Cover

Table of Contents

Editorial

- Strengthening AFAD’s Unity…

Cover Story

- Years of Trials and Triumphs…

Country Situations

- NO political reform, NO hope for justice…

- Hunger Strike

- Indonesian Human Rights Movement…

- Crime and Punishment

- Anti-enforced Disappearance Bill

Human Interest

- A Life That is Never The Same Again

Photo Essay

- Kashmiri families of missing person stage…

Book Review

- Disappearances in Sri Lanka

Report on International Lobbying

- A Narrative of Contrast

Features

- Where are They?
 
- Working Towards an African Network

- Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency…

News Brief

Mid Year Report

Prayer 

FEATURES


Reduced to Ashes:
The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab
 
 
by Ram Narayan Kumar1


Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab is the 650 pages long first volume of the final report of the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab (CCDP), which was released in New Delhi on 23 May 2003. Authored by Ram Narayan Kumar together with Amrik Singh, Ashok Agrwaal and Jaskaran Kaur, the report has been published by The South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR), based in Kathmandu. The report is also posted on the following website: www.punjabjustice.org. The site provides additional visual evidence to support the findings contained in the report; in addition to the complete database. Even a quick read through the introduction, the table of contents, the chapter on methodology, the short endnote will illuminate our somber discoveries, concerns and goals. 

Punjab, the truncated part of the province east of the Pakistani border that remained with India after the 1947 partition of the subcontinent, is a member state of the Indian Union. Totally landlocked, it covers 50,000 out of India’s 3.3 million sq. kilometers of diverse geography. Its population of approximately 22 million people is dominated by the Sikhs, a distinct religious community initiated by Guru Govind Singh in 1699. W. Owen Cole’s dictionary of Sikhism defines a Sikh as “any person who believes in God; in the 10 Gurus; in their principal scripture known as Guru Granth Sahib; in the Khalsa initiation ceremony and who does not believe in the doctrinal system of any other religion.”2 Less than 2 per cent of India’s one billion population, the Sikhs constitute more than 62.1 per cent of Punjab’s approximately 22 million people.

Before the partition of 1947, Punjab used to be an overwhelmingly Muslim province. The communal partition of 1947 and the civil war in its wake, took a toll of 200,000 to half a million lives by various estimates. In less than four decades of that traumatic experience, Punjab witnessed another spell of bloody political unrest. This unrest developed from the Sikh political agitation to obtain a radical measure of political devolution. By the middle of 1980s, the unrest became violently separatist and was ruthlessly crushed by the Indian government. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab focuses on human rights abuses that occurred during the period 1984 to 1994. The first volume presents specific information about the personal and political backgrounds of 672 persons from Amritsar, one out of 17 districts in the State, who were abducted, disappeared or executed by the security forces before being surreptitiously cremated. These 672 cases are drawn from the lists of illegal cremations in Amritsar district, which the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) submitted to the Supreme Court in December 1996. The CBI’s three lists of identified, partially identified and unidentified cremations, showing a total of 2,098 bodies, belong to the report of its investigations in Amritsar district, which the Supreme Court initiated in November 1995. According to the Supreme Court, “the report disclosed flagrant violations of human rights on a mass scale.” Instructing the CBI to investigate criminal culpability and to submit a quarterly progress report, the Court appointed the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) to determine and adjudicate all other issues and to award compensation. The court’s order clearly said that “since the matter is going to be examined by the NHRC at the request of this court, any compensation awarded shall be binding and payable.” Six years have passed since the matter before the Commission has not made any meaningful progress. The Commission has not heard a single victim’s testimony or deposition so far. Nothing is known of the CBI’s investigation into the issues of culpability and its quarterly progress report. The full contents of the CBI’s December 1996 report remain secret on the ground that the disclosure may hamper further investigations. The NHRC has concluded that the records of investigation carried out by the CBI are not helpful in revealing the necessary facts. The State of Punjab and its agencies too have not provided any meaningful information either. The Commission itself does not have an independent investigative agency to take on the task. It is against this background and in the context of declared positions on impunity by both the state and the Union governments that the NHRC, while proceeding with the matter, must weigh the evidence of human rights crimes and their legal analysis offered in this volume of the report. 

The CCDP has managed to investigate a total of 1,703 incident-reports from all over Punjab, out of which 889 are from Amritsar, one out of 17 districts in the State. Out of these 889, only 672 figure in the CBI’s lists. This volume presents the summaries of only those 672 cases. The remaining 217 incident-reports from Amritsar, along with 814 from other districts in Punjab, will be presented and discussed in the second volume of the report. 

According to my estimate, only 10 per cent of the survivors from the families that suffered enforced disappearances and arbitrary killings, came forward in any way to give reports. That is also the ratio of people who approached the judiciary or other institutions for redress. This leaves about 90 per cent of the cases undocumented. This should be a cause for concern not only to human rights organizations but also to those members of the scholarly community interested in preserving history. The bulk of victim-testimonies, which we have collected, came 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. It is perhaps a challenge for the members of human rights groups and others involved in recording contemporary history to take up. 

Theodor Adorno, a German philosopher and writer who studied the Nazi atrocities in Europe, once said: “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” By the measure of philosophical melancholy that underlies Adorno’s comment, it may appear barbaric even to write prose after a close encounter with the mechanical power of the State to destroy human life and then to perpetuate that destruction through denial. 

Reflecting over the meaning of Adorno’s melancholy, I have often thought of poet Paul Celan who committed suicide to communicate the sense of truth about the Holocaust which his poetry could not impart. Many survivors of families of the disappeared in Punjab are suffering from the same melancholy at life’s irrelevance before the State’s power to wish it away. 

In the interim report of the CCDP, published in July 1999 and its summary later published by SAFHR in 2002 as a paper, I have discussed the suicidal bereavement of Ajayab Singh, a fifty-five year old Sarpanch of a village, headman of an elected village council, in Amritsar district who took poison and died inside the Golden Temple on 7 July 1997 after writing an “epistle in black ink” to explain his reasons. His eldest son Kulwinder Singh, a Panchayat Secretary, disappeared after having been taken into police custody at a check post across Amritsar’s railway station on 20 December 1991. I have narrated the entire story at length elsewhere. The life-exhausting and fruitless pursuit of accountability and justice, which lasted more than five and a half year, finally broke Ajayab Singh’s spirits. His thirty-five years old married son with three young children disappeared in the jaws of the Punjab police, and Ajayab Singh could not do anything to establish that his son’s life had not been a chimera. The State’s power of denial became so magical that it obliterated life retrospectively against the authenticity of history. The constitutional guarantees of human rights and the rule of law seemed to have no meaning. Ajayab Singh’s epistle in black ink said “self-annihilation is my only way out of a life that leaves no scope for justice.” 

Ajayab Singh’s is not an isolated example. Our survey of 838 incident-reports of enforced disappearances, conducted in the period of one and a half years from November 1997 to May 1999 and published in our July 1999 Interim Report, shows that 222 relatives of the victims died under trauma. In 500 of 838 incidents, the surviving relatives report morbid psychological effects, including clinical insanity. 

I referred to Theodor Adorno and Paul Celan from my knowledge that the vast majority of survivors from victims’ families feel hapless. 

We cannot stop at this bleak note. I don’t subscribe to Theodor Adorno’s statement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” I think that perennial and incurable suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream. I think Ajayab Singh’s suicide is itself a primal, desperate shriek against the state of impunity in our country, which must end. To silently accept the State’s power to wish away life, as Elias Canetti of “The Crowds and Power” fame pointed out, has dangerous or even fatal implications: it makes the entire society complicit in the State’s crimes. Even if the political realities of our times are such that injustices of the past cannot be redressed through recompense and remorse, it is important to discover and broadcast the aspects of truth that have been suppressed. Even if the development of a shared truth as a precondition of social reconciliation remains impossible, human rights inquiry serves the purpose of reducing the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in public discourse. 

Reduced to Ashes is inspired by a view of accountability that perceives remedies for past human rights abuses to be an inseparable part of preventing their recurrence. Dealing with grievances in an empirically and legally rigorous manner, social participation in the grief of victims, their rehabilitation, societal censure of crimes and prosecution of perpetrators belong to the process by which institutions of the State renew themselves as credible fora for the redress of wrongs. Accountability is not only a matter of basic justice, but is also the key to overturn patterns of impunity, essential to cease coalescing of collective guilt and suffering, and also to stop them from developing new cycles of vengeance and violence.

We ardently hope that the new bench of the NHRC, under the chairpersonship of Justice A. S. Anand, will embark on the path of accountability, bridge the gap between public knowledge of human rights crimes that occurred in Punjab and its official acknowledgment, offer reparations to hapless survivors and thus, provide leadership in terminating the culture of impunity in India. 


1Ram Narayan Kumar, an author and human rights worker from India, for more than a decade and a half has been engaged in documenting human rights abuses in Punjab, and in campaigning for acknowledgement and accountability on behalf of victims’ families in the State. For his human rights campaigns in the past, Kumar has spent almost five years in Indian prisons: nineteen months during the period of Emergency from June 1975 to March 1977, when he was interned without trial, again for three years for his involvement with the plight of colliery workers in a tribal area of Madhya Pradesh.

2 W. Owen Cole and Piara Singh Sambhi, A Popular Dictionary of Sikhism, Curzon Press, London, 1990


VOICE September 2003

 

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