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Ghosts all over in Punjab as men walk back from
the ashes
Punjab, Gujarat – Shame haunts Indian establishment, Badal mum
WSN Bureau
 AMRITSAR: What do you call
shamelessness? The world stood by horror struck as top police
officers belonging to IPS cadre, India’s highest law and order
maintaining elite uniformed cadre, were found to be killing people
in fake encounters and then senior most lawyers employed by the
state of Gujarat submitted before the highest court of India’s
socialist, democratically elected republic that after killing the
victim Sohrabuddin Sheikh in cold blood, they killed his wife too
within the next 48 hours. No reasons given!
Three IPS officers have been arrested,
interrogations have brought out shameful truths, but these are
certainly not revelations! Average right-thinking Indian knows the
truth of the police force in India. Ask those in Punjab where fake
encounter is a term so carelessly bandied about that it escapes the
notions of many that killing other human beings because you don’t
know what to do with them is something not really permitted in law.
As Gujarat shamed India, ghosts of state
terrorism came tumbling out of the police cupboards in Punjab,
stuffed with such skeletons and forever bursting at the seams. The
April 25-May 1 edition of the WSN had front paged a story about Gurnam Singh Bandala who was ostensibly killed in 1994 but is very
much alive, still in the dark about who pocketed the Rs 25 lakh
award that cops won for “killing” him.
More shame was in store. Now, a former
‘militant’ Jaspal Singh Bhatti, who was declared ‘killed’ in a
police encounter in 1993, has surfaced at his native Nangli village
in Amritsar. On August 11, 1993, the Jagraon police had declared
Bhatti “dead” and pocketed the award of Rs 5 lakh. The officers who
had done the brave deed were also given promotions. Who was the man
whom the cops killed to get a decent corpse to pass off as a
“dreaded killed militant”?
Bhatti was arrested by the Ferozepur
police on December 12, 1994 and a dozen cases, including murder and
attempt to murder, were slapped on him. He said at one stage the
CBI, India’s top sleuthing agency which too is not free from
allegations and partisanship, started a probe but no one knows what
happened to it.
A few kilometers
away, Gurcharan Singh, alias Giani, sat among the bovine companions
in his village Chajjalwadi, wondering about the bovine ways of the
police. The Punjab Police killed him in an encounter near Shivpuri
in Madhya Pradesh in September1993. He is brother of former
Khalistan Commando Force (KCF) chief Surjit Singh Painta, who was
killed during Operation Black Thunder.
 He has a wonderfully
pregnant term for describing himself: “I am part of the collateral
damage that my family suffered after my elder brother Surjit joined
the ranks of militants. My father, mother and sister were arrested
and I was also tortured in police custody. So I left Punjab and
started working as a truck driver in Madhya Pradesh but the police
followed me.”
He says he was
shocked when he learnt that some other truck driver had been killed
in his place. “I read the news in a paper and continued to remain
in hiding until I was arrested in 1994 by the local police and
various cases were slapped on me,” alleges Gurcharan, who has just
come out of the jail after serving a sentence in various cases
registered in Amritsar and other neighbouring districts. No, he
hasn’t asked who pocketed the Rs 5 lakh cash for “killing” him? “You
want me to ask this of the police? For them I am already dead. If I
ask, they will kill me. I am a ghost, and ghosts ask no questions,”
he says.
The establishment was
to torment him in many ways. Gurcharan’s family was uprooted in 1984
riots from Delhi too.
If the Indian
establishment which is reading about these cases everyday – such
cases are reported in Punjab media with an unfailing regularity –
fails to act, fails even to pretend to act, then we have reached a
point where shame refuses to shame us any more. It certainly does
not shame the establishment.
Punjab Chief Minister
Parkash Singh Badal has maintained a studied silence on the dead men
walking on Punjab’s roads. An accomplished master at shooing away
ghosts, Badal had promised in early 1997 the establishment of a
commission to probe into the era of militancy and fix
responsibility. Later, he not only reneged from that written promise
in the election manifesto but even opposed the initiative by a
People’s Commission, formed on the pattern of Truth and
Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. Now, a junior Badal-kin
minister Bikramjit Singh Majithia has said there will be probe. Of
course by some police officers. If it fails to evoke any faith, it
must be because of ghosts.
 Gurnam Singh Bandala,
Jaspal Singh Bhatti and Gurcharan Singh are only three of the cases
that the media highlighted in just one week. And they have all been
reported from just one district. It is well known that the number of
such “killed” people is much larger and they dot entire Punjab, and
even elsewhere.
Earlier, when the
then DGP S.S.Virk had come under fire after a militant-turned-police
informer called Sukhi, shown “dead” by the police, was found alive,
the then CM Amarinder Singh was asked who, then, was killed in place
of Sukhi, he had replied, “I think the police poured some tomato
ketchup on him to show it as blood.” It was that casual in Punjab.
You could have killed a person, and not remembered. Just as police
officers showed people as “killed” by arranging some other corpse
through an instrument called “fake encounter” and then forgot all
about it. But ghosts come back to haunt, always.
“Did we kill the fellow? Sorry, I can’t
recall”
In the case of Gurcharan Singh of
Chajjalwadi, it was then SSP Ferozepur S.K.Sharma, presently posted
as an IG in the Punjab police, who had announced the “killing” at a
press conference. Now, when the media questioned Sharma, he failed
to recall the event. He admitted that he was the SSP, Ferozepur,
during that period but said he did not remember any militant killed
in MP. He was also clueless about Painta. The media clippings about
Sharma announcing Gurcharan’s “killing” were of no help in making
him recall the incident.
Gurnam Singh Bandala, whose case was
reported in the last edition of the WSN, was declared “killed” in a
shootout near Ropar in 1993, while Gurcharan was reported dead in an
encounter in September1994. Bhatti says he was working as a truck
driver at Shivakasi.
2
May, 2007
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