We quote a New York Times story at length to drive home the brutal repression by the Punjab police. The article written by Barbara Crossette needs no elucidiation.
KHARAR: Kulwinder Singh’s descent into brutality and terror began in May 1985, when he was a 15yearold 10th grader.
It was then that the police first came for him and five of his friends, his father, a high school principal, recalled.
Rounded up in what Punjabis call a “fake encounter,” the boys were taken into custody as Sikh Terrorists under security measures that require no evidence and no hearing.
The arrest shocked the farming families of Ropar district. Ninety of them went to court, where the superintendent of police confessed under oath that there was no evidence. The arrests had been ordered from higher up. The boys were freed.
But the boy’s father, Trilochan Singh Sidhu, said that for the next four years his only son was hounded by the vengeful police. In July of this year, he disappeared. Two bodies were found. One of them, Mr. Sidhu fears, was that of his son. No identifications were permitted, however, before the local police cremated the bodies.
They offered the grieving father his choice of two sets of ashes. He took both, he said, and scattered them on a holy river in Punjab.
They offered the grieving father his choice of two sets of ashes. He took both, he said, and scattered them on a holy river in Punjab.
When Prime Minister V.P. Singh went to the holiest shrine of the Sikh religion, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, last week and promised to heal the “heavy, bleeding hearts” of a state living under virtual martial law, he was talking about families like the Sidhus and the parents of the unknown boy whose unclaimed ashes they recovered.
Punjab’s political problems began in the late 1970’s, as pressure for land and scarcity of jobs for a hardworking, literate population began to generate a belief that India’s central Government was discriminating against Punjab, the homeland of the country’s religious Sikh minority. Militancy was born, centered around Sikh temples, called Gurdwaras.
Ties to Militant Sikhs Sikhs are only 2 percent of the population of India, but have won disproportionately large numbers of positions in the army, the police and in business and industry. The Sikhs religion, an offshoot of Hindusism with some Muslim influence, has marital heroes and requires men to wear a turban, a steel bracelet, a token ceremonial sword and a particular kind of shorts. Cutting the hair is forbidden. Nearly all Sikh men adopt Singh, or lion, as part of their names.
The secretary of the Punjab Human Rights Organization, Baljit Kaur, said an analysis of Punjab voting in India’s recent national parliamentary election was a guide to hardening public opinion in the state; She began to check off the 11 of 13 constituencies won by Sikh militants.
“In Ferozepur, Thyan Singh Mand was elected at the age of 24 although he had no money to fight an election,” she said. “The people chose him because his three brothers were killed in fake encounters by the Central Reserve Police. Their house was raided.”
In Bhatinda, she said, Sucha ‘Singh, the father of one of Indira Gandhi’s Sikh assassins, Beant Singh, was too ill to stand for Parliament.
She said: “But people came to him and said, “Beant Singh repaid a debt. Our turban had been knocked off, and your son put it back on our head.” “He won without making a single campaign appearance.
Article extracted from this publication >> December 22, 1989
