NEW DELHI: India’s premier daily, The Pioneer, has exposed and condemned death squads operating in the country to summabily execute Sikhs, in an editorial on July 15, the newspaper made the following points.
Early this month a Punjab police team arrived in Bombay and took into custody two brothers who had been working as transporters in the city for decades. After torturing them for two days to extract information about Punjab militants, the police team put them on a train to Punjab. En route, one of the detainees conveniently, “fell off” the train while being escorted to the toilet by two policemen. When the body was brought back to Bombay by the bruised and battered younger brother, the local Sikh community protested and petitioned the Union Home Minister, S.B.Chayan, to order an enquiry into this custodial death. This petition will probably lie unsanctioned in Home Minister’s Delhi office, along with similar letters received in recent months from other states about similar depredations by Punjab Police teams which appear to have fanned out across the country in search of dispersed Khalistani militants.
Two months ago a Punjab Police task forces truck in Calcutta, shooting dead a suspected Punjab militant and his wife in broad daylight in the busy Til jala area, That operation was conducted like a commando raid: Uniformed Punjab Police men drove up in jeeps, barged into the couple’s house, shot them in cold blood and carried off their bodies. On that occasion, too, the local police was completely in the dark about the involvement of the Punjab Police and local papers reported the incident as an attack by terrorists dressed as policemen. Ironically, that is an appropriate description of the way the Punjab Police has been executing militants and suspected militants. On that occasion the West Bengal Chief Secretary had written to the Union Home Ministry and the Chief Secretary of Punjab, complaining about this completely illegal operation by the Punjab Police without even the courtesy of informing the West Bengal Police. After that complaint, the Home Ministry announced that it would convene a meeting of chief ministers to discuss the problem. Strangely enough Home Ministry officials who briefed the Press were quoted as saying that other states should cooperate with Punjab “in the national interest”.
Is one to deduce from those reports that K.P.S.Gill squads have a carte blanche from Delhi to roam the country, selectively targeting militants? And that the Government has left it to the Punjab Police to decide who is a militant? The Western Press paint Gill as a modern day Wyat Earp who brought order to India’s Wild West but that is small comfort for a democratic society which should have progressed beyond order to law.
Can any society governed by the rule of Jaw give any individual or a group the powers t0 act as prosecutor, judge and executioner? Such incidents blacken our human rights record, project a picture of India as a lawless society and provide to the organizations like Amnesty International.
Article extracted from this publication >> July 23, 1993
