Jaswinder Kaur and her father, Darshan Singh, have not been seen since they were taken on separate dates from their home in Mohalla Sadavarat, Ropar, Punjab, by members of the Ropar branch of the Criminal Investigation Agency (CIA). There are serious concerns for their safety.
On 26 February 1995, CIA officials, who were reportedly looking for Jaswinder Kaur husband, Surinder Singh, raided the family’s home and took Jaswinder Kaur away. They did not have an arrest warrant, and reportedly beat the 17-year-old despite the efforts of neighbors to stop them. On March 6, CIA officials returned to the family home and took Darshan Singh away with them. Police subsequently confiscated the house, making Jaswinder Kaur’s mother and children homeless.
Two habeas corpus petitions have been filed at the Punjab and Haryana High Court. The first concerned the confiscation of the house. As a result of a second petition filed on March 23, regarding the “disappearance” of Jaswinder Kaur and Darshan Singh, a warrant officer visited Ropar police station but was unable to establish the whereabouts of the girl and her father. The police have reportedly flied an affidavit denying the arrest of Jaswinder Kaur and Darshan Singh. The next hearing in the case is set for April 6.
Amnesty International regularly receives reports that alleged members or sympathizers of armed opposition groups, or their relatives, in Punjab have “disappeared” or been killed in police custody, often after torture. Officials later wrongly attribute their deaths or “disappearances” to “encounters” between militants and the police, to “escapes” during such an “encounters” or to other improbable causes. The number of such “disappeared” and mysteriously “escaped” individuals runs into thousands.
Even though legal safeguards against unacknowledged detention exist in India’s ordinary criminal law and procedural code, they are often simply not adhered to and prisoners are held in unacknowledged detention for weeks and sometimes months. In many cases the detention of the prisoners are never acknowledged even though the prisoners are later on shown to be “escaped!”
In cases where allegations such as this are brought before the courts in Punjab, legal proceedings are extremely slow and often police fail to comply with the orders of the court. The case of Harjit Singh is representative of this inaction by the authorities in Punjab- although an investigation into his “disappearance” was ordered by the High Court in December 1992 to be completed within three months, the hearing is still in progress.
Article extracted from this publication >> April 28, 1995
