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