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Know Your Rights
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World Sikh
News presents a sampling of documentation which is an indictment
of the police, security agencies and respective governments in
Punjab.
Readers are invited to visit the websites mentioned here to
learn more and become informed and concerned citizens. |
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 Documenting
human rights violation is the key work of human rights activists
world wide. From Amnesty International to the People’s
Union
for Civil Liberties, from Punjab Human Rights Organisation to the
International Human Rights Organisation, from lawyers to political
activists who have been engaging governments in cases of human
rights violations –all organizations have questioned the role of the
government in committing gross and systematic abuse of human
rights.
World Sikh News
presents a sampling of the recent documentation which is an
indictment of the police, security agencies and respective
governments.
Smoldering
Embers
Story of Long and Unending Wait for Justice for the Disappeared in
Panjab
The voluminous data documents a trajectory of police excesses and
helpless victims of state terrorism. It was an atmosphere bred by a
state in total control of a police force with scant respect for the
constitutional and moral bindings that led to the creation of super
cops actually super vigilantes as “encounter specialists”.
This narrative
by families works towards the professed aim of getting justice to
the victims and their families, to get the guilty persons their
deserved retribution and in some way restore the dignity of the
dead. It is not only the recounting of the stories of the
disappeared but an insight into the human side of the loss and also
the legal outlook of the case so far.
 The
first chapter Consequences: Those Left Behind takes into
account the effect of disappearances on family members of those who
were abducted and killed clandestinely. Many of these families did
not get to see the last remains of their loved ones and many never
even received the intimation of their “elimination”. To live in
darkness as to what happened to the ones they loved, to never know
the truth and sometimes hope in despair that their loved ones might
just walk through the door one day is like living in hell every
single day of their lives. Their life is taken out of the ordinary
and they experience the same fears and hurt that they had a decade
ago.
This chapter is
an interview with two families bound by the disappearances and very
dissimilar in their lives after the disappearance. One interview is
with Paramjeet Kaur, the wife of Mr. Jaswant Singh Khalra, who has
been actively involved with the case with the NHRC and the other one
with a poor family who could not even decipher what, was going on.
One is a woman who has become a beacon for struggle and the other a
family struggling for daily existence. Most of the victims fall in
the second category --scared whenever a stranger walks in through
the doors thinking he/she is a police personnel and barely surviving
above poverty.
The second
chapter Mr. Jaswant Singh Khalra: As I remember him is
Parmjeet Kaur Khalra's recollection of her life with Jaswant Singh
Khalra and her struggle after his kidnapping and disappearance. She
is carrying forward the human rights mission of her dead husband by
personally collecting information from families of the disappeared
and submitting applications to NHRC. She has also been actively
pursuing her case against the guilty police officers, including top
police cop, K.P.S. Gill, responsible for her husband's
disappearance.
The third
chapter Those Lost Forever narrates the stories of kidnappings,
disappearances and torture and comprises the pivot around which this
report revolves. It might appear to be repetitive but the very
repetition of the disappearances is what we are trying to highlight
in the state of Panjab during its anarchic “police rule”.
The fourth
chapter Panjab Police: The Torture Machine details at length
torture methods of the Panjab police. Their brutality and their
impunity have surpassed all human limits. This chapter also details
the plethora of laws for the weak, the accused and the undertrials
and the various methods and manoeuvres used by the security agencies
to torture and 'still get away with murder'.
The fifth
chapter NHRC: What next? looks into the judgments delivered
by the NHRC. It analyses the various legal arguments of governmental
organisations, judgments of various courts and the NHRC. It takes a
critical view of the various stages when the Commission and the
government have denied the system of justice from taking its right
due course.
 The
last chapter Acknowledging the Past takes a look at the
various truth commissions instituted around the world where human
rights violations have taken place, bordering on genocide as in
Panjab. This chapter reiterates the need to set up a Truth
Commission to probe violations and bring the guilty to book to
ensure that the dignity of those killed extrajudicially is restored
and the living victims get the justice they deserve.
Smoldering
Embers is a Voices for Freedom report, published by Booksurge and
available on amazon.com. It can also be read online.
Reduced to
Ashes:
The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab
Report Documents Disappearances, Extrajudicial Executions and Mass
Illegal Cremations by Police in
Punjab
by Ram Narayan Kumar with Amrik Singh, Ashok Agrwaal, and Jaskaran
Kaur
This 634-page
volume contains extensive documentation and analysis of hundreds of
cases of enforced disappearances, torture and extrajudicial killing
of victims by the security forces in
Punjab during
the political unrest of the 1980s and early 1990s. Included in this
first volume—authored by R.N. Kumar with Amrik Singh, Ashok Agrwaal
and Jaskaran Kaur—are more than 500 testimonies by the families of
the victims describing 672 cases of extrajudicial executions by the
police in the district of Amritsar alone.
The Final Report
builds upon the work of the late Mr. Jaswant Singh Khalra, a lawyer
and human rights activist who was himself abducted and "disappeared"
by Punjab Police in September 1995 for his pursuit of justice and
human rights. Mr. Khalra had discovered, from the records of three
cremation grounds in
Amritsar
district, cases of mass illegal cremations by police over many
years. As Peter Rosenblum of the Harvard Law School notes in his
preface to this volume, the careful analysis by the authors allows
the reader to "pierce through the thick veils of ideology, intrigue
and 'state security' that obscure our understanding of the campaign
to pacify Punjab."
The Committee
for Coordination on Dissappearances in Punjab (CCDP) has been
investigating and documenting the systematic and large-scale abuse
of basic human rights by police in
Punjab since its
formation in November 1997.
10 December
2008
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