Qasiar Mansoor
On this day in 1995, S. Khalra was abducted from his home in Amritsar, Punjab by plain clothes police officers from the Tarn Taran district. Earlier, when S. Jaswant Singh’s research had uncovered the illegal murder and cremation of thousands of young Sikhs by the Punjab Police, the Superintendent of Police from Tarn Taran, Ajit Sandhu had said “if 25,000 have disappeared, it will be easy to make one more disappear too.”
Khalra was invited abroad to provide evidence of the murders of Sikhs. He presented estimates: 25,000 illegally cremated; 6,000 from Amritsar district alone. His documentation exposed an ecosystem of impunity and contextualized the individual asylum cases that had created the Sikh diaspora population in the West since 1984.
Dal Khalsa spokesperson Kanwar Pal Singh said the voice of the S. Khalra was silenced forever because he became the voice of the voiceless. He said, the contribution and sacrifice of Khalra was unique as he was struggling to get justice for the disappeared persons who were illegally abducted, tortured, eliminated and cremated as unidentified bodies by the Punjab police and other security forces. Supreme Court first took notice of the disappearances in Punjab on 15 November 1995, in the wake of the abduction and murder of Jaswant Singh Khalra.
Khalra had charged Punjab police with clandestinely cremating 2,097 dead bodies in Amritsar, Tarn Taran and Majitha areas. SC directed CBI to inquire into Khalra’s abduction and the facts of Khalra’s claims of secret cremations by the police.
Subsequently, the CBI filed charge sheets in 44 cases and also charged nine police personnel with Khalra’s abduction and murder. Six of these people were later given life sentences. The trial is still pending in most of these cases due to legal loopholes. But a major drawback of the investigation at that time was that CBI probe did not expand the investigation to other parts of Punjab, even though the apex court in its order on 11 December 1996, acknowledged the matter as a “flagrant violation of human rights on a mass scale”.
Khalra’s mission did not end with his death. Human rights activists continue to work on the cases of those innocents who were disappeared by the Punjab Police despite the fact that the records of cremation grounds in other districts of Punjab which Khalra had not yet studied have now been sealed and are inaccessible. In 2011, World Sikh Organization and Human Rights Law Network in Delhi India launched ‘Khalra Centre for Human Rights Defenders’ to protect those heroes who like S. Khalra risk their lives to speak out against injustice.
Chandigarh-based NGO Punjab Documentation and Advocacy Project (PDAP) released a report in 2017, claiming to have identified 8,257 persons who disappeared from 1980 to 1995 from all across the state and were also cremated as unidentified and unclaimed bodies.
The extrajudicial executions, custodial deaths, disappearances and widespread torture perpetrated by the Punjab Police in the name of national security are clear violations of international human rights law. These violations are not the result of a few rogue police officers fighting terrorism, but symptoms of a deeply embedded system indifferent to human life and the rule of law.
