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Punjab Atrocities Examined at UC-Berkeley Law School

November 16, 2003: California, USA
by Jasbir Singh, special to sikhsentinel.com

The "Punjab problem" may be over for India's political establishment, but its effects linger on even today for many people of the state. About 150 people packed the Goldberg Room at University of California Berkeley's Boalt School of Law on October 21 to hear a panel of speakers discuss the state's human rights violations and police impunity in Punjab. The crowd included an equal mix of university students, faculty, and members of the South Asian diaspora living in Northern California.

The centerpiece of the event was the human rights report - Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab - which was recently published by the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab (CCDP).

The presentation and discussion titled "Human Rights, Insurgency, and Legal Accountability for 'the Disappeared' in Punjab (India): Presentation and Discussion of Reduced to Ashes (The Final Report of the CCDP)" - was jointly sponsored by the Center for South Asia Studies (CSAS), the Human Rights Center (HRC), and the International Human Rights Law Clinic. The speakers included Professor Laurel Fletcher of Boalt Law School (left in picture), Professor Darren Zook of the Department of Political Science (middle in picture), and Jaskaran Kaur (right in picture), a Harvard Law School graduate, who co-researched and co-authored Reduced to Ashes.

Dr. Daisy Rockwell, Vice-Chair of CSAS, welcomed the gathering for this event. Professor Fletcher, the first featured panel speaker, began the actual seminar by explaining how "disappearances" constituted a human rights violation. Her presentation helped put the event into a proper legal context. In legal terms, she explained that a "disappearance" undermined a central feature of most judicial systems- the right to habeas corpus (literally translated-"produce the body"). Instead, "disappearances" had been used by governments throughout the world, especially in Central and South America, to suppress social and political movements that challenged the legitimacy of the central state. Professor Fletcher argued that the central state often undermined the very "rule of law" that it hoped to protect by using "disappearances" as a tool against dissidents.

Professor Fletcher also deconstructed the concept of a "disappearance" by arguing that there was no scientific explanation of a human body simply "disappearing." Instead, she explained that there existed a tangible process by which a living body was arrested by security forces, killed (turned into a corpse) while in police custody, and then secretly disposed of to avoid public or legal scrutiny. Thus, there always existed a set of actors in the process of a "disappearance" who could theoretically be held responsible for their actions in a court of law willing to prosecute them.

The event's second speaker, Professor Zook, provided the historical context for "disappearances" in Punjab by explaining the underlying causes of the Punjab insurgency. While acknowledging the complexity of the "Punjab problem," Professor Zook stressed the role played by the then ruling Congress (I) central government under Indira Gandhi as one important factor in the emergence of the conflict. He explained that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was never secure in power in the center. Thus, she tried to undermine regional political parties in order to retain her own power. In relation to Punjab, she tried to split the traditional Sikh leadership found in the Akali Dal political party by supporting an alternate Sikh leadership. This strategy had disastrous results for the state, which eventually led to Operation Bluestar, Mrs. Gandhi's assassination, and the November 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms in Delhi. These events culminated to provide a spark for the separatist insurgency in Punjab.

Professor Zook's presentation was followed by a TV documentary made by the Australian SBS news station on "disappearances" in Punjab. The documentary chronicled the plight of many families of "the disappeared" who had been waging a losing judicial battle to seek justice and accountability for their lost loved ones. The documentary also contained interviews with important personalities involved in anti-insurgency operations and its aftermath. K.P.S. Gill, the Punjab police chief during the conflict, bluntly denied that the security forces had committed any human rights violations. In fact, he described the anti-insurgency campaign as being "one of the most humane ever" in contemporary history. Sarbjeet Singh, Punjab's police chief immediately after the conflict, explained his inability to investigate accusations of extra-judicial killings committed by the security forces by stating that no bodies existed to prove these accusations.

Ram Narayan Kumar, a prominent human rights activist and CCDP member, challenged these explanations in the SBS Australian documentary. Kumar explained that a plethora of evidence existed verifying human rights abuses and extra-judicial killings, but that the judiciary and state agencies simply refused to examine this evidence. Kumar explained that his decision to undertake this human rights research was motivated by his desire to help make India a more humane and just society. He characterized the Indian state as often behaving in "monstrous" ways when dealing with various social and political movements within its borders.

The main speaker of the event was Jaskaran Kaur, a recent Harvard Law School graduate and co-author of the CCDP report. She detailed the extent of human rights violations and "disappearances" in Punjab. Reduced to Ashes, she explained, contained about 600 case-studies of individuals from the Amritsar district alone who had been killed by the security forces while in their custody and had subsequently "disappeared" by being secretly cremated as "unidentified bodies" in public cremation grounds. Jaskaran Kaur challenged the Indian state's claim that all those killed where "criminals" or armed "militants." She pointed-out that the CCDP's research had found that the vast majority of those killed had no criminal records and were actually "non-combatants." She described how relatives of suspected "militants", those ideologically supporting Sikh nationalist organizations (even non-violent ones), and baptized Sikhs were particularly prone to "disappear" in Punjab during the insurgency.

Jaskaran Kaur also meticulously described the plight of relatives of "the disappeared" who tried to get justice for their loved ones in the Indian judicial system. She explained that less than a handful of police officers had been successfully prosecuted in Punjab. She detailed how the judicial system in India was grossly tilted toward not prosecuting other agents of the state. For example, most legal cases filed by families of "the disappeared" in Punjab had been withdrawn because of police intimidation, the inability of the families to sustain years of litigation against agents of the state, and the unwillingness of judiciary to pursue cases against police officers. Not even the well-documented case of slain human rights lawyer, Jaswant Singh, had made any significant progress in either the Indian judicial system or in the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), which was created in 1993. The result, according to Jaskaran Kaur, had been a culture of almost complete police impunity and no legal accountability for its actions.

Jaskaran Kaur explained the rationale for the CCDP's research. She stated that it was important for the purposes of presenting a body of empirically-verifiable evidence to the NHRC and the courts, shifting the discourse of human rights in Punjab away from partisan rhetoric and toward an examination of the facts and the law, and, most importantly, to give the relatives of the victims "a voice" in the domestic and international arena. She explained how the mere act of telling their stories to the CCDP helped the families of "the disappeared" get a sense of psychological "closure" after the death of their loved ones.

The formal event ended with a short "question and answer" period. The three panelists summarized their presentations and responses to questions by stressing the importance of achieving "justice" for human beings as individuals. Professor Fletcher stressed the importance of human rights documentation by saying that victims of state-sponsored terror rarely got "justice" in the form of trials against the perpetrators of abuses. Instead, she argued that "justice" for them was usually achieved by exposing these abuses and their perpetrators, and by discussing them in public forums including reports such as Reduced to Ashes. She also noted the efficacy of such human rights reports by noting that "disappearances" in Argentina had stopped after human rights organizations and the media had successfully highlighted them.

Professor Zook stressed the importance of "human agency" in achieving "justice." He stated that the work of human rights activists, however apparently small when viewed in isolation, all combined to produce a powerful vehicle for protecting individual rights. He stressed that human rights was a universal concept that focused on the rights of the individual irrespective of his origin or beliefs.

Lastly, Jaskaran Kaur expressed hope that such documentation and events would help change the judicial culture in India (and other parts of the world) from one in which the state's security forces were given both carte blanche powers and almost complete immunity from prosecution to one in which even they were held responsible for their actions against other human beings. The panelists stated that human rights and "justice" were important concepts that crossed national boundaries and deserved more public and academic attention.

note:

Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab
Authors: Ram Narayan Kumar, Amrik Singh, Ashok Agrwaal and Jaskaran Kaur
(Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab)
Publisher: South Asia Forum for Human Rights
Free Internet version available on web site: www.punjabjustice.org

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