Someone at last has spoken out it is “worse than genocide.” The treatment meted out to Sikhs in Punjab during the past 1015 years has rare parallels. The incident which attracted attention of the Indian Supreme Court judges relates to the cremation of unidentified bodies at Patti in Amritsar district between 19901995. The judges, Kuldip Singh and Saghir Ahmed some time ago had directed the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation to investigate the disappearance of human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra and the circumstances surrounding it. The CBI early this week produced a 74page interim report before the court to suggest that the Punjab police cremated 984 dead bodies declaring them “laawaris” unidentified between 19901995 at Patti in Amritsar district. The CBI has been ordered to speed up the enquiry and produce its final report by October 7. The CBI report also indicated that Jaswant Singh Khalra (who tried to collect evidence to support the charge of murders by the Punjab police) was picked up and killed and said that several policemen were involved in the case.
The judges after looking at the CBI report expressed their “horror and shock” and described the cremation incident as “worse than genocide.” The report and the court observations clearly support the allegations that the Indian armed forces had been involved in a systematic campaign of elimination of Sikh youths in their thousands to stamp out the idea of Khalistan. The allegations were not after all baseless. Several international and India based human rights groups had collected information suggesting large scale murders by the Indian police, a charge the Indian foreign ministry and government spokesmen had been denying all these years.
The CBI report and the observations by the highest Indian court are sufficient to call for an international tribunal to try the criminals. The Indian authorities themselves cannot simply bring the culprits to book because even after years of investigations, none of the culprit police or civil officer has been effectively proceeded against. In fact, the chief culprit, B.S. Sandhu, has still been retained in service and is currently posted as D.1.G. (Border), covering the same area as he covered at the time of crimes committed by him. Moreover, he is arrogant enough not to hand over the official records pertaining to the cremations to the C.B.I. despite the Supreme Court orders.
Nevertheless, the two Supreme Court judges deserve to be complimented on taking a stern view of the crimes as a case “worse than genocide” (of the Sikhs). The Sikhs must thank these brave and just men of the Indian judiciary. The question arises: Why are Akali leaders silent about the genocide of a community of which they claim to be leaders? The answer simply is: Men like Badal are too corrupt and power hungry to think of Sikhs, and their problems. The Sikhs in Punjab must rethink about the quality of their leaders before raising them to sky high.
Article extracted from this publication >> July 24, 1996
