CHANDIGARH: Punjab Pradesh Congress (Samajwadi) chief Nirmal Singh in a memorandum to Indian Home Minister S.B. Chavan warned that Punjab’s farmers would soon stop growing cereals as retaliation 10 Indian governments ham handed treatment of its people.
“Do you believe the farmers of Punjab will continue to feed two third of India with its wheat and rice even after losing thousands of their sons at the hands of Indian forces?” Nirmal Singh asked the Home Minister.
“The Congress(S) leader regret ted that India was diverting Punjab’s water to other non riparian states and was bent upon destroying the state which served as India’s granary so far. The Indian governments Punjab policy he said was based on Indira Gandhi’s secret files and every move was predetermined accordingly. “If you want to resolve the Punjab problem tear away these files” he asked India’s minister who was here recently to meet political leaders from Punjab.
Nirmal Singh added that almost all political parties and their leaders had been rendered redundant while the Indian government had not lost fancy of such “pur chased” leaders as Sewa Dass Umranangal and Rachhpal Singh.
However according to reliable information Rasool was an active is to of the Radical Students Union during his student days. Recently the Pyla Vasudeva Rao group of militants had pat up posters in Acralleging that he was working as a legal adviser to the PWG and threatened to eliminate him Rao is learnt to have had no contact with any organization except the
National Students Union of India the students wing of the Congress. He even held a passport which is issued after a outline police verification.
In this backdrop knowledgeable sources dismissed the police version as a concoction. The theory and behavior of the police betrayed many inconsistencies and an obsession to suppress the fact they pointed out.
The sources questioned how militants would first of all dare meet at a place hardly 20m from the state capital at all the large number of policemen who landed at the spot would have made the so called militants beat a hasty retreat they added.
It is alleged that the victims were taken to a dilapidated building in deserted locality near Uppal on the outskirts of Hyderabad and morning were prevented from clicking the victims. One lens men was thrown out of the building by enraged policemen. The police authorities meanwhile circulated to the press their own pictures of the victims taken from a long distance. When enlarged later by Rasool colleagues these pictures established the victim’s identity.
Even as the victims” relatives and friends were trying to trace them the police secretly moved the bodies to hospital smuggled them out the mortuary and cremated them declaring that their were no claims for them. The fact is neither the families were in formed nor were the bodies kept inmortiary for the requisite mini mum period of three days. The home minister who assured journalists that he would instruct the police officials to hand over Rasool body to then later “gave slip and flew to Del Journalists here found it surprising that if the police had such information why they kept mum all these months when Rasool was routinely attending government functions and the DSP”s press conferences.
Rasool colleagues said that he earned the wrath of the police officials when he wrote series of reports on the deplorable conditions in the Masheer abad Central Jail and interviewed Satyam a top militant leader. The police made discreet inquiries about him at the time Pratap Reddy who was immediate superior to Rasool told Sunday Mail that the police had been shadowing them since that incident “When everyone went out on scooter one jeep used.
Article extracted from this publication >> January 17, 1992
