complaints of atrocities. The petition argues that the Commission poses a serious threat to India's national security interests and aims to subvert India's judiciary by setting up a parallel system. But the fact is that both the Union government and the Aklai government in Punjab, when appearing before the court, have declined to set up an official machinery to examine all cases of human rights violations. As of now, the High Court has not given its decision, although the arguments on the matter have long been concluded. As a result, the People's Commission has not been able to proceed with its work.

Faced with such stubborn denial of truth, what can we do except persist in our efforts to arouse the mechanisms of human empathy and compassion? And how can we achieve that, unless we place the facts before the public, as carefully and objectively as we are capable of?

THE REIGN OF DESPAIR AND THE URGENCY OF DOCUMENTATION:
This collective looking-away from the truth and this hypocrisy of our political establishment are real crimes. They have a devastating effect on the survivors and the bereaved who are hoping against hope for acknowledgement and reparation. We are acutely conscious of our inadequacies in conveying the spirit of despair and impotent anger that weighs on their lives. As shown in the second part of the report, many have committed suicide. The majority are already resigned to the dispensations of Providence. They fear reprisals and, when exhorted to keep faith in the eventual triumph of justice, remind us of what happened to Khalra .
In our assessment, the large majority of survivors from the families of those who disappeared or got arbitrarily killed do not even care to report the incidents from the conviction that no one can do anything to alleviate the injustice they have suffered.
In our estimate, only ten percent of the survivors from the families that suffered enforced disappearances and arbitrary killings have, in any manner, come forward to give reports. That is also the ratio of people who approached the judiciary or other institutions for redress. This leaves about ninety percent of the cases that have remained undocumented.

This should be a cause for concern to human rights organisations or simply to those interested in preserving history. Clearly, filling this huge gap would be a difficult task. It would require coordinated efforts, and demand technical and financial resources. The bulk of victim-testimonies is coming from people who are old and might not live very long. Most of them are poor and illiterate and do not understand the meaning of "evidence" or the point of recording it. Yet they are the repositories of that evidence, which, unless quickly collated, risks being lost altogether.

OUR SURVEY AND ITS METHODS:
One part of our survey is based on the sample of 838 Incident-Reports. This survey of 838 cases has gone through two main stages of verification. The first stage involved the filling of an Incident-Report Form (Appendix F) by close relatives of victims, often assisted by volunteers affiliated to the Committee. In the second stage, members of the documentation team, tape-recorded oral testimonies in a structured interview process. Both the stages implied several sub-processes. The interview process was not chosen at haphazard. It was evolved after examining the information contained in the Form and after taking into account the impressions and suggestions of the volunteers engaged in the fieldwork.

THE REPORT FORM:
One slightly unorthodox but very important feature of our inquiry is the emphasis put on descriptive information. The Incident-Report design is in the number of columns that elicit descriptive information on the political and family background, the general circumstances of the disappeared person and his family members. These columns, which elicit descriptive data and leave room for subjective interpretation, follow on other questions, which seek strictly factual information.
Of course, for an efficient computerized analysis, this blend of factual enumeration and anecdotal and interpretative material created major difficulties. Neither Foxpro database program, which we decided to use, nor any other program available in the market seemed capable of analyzing our long memo fields and of squeezing a clear statistical picture out of them.
For the sake of detailed knowledge, we opted to err on the side of clumsiness and to sacrifice database efficiency, which required complete ranking of information through entries under controlled vocabulary. To put it simply, we settled for a design that allowed us to incorporate in the Form whatever the victims wanted to tell us, even though it meant that much information had to remain locked in memo fields outside the reach of database queries.

We distributed the Incident-Report-Forms to the victims' families through volunteers affiliated to the Committee. The volunteers were also required to fill them if the complainants could not read and write.
The number of forms and the dates on which the Committee's volunteers took them were entered in a register, along with the volunteers' names and addresses. Similar entries, with names and dates, were also made when the volunteers returned them to the office.

Those forms that were sent back by mail were entered in a separate register.
Every form was given a unique number and acknowledged.
If the information was inadequate or confusing, we wrote back with requests for clarification and supplementary details.
A status report was prepared for every form after cross checking the information with the lawyer, if there was one involved, and the volunteer who assisted the complainant to fill the form. This led to the second stage of verification, which involved new interviews, to understand the complex and unique situation of each victim and to guess its likely influence on the presentation of the facts.

THE INTERVIEW PROCESS:
To illustrate the intricacies of the second process, we shall give two regular examples:
A relative of the victim of enforced disappearance let say a mother, a father, or a wife, who is reporting the incident, is illiterate. The relative has acquired a copy of the Incident-Report Form, and has approached a local social worker who can fill it up. More probably, a political worker from the area, loosely affiliated to the Committee, has gone to the family to take down the incident.
The straight and simple question in the column to be answered is: When did the incident take place? That sounds simple, but the reporting family member does not possess written notes on the incident's details. The local newspaper either did not report the incident or the copy has been lost. The reporter does not exactly remember whether it was four or five years ago. It was just approaching winter, and crops in the fields were so high; harvesting was still so many weeks away. That is as close to the time of occurrence as you can get by the narration. Or again, the family member may know the year but not the month and the date; perhaps, if you are lucky, he known even those details but by the local variation of the Indian system of calendar, let us say 16th of Magh!

The volunteer who is filling the Form can, of course, take down the information verbatim. That would be easy to classify and enumerate, even resolve. But he may have his own ideas of exactitude, but not enough sense or training to extract it. Not liking uncertain statements, he might resolve four or five years into a certain number and calculate the year back as 1992.
Of course, there are methods to extract the definite year, month and date of the incident even when the reporting relative is confused and without any written evidence to offer. Some one in the village might have got married around that time. Perhaps, the neighbor had childbirth in the family, or a cousin of the disappeared had passed the school examination or had come home on a short vacation from the army. Perhaps, the Congress Party had formed the State government earlier in that summer, or there was an election to the village council of elders few months later.

By determining a few such definite occurrences in the recollection of the reporting member, it would be possible to work one's count closer to the actual time. However, the process involves tiresome investigative work, hours of interviews, checking and cross-checking of facts and scanning of old newspapers. The volunteer might not have the patience, time or training for the task and so he might enter in the Form, which carries the thumb impression of the illiterate complainant, a wrong date at his own guesswork.
The reporter says the incident happened on 16th of Magh. Our volunteer should normally know that the Indian month of Magh belongs to the winter season, but might not be able to work out the corresponding month of the Gregorian calendar. In stead of recording exactly what he has heard, he may write down his conjecture of the analogous month, which can be both January and February, and further vitiate the possibility of correction by swiftly guessing a date.
The interview process aims to correct all such errors that can creep into the information system. It also hopes to corroborate factual assertions in the survivor testimony with statements and evidence from independent sources to account for possible lapses in the recounting abilities of putative victims.

A CASE FOR EXCLUSION:
Let us consider one more example. A complainant, call him XY Singh, is a well-to-do farmer and can also read and write. On 22 August 91, his son is abducted from the local bus stand by unknown officers. A shopkeeper who cannot identify the kidnappers, or does not want to reveal their names from fear, sees the kidnapping. He is also afraid to become a formal witness.
Five days later, a newspaper reports the death of his abducted son in a supposed armed combat between some officers of a police station in the district and a group of unidentified militants. The report says that one militant, later identified as XY Singh's son, is killed while others escaped.

XY Singh knows the report to be false. He does not actually know which officers abducted him. But after reading the news report, he is convinced that the officers who killed him in the supposed combat are the ones responsible.
With the intention to file a petition before the High Court, XY Singh consults a local lawyer who tells him that unless there is a witness to identify the officers as abductors, the court would not entertain his allegation. So, under the influence of this expert advice, XY Singh decides to introduce a false witness, a relative, to claim that he was also at the bus stand when such and such officers carried out the kidnapping. Or, he decides to change the scene of the abduction to claim that the officers have picked up his son from his own house. After receiving notice from the High Court, the officers swear an affidavit to disclaim responsibility. The affidavit also contains some information to suggest that they were some other place when the abduction allegedly occurred, and the court dismisses the petition. But the father feels compelled to repeat the invented evidence before our volunteers, lest his incident-report should appear inconsistent with the record of his statement before the High Court. If the person interviewing him is patient and persistent, and would not hesitate to go back to him a few times after crosschecking the facts locally, he would know the truth. If then XY Singh insists on "consistency", the Incident-Report is excluded from the survey.

Transcripts of all interviews, when tape-recorded, and also all hand written notes, are included in the files of the incident-reports with their unique numbering, along with any other material including press reports, court papers and personal letters containing information on the cases. Their perusal would show the staggering complexity of the interview process, with repetitive and circular questioning, checking and cross-checking, all aiming at as complete and authentic a reporting as possible. Although the process is time consuming, strenuous and emotionally exhausting, also for the reason that the dignity of victims requires that we talk to them at their pace and in their own terms, it has rewarded us with a wealth of information and insights, which help us to better understand the larger systemic aspects of violations. All of this material would be included in the writing of the final report.

INCIDENT-REPORTS:
Complete list of Incidents-Reports, constituting the sample of our survey, is included as Appendix G. Some salient points of the data, already analyzed by us, are included in the note on the highlights which follows the introduction. The summaries of incidents included in the second part of the report are drawn from this survey.

The Committee has received 523 complaints, involving grave human rights offences, for submission before the People's Commission whose proceedings have been hampered by the petition before the High Court that seeks a writ of mandamus to restrain the Commission from publicly hearing them. The Commission would take them up for further investigation after the matter before the High Court has been disposed of. The Committee has not included these 523 cases in its report.

COURT CASES:
The Committee has analyzed 112 petitions for the writ of habeas corpus, filed by four lawyers of the Punjab and Haryana High Court on behalf of relatives of those who disappeared after police abductions. These lawyers are Rajvinder Singh Bains, Navkiran Singh, Harbhajan Singh and Dalbir Singh Pheruman. All these cases would form part of a research project of the Committee that aims to examine human rights abuses in Punjab, the relevant laws and the judicial attitudes.

FURTHER EVIDENCE OF SECRET CREMATIONS:
The Committee's investigations to acquire further evidence of illegal cremations have resulted in our being able to obtain partial records from six districts in Faridkot, Kapurthala, Ludhiana, Mansa, Moga and Zira in Ferozepur district.
These records show cremations of 934 bodies, labeled as unidentified and unclaimed, which the Punjab police carried out. The lists of these cremations are given as Appendices A-F. In the course of its investigations, the Committee has been able to acquire some important insights into the procedure governing the cremations. They are the following:

For cremations of unidentified and unclaimed bodies, the concerned police officials are required to make formal application to the local Municipal Committee to make arrangements, and also to purchase firewood and body shrouds. The applications, addressed to the Executive Officer of the Municipal Committee, are supposed to be complete with description of the bodies, their sex, First Information Reports, and autopsy reports. The rules say that the Municipal Committees are themselves responsible for the actual cremations. In the years of militancy, however, the police officials never allowed the personals of the Municipal Committees to come near the bodies brought for cremations.

Every Municipal Committee is supposed to maintain a separate Stock Register to account for the purchase of firewood and shrouds for unidentified bodies. However, some committees do not do so, making the necessary entries in some general-purpose register. Some Committees maintain separate yearly registers, while others use the same register until they are full. Some give lot of details, - the number of bodies, names if known, concerned police station and FIR numbers, details of the purchases made for their cremation, their costs etc. Other Committees only enter the weight or the cost of firewood and shroud. In such cases, the number of bodies remains unstated, and has to be deduced by calculating the amount spent for a single body against the aggregate expense.

Most of these cremations took place at the sub-divisional and district headquarters for the reason that smaller places did not have the facilities for postmortem. In some districts and subdivisions, the cremations of unidentified bodies were carried out only in one burning ground controlled by the Committee. In bigger cities, the Committees controlled a number of sites where the bodies could be burnt.

We have found out that the Municipal Committees have maintained the records concerning cremations of unidentified bodies, which have taken place over the last twenty-five to thirty years. After the Supreme Court ordered the CBI to investigate the illegal cremations, Punjab intelligence officials started to ask for and examine the Municipal Committee Records relating to the cremations of unidentified bodies, carried out by the police in the militancy years, in all the seventeen districts of Punjab.

APPENDICES OF CREMATIONS: SIX LISTS:
The specific experiences of our investigation team at six Municipal Committee offices, from which it was able to obtain the records, are as following:

Faridkot:
At the Municipal Council's office in Faridkot, the investigation team was able to examine three stock registers relating to the cremation of unidentified and unclaimed bodies. According to one official, the Register No. 1 had been opened on 29 October 86. But the first entry in the register showed the date of 29 April 87 and covered the cremations carried out up to 18 April 89. The register No. 2 had the details of the cremation of unidentified and unclaimed bodies from 8 April 91 to 9 December 91. The register No. 3 covered the period from 10 January 92 to 10 September 92. The entries in the registers showed the weight of firewood purchase for every body as 350 kilograms and length of body shroud as 5 meters. It also gave the names of wood and cloth suppliers. The register showed the dates of each entry, and names and signatures of the Committee's employees receiving the purchases for the cremations. But the registers did not show the names of police stations or police officers who had brought the bodies. There was also no column for the number of bodies, which had to be calculated from the quantity of wood and the length of cloth purchased for the bodies. The investigating team only noted down the dates of cremations and the number of bodies.
When the members of the investigating team started to note down the details from these registers in their own note books, the Municipal Committee officials began to object. They refused to show them any more registers, and insistently took away one register that seemed to contain entries of cremations for the period from 18 April 1989 to 7 April 1991. This was the period in which deaths in so-called police encounters were at their peak. The three registers covering the periods from 29 April 87 to 18 April 89, 8 April 91 to 9 December 91 and 10 January 92 to 10 September 92 showed 164 cremations. The details are in the Appendix A.

Kapurthala:
At Kapurthala, the investigating team made a formal application to the Executive Officer of the Municipal Committee for copies of the registers containing information on cremations of unidentified bodies in the period from 1987 to 1994, through advocate Harjit Singh Sandhu. The Executive Officer marked the application to the Sanitary Inspector, who wanted to know the rules under which he could give the copies. The application went to the Legal Advisor of the Municipal Committee, but no decision could be taken.
After waiting for some days, the team went to the Shiv Mandir cremation ground to explore the possibility of obtaining its own data. The attendant of the cremation ground said that the information was available at the office of the cremation ground run by Sanatana Dharm Sabha. The team then went to this office and demanded to see the registers concerning the police cremations. Apparently, the office attendants assumed that ours was an official intelligence team and showed them the registers. They also revealed that the Central Intelligence Department from Chandigarh had already examined the register once. The register contained details of every body under a serial number which had been cremated at this one particular site from 20 January 1988 to 11 February 1994. Our team members noted down the details, showing a total of 149 cremations, as in the Appendix B.

Ludhiana:
As the Ludhiana Municipal Corporation officials refused to allow the team to examine their registers on the cremations, its members went to the managing Committees' offices for various cremation grounds in the city. They found out that the police burnt unidentified bodies at four places in the city. They were:
[1] Shivpuri cremation ground, [2] Daresi ground, [3] Ramgarhia cremation ground, [4] Miller Ganj cremation ground and [4] Gaushala cremation ground. The team members then went to all the four places where the attendants told them that all the records were with the Presidents of their managing committees. The team members went to all the managing committees' offices but succeed in obtaining the records for only the Ramgarhia cremation ground. The team members noted down the details of all the entries relating to cremations of unidentified bodies carried out by the police, only omitting those which mentioned the cause of death as natural or accident. The entries in the register of Ramgarhia cremation grounds Committee covered the period from 6 May 1987 to 20 September 1993, and showed a total of 94 unidentified bodies.

Mansa:
The Executive Officer of the Municipal Council at Mansa allowed the Committee's application for copies of the records, made through advocate Ajit Singh Bhangu. The Sanitary Inspector showed a register that contained entries from 23 April 1992 to 26 November 94.
The Inspector claimed that the older records of such cremations were at a different office and could be obtained only later. The register for unidentified cremations from 23 April 1992 did not show the names of police stations or officials who had brought the bodies. It also did not have any entry on the cause of death. The details of what our team was able to write down are listed in the Appendix C, which shows a total of 74 bodies.

Moga:
The Municipal Council official at Moga produced three registers, which contained the entries of the unidentified cremations done by the police from 20 April 1988 to 12 September 1994. The team did not write down those entries which mentioned as causes for death road or rail accident, or sudden or natural deaths. The list, Appendix E, shows a total of 165 bodies.

Zira:
Approached for information, the Municipal Committee officials in Zira produced one register which contained entries on the purchase of firewood and body shrouds for unidentified bodies from 4 June 1988 to 19 May 1994. The register maintained by Zira Municipal Committee showed more details than others. The information was organized in eight columns under the following entries: [1] Serial number, [2] date, [3] FIR case number and date, [4] name of the police station, [5] name, if any of the dead person, [6] cost of firewood, [7] cost of cloth, and [8] remarks etc., carries the signature of the person making the entry after recording the details of the officer who issued the orders for cremation of the body; also, details about the police report on the search of the body. This information covered the period from 4 June 1988 to 13 May 1994 and showed a total of 288 cremations, as in Appendix F.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Some acknowledgements are due. Our investigative work would have come to nothing without the support from local informants, mostly members of the Akali Dal (Mann) and the Panthik Akali Dal. They helped us in a spirit of dedication to justice, which we hope would eventually triumph. The members of the Accounts Committee sustained our efforts in ways infinitely more onerous than their formal responsibilities entailed. When there was absolutely no money, they contributed from their private resources so that the essential work can go on. We are particularly grateful to Major General (Rtd) Narinder Singh and Dr. Sukhjeet Kaur Gill. The Committee would never have taken off without a roof over our heads. Mr. Gurtej Singh not only provided us with an independent office space within the compound of his house, he also allowed us to use all the facilities of his private establishment. We are particularly thankful to his wife Mrs. Surinderpal Kaur who, in her sympathy for our cause, has suffered myriad nuisances that attend on our intensely people oriented activities. Several volunteers from outside organizations have for short periods of time been associated with our documentation work. We acknowledge the contributions of Kamayani Mahabal from the India Center for Human Rights and Law, Neeru Kumar who now works with the Hague Tribunal and Neeta Kaur Chabra from New England School of Law. Neeta spent several sleepless nights in making short abstracts of case studies, included in this report. The life of our database specialist Hardayal Singh has not been easy since he joined the Committee's office year and a half ago. His calm persistence is our strength. Mr. Kripal Singh Bajwa not only developed an efficient system of maintaining office registers and case files, but has also been an inseparable member of the documentation team.

Without the core documentation team, the Committee would not exist and this report would never have got written. No words can sufficiently convey their importance to the mission, which the Committee represents. They should have signed this report as the co-authors, as I proposed. They declined for the simple reason that they had not written it, literally. Well, it would have been impossible for me to work on this project without their help. This report marks the end of my direct association with the Committee for the reason that I would be on a Fellowship at Oxford. But the documentation team of the Committee can count on me personally for the cause that brought us all together.

Justice (Rtd) Kuldip Singh's moral support has been crucial in sustaining our endeavors against impediments, which often seem insurmountable. Diverse and sometimes-discordant groups and individuals belonging to the Committee may not have been able to hold together as a group without his persuasive force that connects them as a community dedicated to a common cause.

[BACK]