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International news
agencies focus on fake encounters
in Punjab
WSN Network
AMRITSAR: One of the world's leading news agencies, the Associated
Press, has now extensively covered the shameful adoption of "fake
encounters" as a tool by the Punjab Police and the Indian state to
counter what official India calls "militancy" and "insurgency" and
the Sikhs see as a fight to stress community aspirations.
The Associated Press reporter, Matthew Rosenberg, narrated the case
of Gurnam Singh Bandala extensively in his June 10 despatch from
Amritsar, published next day widely in many newspapers across the
world, including the Arizona Republic and St Petersburg Times,
Florida. Bandala was gunned down in a shootout with police 13 years
ago during the waning days of an uprising by Sikh militants,
officers claimed the reward money on his head but then Bandala
turned up alive, living as a preacher outside this northern Indian
city.
"Authorities now believe an innocent farmer was deliberately killed
by police so that they could present his body as Bandala's and
collect a $60,000 bounty," the AP reporter wrote, adding that "Bandala's
re-emergence is one of nearly a dozen similar cases reviewed by the
AP that have surfaced recently in India."
The report is full of terms like "brutal result of a system
dominated by poorly educated, badly trained and corruptible cops,
dirty politicians and stagnated courts where justice, if it ever
comes, can be delayed for years."
"The exact number of fake encounters is impossible to determine.
Police officials acknowledge only a handful over the past two
decades and say they are isolated cases," the AP report said.
As is well-known by now, Bandala, meanwhile, was caught by police in
1998 and spent four years in prison on charges of carrying illegal
weapons. He was convicted under his real name, but the public record
- which lists Bandala as deceased - was never changed. The
establishment in India may like to keep such cases under wraps for
years to save itself from public shame and embarrassment but then it
should not complain when international human rights groups and
neutral reporters occasionaly state the truth. Hanging its head in
shame should by now be a practised art for Indian politicians and
justice dispensing machinery comprising police and courts.
13 June 2007
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