India - Punjab

Who Killed the Sikhs?

37 min 48 sec

June 2002

REPORTER: Geoff Parrish

On a crisp winter's morning, there's no more beautiful sight in northern India than Amritsar's Golden Temple. This is the holiest shrine for Punjab's estimated 14 million Sikhs and millions more around the world. It's a tranquil and welcoming place of worship. Jagbir Singh is a devout Sikh. His faith sustains him, but his shattered life and what he terms 'the destruction' of his family is irrevocably linked to the temple's recent history. In 1984, the shrine became a battleground. The Indian army attacked in force to destroy armed Sikh militants fighting for an independent state they called Khalistan. Hundreds were killed. It marked the beginning of a 10-year campaign by the Indian Government and the government of Punjab to crush the insurgency. The militants had paralysed the state with a campaign of murder, bombings and kidnapping.

K.P.S. GILL, FORMER POLICE CHIEF: Terror was palpable. You could feel it in the air. You could feel it in the eyes of the people.

Over the next decade, the Punjab police killed thousands of militants. An estimated 1,800 police died in the counterinsurgency campaign and many thousands of innocent civilians also lost their lives. Tonight, we examine the aftermath of the campaign and what happens when the world's largest democracy turns its back on the rule of law.

RAM NARAYAN KUMAR, HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST: The evidence shows a systemic pattern of abduction, killing, torture and elimination and disappearance.

RAJINDER S. SANDHU, VICTIM'S RELATIVE: Most of the police officers are illiterate. They don't know anything about law. All they know how to kill or beat people and that's all.

We reveal how the Punjab police illegally cremated more than 2,000 unidentified bodies and there are serious questions raised about India's legal and judicial system and its ability to deliver justice.

ASHOK AGGRWAAL, LAWYER: I would say that the system doesn't really function. The police don't function. They simply...they act in a whimsical and arbitrary manner. The courts don't function. They also act in a whimsical and arbitrary manner.

Our story begins in December 1991. It's seven years after the war against the Sikh militants began and two more people are about to disappear after being taken into police custody. A man the police describe as a known militant is waiting on one of Amritsar's main streets looking for a lift. He flags down Kulwinder Singh, 35 years old and married with three children. The relationship, if any, between the two men is not known. But, before they've travelled far, they are stopped by police and taken here to the local Sardar police station. That night, the militant is killed in what's known in India as a "fake encounter", where police fabricate a shoot-out with terror suspects.

RAM NARAYAN KUMAR: My evidence is I say that, in the majority of the cases, the so-called encounters were faked. People were taken into custody, killed and then explained away as deaths in encounters.

And, for Kulwinder Singh and his family, a nightmare begins. Jagbir is Kulwinder's brother. That's Kulwinder again on the left of this photo and their father, Ajaib on the right. Jagbir and his father, Ajaib, rushed to the police station when they heard of Kulwinder's detention and were told he'd be released after interrogation. Soon after, Kulwinder was brought here to the family house by police when they conducted a search, but was not allowed to speak.

JAGBIR SINGH, VICTIM'S BROTHER (Translation): He called from inside the car, "Mother!". The police grabbed him and forced his mouth shut. They covered his mouth and drove away. They didn't let him see anyone.

Jagbir works for the Sikh administration at the Golden Temple. On this day, though, he's been seconded to work at the nearby Temple of Martyrs, taking money for offerings. Aside from their religious involvement in the community, Jagbir's father Ajaib was the head of his village council, a position of some power and responsibility, but that meant nothing to the police. The inspector who arrested Kulwinder demanded the equivalent of A$6,000 for his release, more than the family could afford.

JAGBIR SINGH (Translation): When more than a week had passed, they settled on 150,000 rupees. We couldn't arrange the money.

RAM NARAYAN KUMAR: Right now, I have completed my investigations in 1,500 cases and I can say, in hundreds of these cases, I have seen evidence when the police demanded bribes, huge amounts of money, few hundred thousand rupees at a time, I mean, which normally people cannot just afford and they were doing it quite openly, quite shamelessly. Sometimes, they collected money even when they were in no position to release the person. I have seen evidence when, when they asked for money, got the money and the person was not released. Probably, they had already killed him.

Ram Kumar, author and human rights activist, has documented the Kulwinder Singh case and hundreds more like it. He leads a small human rights group called the Committee for the Coordination of Disappearances in Punjab, the CCDP. He's taken this train ride from Delhi to Amritsar countless times, as he fights for justice for the relatives of the disappeared. It's a journey that's also taken him to the highest courts in the land.

RAM NARAYAN KUMAR: So, you see, I mean, our work is pretty difficult but we have persisted, we have persisted over the years and have been able to gather evidence of substantial nature.

The family sent urgent telegrams about Kulwinder's detention to Punjab's Governor, the Director-General of Police, the Chief Secretary and Chief Justice of the State High Court. These were followed with lengthy petitions, all to no avail. Then, junior police told the family that Kulwinder was being severely tortured, ostensibly to force him to reveal the identity of militants.

RAM NARAYAN KUMAR: Apart from those who disappeared, relatives were very often tortured, especially fathers, mothers, sisters, wives, children and, from their accounts, I cannot overstate the brutality of the torture.

In early 1993, after an approach to India's Home Affairs Minister, a message was passed on to the family from the police that Kulwinder had been killed. To this day, no reason for his death has been given by the police and no mortal remains provided. 10 years on, Kulwinder's wife has only memories of her husband.

VICTIM'S WIFE (Translation): He was very nice. I still remember him.

WOMAN SITTING BEHIND SOBBING WIFE: He used to support his parents, brothers and sisters. He used to support his brothers' households. He was looking after her parents too. Everything was his responsibility. Now he's gone, everything is shattered.

For four more years, the family pursued a fruitless round of the courts, politicians and police. In 1996, here at the High Court of Punjab and Haryana, father Ajaib lodged a writ of habeas corpus, a demand the state produce his son's body. The writ worried the police. A massive bribe of 1 million rupees - A$40,000 - was offered to the family to drop the case. The offer came via an intermediary, Jagbir's manager at the Golden Temple.

JAGBIR SINGH: (Translation): I don't know who was actually behind the demand. He put all the pressure on me and said he'd transfer me. But, when I told my father, he told me to resign from my job. Then my father went and abused him.

When the bribe was rejected, Jagbir and his father were brought here, once the site of a police interrogation and torture centre. The police threatened to kill them if they didn't drop the High Court action. The police didn't have to act on that threat, because, soon after, the High Court threw out the writ. Incredibly, the court found insufficient evidence that Kulwinder Singh had been abducted.

RAM NARAYAN KUMAR: When they say 'insufficient evidence', what do they mean? Eye witnesses, eye witnesses to abduction, eye witnesses to his illegal custody, are coming before you making statements in writing and saying that this man was picked up by the police on such and such a date from such and such a place. He was at this police station. He was seen being tortured and you say "insufficient evidence." You don't even get the state to sort of give a response, deny or accept, and then go on to make an independent inquiry. What kind of judiciary is this?

For eight more months, Ajaib Singh pursued the authorities over his son's death until yet another so-called inquiry produced no result. The family knew their father was despondent, but had no inkling another tragedy was about to occur.

JAGBIR SINGH (Translation): That day, at home, nobody suspected anyting, because whenever he was free he went to the Golden Temple and prayed, washed the dishes and polished shoes and performed his religious duties.

Six long years after his son was killed, Ajaib Singh returned to the Golden Temple to end his life. He wrote out a suicide note and, while walking the temple's cool marble corridors, he consumed poison.

RAM NARAYAN KUMAR: Everyone failed him - the Congress Party, the central government, the Chief Minister of Punjab, the High Court, the Supreme Court, the Commission. He decided to commit suicide. I mean, he decided to commit suicide and, in his note, he said he's not dying, he's not committing suicide because he has committed anything wrong, but he finds it impossible to live in a world where there is no justice, and it was sort of a desperate cry of a person who wanted his case to be heard.

JAGBIR SINGH (Translation): When Kulwinder Singh was picked up in December, the family began to disintegrate. He was such a great man, nobody had a bad word to say about him. The family just disintegrated.

If the authorities had ever wanted to know where people who were abducted ended up, they may well have looked here... This is the Durgiyana Mandir cremation ground in Amritsar. Cremation is a Hindu ritual, also used by Sikhs, where the body is returned to the cosmos. In January 1995, human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra made an astonishing claim - police in Amritsar had illegally cremated more than 2,000 unidentified bodies in just two years. His information would cost him his life. Khalra was well known and highly respected in the Sikh community. His allegations attracted wide publicity in India and he'd travelled abroad to publicise human rights violations against Sikhs. Khalra also approached the state's High Court for an investigation into his claims, but the court threw out his writ on a legal technicality.

RAM NARAYAN KUMAR: When the High Court is dismissing this on the ground that you have no locus standi before the court, it's actually shutting its eyes to the evidence that he brought before it, which is of the killing, possible killing and cremation of thousands of people done in one district. Frankly, the revelations made by Khalra and the documents that he had gathered were so astonishing that I had to go with him to find out, I mean, and get the corroboration from people. So I went with him to the cremation grounds to speak to the people. I look at the registers and the records which he produced of the police bringing the dead bodies for cremations illegally.

The records show that Durgiyana Mandir ground was one of three cremation sites in Amritsar illegally used by the police. It takes about 300kg of wood to burn a single body and each wood purchase is written in a register. The police subverted the system, by burning more than one body on each pyre.

RAM NARAYAN KUMAR: Now, we discovered, Jaswant Singh Khalra to be precise discovered, by examining this register, that hundreds and hundreds of unclaimed bodies had been burned in this fashion and wood had been purchased in this fashion.

So many bodies were being inadequately burned that farmers told Ram Kumar dogs were carting body parts into their fields. And there were more shocking revelations. This 1995 film by Kumar revealed that, not only were bodies being illegally cremated, but doctors were spending only five minutes on post-mortem examinations. Worse still, this Chief Medical Officer describes how a person brought in for a post-mortem was still alive. When police discovered their mistake, the patient soon became a corpse.

CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER: (Translation): It was not a dead body. It was a patient. The patient was in deep coma, brought to mortuary as a dead body.

MAN: Sarabjit was brought here?

CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER: Yes.

MAN: He was admitted in a ward?

CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER: Yes. MAN: The police brought him back dead. Then the post-mortem was carried out?

CHIEF MEDICAL OFFIER: That is right. My boss aid post-mortems should take time. I told him to do whatever he wanted. My example set the precedent in Punjab. Five minutes a post-mortem. Five minutes a post-mortem.

With the authorities confronted by allegations of murder and illegal cremations after the most cursory post-mortems, it was Khalra's turn to disappear. (RE-ENACTMENT): While washing his car, five men drag him into a blue van. He'll never return home. The abduction takes only moments, but it's not the perfect crime, far from it. There is an eye witness, Rajiv Singh Randhawa.

RAJIV SINGH RANDHAWA, EYEWITNESS: So I immediately came here and I saw a van had stopped in front of this house and abducted Mr Khalra at gunpoint.

Randhawa saw a vehicle with uniformed police drive off behind the blue van.

RAJIV SINGH RANDHAWA: I immediately recognised one D.S.P. Ashok Kumar immediately here and, as I was a journalist with the 'Punjabi Tribune' at that point of time, I knew it was the Taran Taran police which had abducted Mr Jaswant Singh Khalra.

Randhawa also names two other police involved in the abduction and their colleagues have been after him ever since. Because he'd seen too much, Randhawa was arrested and charged with murder and robbery. Amnesty International says the charges are merely "a means of harassing and intimidating him." He's not the only one being harassed. This is the Khalra family, including Mrs Paramjit Kaur Khalra, her two children and brother-in-law. The Punjab police tried to arrest Mrs Khalra, alleging she offered a bribe to a police officer to testify against his colleagues in the matter. The so-called case against her quickly fell apart.

PARAMJIT KAUR KHALRA, VICTIM'S WIFE (Translation): Because Khalra was abducted, we are not the guilty party, so why should we bribe anyone? You only give bribes when the story is false. I would never do this in my life nor have I ever done it.

India's highest court, the Supreme Court here in Delhi, had earlier ordered two inquiries to be conducted by the nation's premier police agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation or CBI. The CBI found nine police responsible for Khalra's death and they'll soon face trial. The police also confirmed his allegations of illegal cremations, saying there had been flagrant violations of human rights on a mass scale.
And there's also police eyewitness evidence that Khalra's body was dumped here at this bleak spot.

RAM NARAYAN KUMAR: And this was the dead of the night. They took out the body and dumped it somewhere, somewhere here actually. Somewhere here, down there.

One of the police charged with the murder of Khalra lives in this heavily guarded house. This is Ashok Kumar, allegedly seen by the eyewitness to the abduction. But he says he's innocent.

ASHOK KUMAR (Translation): Yes, I'm absolutely not involved.

REPORTER: But an eye witness to the abduction puts you at the scene of the abduction.

ASHOK KUMAR (Translation): It's false. It's all lies.

Despite the forthcoming trial of the police charged with her husband's murder, Mrs Khalra is not confident of justice.

PARAMJIT KAUR KHALRA (Translation): I collect evidence and take it to court. In court we have to fight, there's so much harassment. Seven years have passed and we haven't gained anything as yet. This won't finish in our lifetime. It'll take another 10 or 15 years.

K.P.S. GILL, FORMER POLICE CHIEF: I have always said and I will repeat it again, that in the annals of terrorism operation of this nature, there's never been a more humane operation than this.

As director-general of Punjab's 70,000-strong police force, in the 1980s and early '90s, K.P.S. Gill was the architect of the campaign to destroy the militants. But there are those who believe his strategy and tactics claimed thousands of innocent victims as well. He's also campaigned very publicly to defend his former officers.

REPORTER: The use of heavy rollers with men standing on them, electric shock, rape, burning with an iron, toenails ripped out, the breaking of the spine of people hung from the ceiling - were these the methods the police used under your command?

K.P.S. GILL: No. Not at all because, you see, the question was that we wanted information which was correct. When you torture a man, he will say anything. And my idea was that, if you are going after a terrorist, you're not going to do any vicarious punishment to anyone - unless you catch the right man.

I have allegations of systemic use of torture, of illegal cremations.

K.P.S. GILL: No. There were no illegal cremations.

There weren't 2,000 illegal cremations?

K.P.S. GILL: No, no, no.

With two or three bodies being put on a pyre meant for one person?

K.P.S. GILL: No, no, no.

That simply didn't happen?

K.P.S. GILL: No.

RAM NARAYAN KUMAR: I mean, the matter is before the National Human Rights Commission. You may deny it but I think, let them be not so stupid as to deny the facts which is on record before the commission.

If the National Human Rights Commission wanted any help, it need look no further than here. In this tiny office in Punjab's capital, Chandigar, Kumar's committee, the CCDP, patiently compiles statistics. It's here that the magnitude of the crime hits home. Each file contains the details of a person who's disappeared at the hands of the police.

RAM NARAYAN KUMAR: I would say that this is actually the tip of the iceberg. My own assessment is that about 20% of the people are actually talking to us - a vast majority of the people - even when they tell us privately, "Yes, this is what has happened to us," they are so afraid, so demoralised, that they don't speak up.

This database contains nearly 1,500 cases of people who've disappeared. That's in addition to the 2,096 cases the National Human Rights Commission is meant to be investigating. The CCDP's investigation shows an irrefutable pattern of police atrocities across all of Punjab. But the Human Rights Commission has seen fit to examine only illegal cremations and only in one district - Amritsar.

RAM NARAYAN KUMAR: We submitted that information to the National Human Rights Commission. We submitted that information to the Supreme Court, also showing records of cremations in other districts, records of disappearances in other districts, following abductions and we said, "Look, these are the patterns. Please, how can you restrict it to one district? How can you restrict it to the fact of cremation, but they have not so far considered any of our plea.

Dateline made numerous approaches to the National Human Rights Commission for an interview, but our requests were declined. This is Gurcharan Singh, a farmer who lives outside Amritsar. He has a chilling tale about how police butchered his son. Today in his courtyard, there's a meeting called by Kumar and his co-workers. They're here to gather more evidence of police atrocities. These people have lost a relative at the hands of the police. It's an emotionally painful meeting and people hold up photos of their loved ones who've disappeared. This man, a poor street vendor, is trying to find out what happened to his son, but the police are threatening to kill him.

RAM NARAYAN KUMAR: What did they say to you?

MAN (Translation): There are hungry fishes at the market. We'll feed you to them. Since then I've lived in fear.

Gurcharan Singh begins his story. His son wanted to contest a local election against the relative of a Congress Party minister. For this crime, he was dragged away by the police who, once again, demanded a huge payment for his release. Gurcharan told them his son wouldn't contest the election, but he couldn't raise the money. Some time later came the terrible news - the police had murdered his son.

GURCHARAN SINGH, VICTIM'S FATHER: And so they disposed of him in many places, in the river, in the canals, in other places, so many places, he was cut into lots of small pieces, and thrown away.

Until late February, when the government changed in Punjab, Sarabjeet Singh was director-general of police, commanding a heavily armed force numbering 70,000. He'd also been handling cases where the police are accused of murder. He should know about the farmer's son who was chopped up but apparently doesn't.

REPORTER: The police said to him, "You will not stand for election against this Congress candidate."

SARABJEET SINGH, FORMER POLICE CHIEF: I'm not aware of this case but let me put it this way...

As I've gone round the Punjab, I've found many cases like this.

SARABJEET SINGH: Well this is not...because we have seen a number of cases which have been brought to our notice and the Human Rights Commission are investigating. This one is not to my knowledge but, in any case, presuming that he was chopped into pieces and killed, the cardinal, one of the cardinal principles of the law is that, unless the dead body is found, it's not possible to establish to a murder. Without agreeing on what has been done, if at all, and while condemning an incident like this, as an investigating officer, there's nothing I can do unless I have evidence of the death of a person.

Sarabjeet Singh has had a long, and some would say distinguished, career.

SARABJEET SINGH: This is the citation which was given to me for distinguished service. These are the signatures of the president of India.

But he's risen to the top of a paramilitary police force now under scrutiny for mass murder.

REPORTER: Have you, in your police force, got any number of torturers and killers who've not been brought to book and should have been well before this?

SARABJEET SINGH: Well, I'll put it this way, that all these allegations date up to 1992 and, in the last 10 years, there are hardly any allegations along this line. So, if the same policemen were there with us, the same allegations should have come to the surface even after 1992 and with the two Human Rights Commissions, both national and state, we can't hide our face anywhere and wherever it has been proved right, action has been taken.

Gurcharan Singh has publicly named the police who murdered his son. They're still working in the district and no action has been taken against them. Along with 17 other families, Gurcharan Singh has even been offered compensation for his son's disappearance by the Punjab Government, but there's a catch. The offer is conditional on there being no investigation of the cases and no admission of liability by the state.

GURCHARAN SINGH: We don't require any compensation. Even 50 lakhs, even a crore of rupees we don't require. We simply want justice and we want those people to be punished. Even judges should think about it. I will pray to judges justice - judges, if they are insincere, if they have any conscience, they should think about it, that compensation is not a matter of - my child.

The National Human Rights Commission, housed in this building, had seemed to endorse the compensation offer by the Punjab Government.

RAM NARAYAN KUMAR: They probably were hoping that relatives of these victims, being poor and indigent would somehow settle for this and they can just close the matter somehow, dealing in the same fashion with rest of the people. Now, this did not happen. All the 18 people rejected this offer with total contempt. They say that what are you giving the money for? We didn't come to you begging. We asked for justice. We took it up before the commission and, fortunately, the media here in India also paid attention to this absurdity which was happening with the result that the commission changed its order saying that, "We opened this case, we will including all the 2,097 cremations which occurred in the Amritsar district and we will identify them and move on to deal with those cases individually."

But dealing with the issue is easier said than done. Lawyer Ashok Aagrwaal works closely with Ram Kumar on the Punjab cases. He's argued before the Commission for them to broaden their inquiry, but without success. He says Kumar's committee, with only three people involved in field investigations, has three more than the commission.

ASHOK AGGRWAAL, LAWYER: The commission has nobody in the field. The commission has no sense of the field. And no officer of the commission has ever investigated even a single case.

Aagrwaal gained access to the original report into illegal cremations by the Central Bureau of Investigation, India's supposed police super sleuths.

ASHOK AGGRWAAL: It became clear to us that, looking at the records which the CBI had produced for inspection, that they had done no investigation at all. They had simply collected the documentation regarding the cremations. And, if the documents disclosed the names of the persons cremated, they had recorded that and compiled lists. That's all the CBI had done.

REPORTER: What does that say to you then about their investigative efforts in this?

ASHOK AGGRWAAL: Oh, pathetic. There's no doubt about that. The CBI is the premier investigative agency in the country but there have been, over the years, any number of times where the CBI has been accused of incompetence, of corruption, deliberately trying to, to scuttle cases. So it has always been a dubious agency in that sense, controversial at the very least.

Responsibility in these matters doesn't end with the National Human Rights Commission or the police. During the unrest, government was suspended in Punjab and the state was ruled from Delhi. According to Ram Kumar, the hand of the 'centre', as its known in India, is firmly imprinted on everything that happened in Punjab.

RAM NARAYAN KUMAR: I mean, I have evidence from police officials who said ministers were flying in from Delhi and addressing meetings with senior officials telling them deal with the problem, deal with the problem whichever way you have to. Now, how should one see that except that centre was sanctioning and permitting these practices to occur.

Dateline sought an interview with India's powerful Minister for Home Affairs, L. K. Advani. He's responsible for the rule of law. We wanted to ask him many questions but, most of all, about an individual's right to justice in India. He, too, declined to be interviewed.

In all its glory, rich and poor, India is happy to boast of being the world's largest democracy. Its constitution is supposed to enshrine human rights and the rule of law, principles laid down at independence 50 years ago. But, if innocent people were killed in the process of crushing Sikh militants, so the government's argument goes, it's a price that had to be paid.

RAM NARAYAN KUMAR: I think, if you accept the merit of this argument, then there is no sense in calling ourselves a democratic nation.

Ram Kumar is now back in Delhi, burning the midnight oil completing his committee's final report on the Punjab atrocities. 15 years after he began his drive for justice in Punjab, he's not about to give up.

RAM NARAYAN KUMAR: I'll meet the victims' families, their fathers and widows and orphans and I see that, for them to accept that justice is impossible is like end of all sense of purpose of life. For me, personally, as an Indian, it's very, very important that India does not sort of become that sort of monstrous state which we have seen in history elsewhere. It's very, very important to me that, no matter how many mistakes that we have in our society and disparities, I believe that let us at least maintain commitment to the ideal of justice and to democracy