AMRITSAR: Senior Akali leaders, Gurcharan Singh Tohra and Manjit Singh Calcutta, president and secretary respectively of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), last week said that the CBI report regarding the cremation of about 1,000 unidentified bodies by the Punjab Police had proved the allegations of genocide leveled by various Sikh organizations. In a joint statement issued here last week Tohra and Calcutta demanded a high level inquiry into the killing of Sikh youth and their cremation as unidentified bodies during five years of militancy. They feared that a number of bodies disposed of by police without identification would be in thousands. They alleged that security forces had eliminated number of such persons who had dared to speak against state militancy.
The SGPC leaders said that human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra who had dared to collect evidence of cremation of unidentified persons by the police was kidnapped from his residence and his whereabouts are not known till date. They alleged that in Punjab almost every Sikh family was victim of police high handedness. The CBI had unmasked the cruel face of Punjab Police, they added. Tohra and Calcutta took strong a note of the attitude of the Punjab Police. They said that police was withholding record of killings of unidentified youth due to fear of prosecution of high officials. The SGPC leaders also expressed surprise over the newspaper reports that name of Congress leader Jagdish Tytler was missing from the FIR registered in connection with Delhi riots. The Akali leaders said that the name of Tytler had appeared in reports on riots published by non-Sikh social organizations like Public Union for Democratic Rights and People Union for Civil liberties.
Article extracted from this publication >> July 31, 1996
