Since Amnesty International report from which the following excepts are taken, the situation in India has rapidly deteriorated. Extrajudicial killings are the rule rather than exception.
“Several thousand critics and opponents of the government, including many prisoners of con science, were held without charge or trial in preventive detention or under laws directed against “terrorist” activity. There were widespread reports of torture and allegations that some prisoners had died in custody as a result of torture. Dozens of people were sentenced to death and at least four executions were carried out, in one case despite widespread doubts about the guilt of the convicted man. There were reports of extrajudicial killings by police, especially in areas where opposition groups resorted to violent action.
“Political violence increased in Punjab which, since May 1987, has been under direct rule from the capital, New Delhi, the period of direct rule having been extended under the specially enacted 59th Amendment to the Constitution. More than 2,000 people were reportedly killed in 1988 in Punjab and neighboring Haryana, among them leading politicians, officials and unarmed Hindu and Sikh civilians.
Despite assurances in August by home Minister Buta Singh to the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament) that the government would use the National Security Act (NSA) in Punjab “as sparingly as possible” and would ensure there would be no “political victimization”, its provisions continued to be widely used to detain political opponents, journalists and trade unionists. In Punjab, the NSA permitted up to two years’ detention without charge or trial and in the rest of India up to one year. Detention orders were re viewed by an Advisory Board whose decisions were binding on the detaining authority such re views starting after six months in the case of Punjab and after three months in the rest of India.
“Those detained in Punjab under the NSA for “activities pre Judicial to the security of the country”, included several hundred supporters of the Unified Akali Dal (UAD), who were arrested in May after they had protested peacefully against the army entering the Golden Temple in Amritsar to dislodge armed Sikhs. Most were released within a few months but several Sikh leaders were still in detention at the end of the year. Kuldip Singh Arora, the Amnitsar correspondent of the United News of India press agency, was detained in Apnil accused of meeting Sikh) militants inside the Golden Temple. He was released uncharged in June but other journalists were subsequently detained under the NSA, including Mohinder Singh of the daily Akali Patrika, who was arrested in July and remained in detention at the end of the year.
“In November the Director General of Police in Punjab said that 3,082 “suspected terrorists” had been arrested in the state during 1988. Of this total 2,257 were still being held without trial on 24 October, he said, and only one had been tried and convicted. In March and September the authorities released without explanation 40 and 138 respectively of the 365, Sikh detainees who had been held without trial for over four years on charges of “waging war”. The others remained in Jodhpur Jail, Raj asthan, and by the end of 1988 had still not been brought to trial. Many were believed to be prisoners of conscience arrested in June 1984 when security forces stormed the Golden Temple, although they had taken no part in the actions of armed Sikh militants who had earlier retreated to the Temple.
“Those arrested under the TADA often complained that they were refused access to lawyers for several days after arrest and that despite a legal requirement that those arrested be brought before a magistrate within 24 hours of arrest, police refused to do so until several days or weeks had passed. Professor Jagmohan Singh, a lecturer in economics at Jai Hind College, Bombay, who said he was arrested on 12 October, was denied access to a lawyer for five days and only brought before a magistrate on 1 November. Like many others held without access to their families or to a lawyer, Professor Jagmohan Singh claims that he was ill treated during the initial interrogation period in order to extract a “confession”.
“There were widespread reports of torture, despite Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s stateliest in a British Broadcasting Corporation interview in January that “we don’t torture anybody”. In a few cases the courts granted compensation to torture victims. Frequent allegations of torture were received from areas of armed conflict such as Punjab, parts of Andhra Pradesh and northeastern India, and from rural areas in which members of tribal communities and the scheduled castes appeared particularly prone to police brutality and torture, including rape. In May the Supreme Court ordered an investigation into the case of Balkar Singh, Sikh. He was detained in November 1987 by Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel, who held him in unacknowledged detention at Mal Mandi CRPF headquarters in Arnnitsar for five days. They then brought him before a magistrate and claimed he had been arrested the previous day. Balkar Singh says he was stripped, hung from his wrists which were tied behind his back, then hung upside down and given electric shocks, A Canadian doctor who visited him in jail but was not allowed to examine him stated that he appeared to “have been seriously physically mistreated”. In October, before the Supreme Court could announce its findings on the torture allegations, Balkar Singh was released uncharged and without ex planation.
” Allegations that the police had beaten and raped villagers, particularly members of the scheduled castes and tribes in Bihar, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Tamil Nadu, Orissa and Assam were common. Often police refused to register com plaints and, in the case of rape, to allow medical examination of the victims. For example, six tribal women of Ghatiyari village, Bihar, reported that police refused to register complaints that they had been raped by police from Sundar Pahari Police Station in April and that they had not been medically examined. Elsewhere, witnesses to human rights violations were reportedly tortured, apparently as a means of intimidating them or to retaliate against them as happened in Manipur state, where soldiers of the Assam Rifles allegedly tortured villagers who had testified or were due to testify against them.
“Staged killings also known as “encounter” killings of alleged or real political activists by the police continued to be reported from areas including Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Manipur, and tribal areas of Madhya Pradesh. Most reports of such killings, however, came from Punjab, where because of witnesses’ fear of reprisals violent actions by Sikh militants rarely resulted in prosecutions. Dozens of people were killed in Punjab in what were officially described as violent “encounters” with the police. In a number of cases those killed were reported to have been executed extra judicially after their arrest, unacknowledged detention and interrogation. The police said some had been shot “while trying to escape”. ”dozens of death sentences were imposed and there were at least four executions, At the end of the year those under sentence of death included Satwant Singh and Kehar Singh, two Sikhs convicted in connection with the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984. There were widespread doubts about the guilt of Kehar Singh, who was convicted on a charge of conspiracy to murder. In May it became a capital offence to cause death through the use of illegal arms or ammunition, and in December, for second convictions of drug trafficking. In October the Supreme Court overruled a 1983 judgment which had held that a two year delay in carrying out executions would automatically result in commutation. The Court ruled that “no fixed period of delay could be held to make the sentence of death in executable”.
Amnesty International worked for the release of several hundred prisoners of conscience, among them those held in Jodhpur Jail, Rajasthan. It published it concerns about. arbitrary arrests, curbs on legal safeguards, the torture of detainees, and extrajudicial killings in reports published in August.
Article extracted from this publication >> November 24, 1989
