Sandhu’s suicide and the campaign for immunity:

It is unfortunate that the vigorous campaigning for immunity, after it has been established that thousands have been eliminated in illegal custody, has been mounted even as India celebrates the fiftieth year of its independence. The dichotomy reveals that the leaders of our country have altogether forgotten the important role human rights concerns had played in guiding India’s freedom struggle.

The Union government’s attitude on this issue, as also the overwhelming support it has received from the media and the established political circles, show merit in the argument of Punjab police officers that they have been acting largely under a policy that was approved not only by the Central government but also by other independent institutions, even if tacitly. There is no scope here to quote long passages from the newspaper articles, discussions in parliament and the Supreme Court’s numerous judgements from the period of insurgency in Punjab to show that the mental attitude of the ruling elite in India, formed in the matrix of the separatist threat, supported or even reveled in police "excesses".

I have already referred to March 1988 amendment of the Indian Parliament which had selectively abrogated the rights to life for the people in Punjab. Judiciary too has its share of responsibility, but not in the sense suggested by police officials and their sycophants.

In their "horror and shock" at the findings of illegal cremations, the judges of the Supreme Court failed to recognise the unhappy truth that the extrajudicial elimination of suspected terrorists and secessionists was a monstrous consummation of the same Will of the State that underlay the legislative objectives of TADA, which the Supreme Court so vigorously upheld. I would give one more example from the recent past to show how aggressive and extensive is the support which the police officials, responsible for myriad murders, receive from the enlightened sections of public opinion in India when they brazenly ask for immunity from prosecution in the name of national security.

On 24 May 1997, the newspapers reported that Ajit Singh Sandhu, former Superintendent of Tarn Taran police district, committed suicide by throwing himself before a running train. Sandhu had been imprisoned for few months on charges, established by judicial inquiries, that involved illegal abductions, torture and elimination in custody of people like Jaswant Singh Khalra and Kuljit Singh Dhat, a relative of Bhagat Singh, the famous revolutionary from the pre-independence era. The circumstances of his reported suicide were suspicious. He had consumed alcohol; had driven to the railway track in his own car, and a short suicide note which he left behind said "it is better to die than to live in this shame".

Sandhu had been a trusted lieutenant of KPS Gill, former Director General of Punjab police who had led India’s ruthless war against the Sikh secessionist militancy in the State. Accused with all these extra-judicial executions and hasty cremations, Sandhu would have had no choice but to establish the line of command under which he had carried out the executions in his district. There should have been an inquiry into his reported suicide.

But KPS Gill, now retired, seized the opportunity to launch his campaign against "an utterly compromised human rights lobby". He called a press conference on 24th evening "not to express grief", but to discuss the larger political and policy issues that arise from Sandhu’s suicide. And he discussed them passionately, poetically and in terms of high drama. The newspapers across the country carried the full text of his statement that inveighed the nation for ingratitude towards its "heroes" like Ajit Singh Sandhu who had saved India from the brink of disintegration.

It castigated the people for permitting to thrive on the Indian soil the human rights activists "who will work with any cause that serves their personal ends, whether criminal, political or secessionist". The statement chided the State for not "educating itself on how to tackle individuals and groups trying to destroy it", and went on to tell the parliament to bring about the necessary legal amendments which would protect other courageous officers of Punjab from the kind of humiliation that apparently drove Sandhu to suicide. The statement said that the bud of Khalistan had been nipped through the achievements of officers like Sandhu, which prevented the loss of Kashmir and the eventual balkanisation of India.

On 27 May, the Committee for Information and Initiative on Punjab issued a statement to discuss from its own perspective the issues raised by Gill’s statement. This was necessary, as the Committee was not only directly involved in collating and verifying the evidence on illegal cremations, it had also been directly attacked. But no newspaper, with one or two exceptions, carried the statement. Some journalists called back to say that although they liked the statement personally, it did not harmonise with the editorial guidelines. Others wanted to go through the original documents on illegal cremations, to be sure that our arguments were based on "concrete and established facts". They copied documents from the Committee’s files, wasting many hours, and vanished. Promised stories did not appear.

Meanwhile, the campaign launched by Gill avalanched into a crusade. Responsible political leaders began to accuse the National Human Rights Commission of being prejudiced against the police. There were warnings of police revolt, and threats to break the government in Punjab if the Akali Dal, which is leading a coalition government in the State along with the Bharatiya Janata Party, did not unambiguously declare itself for the police. The leader of the BJP’s parliamentary group in Rajya Sabha - Upper House of Parliament - wrote: "Sandhu was not just left to fend for himself, the State abandoned him and - to my mind, much worse - his incarceration and humiliation were used to deflect attention. Tavleen Singh, a senior journalist, explained in her column: "Murderers of Sandhu are the "human rightswallahs".

They have been unable to see that it was war in Tarn Taran: In fighting it if Sandhu broke a few rules, there was no other way. In his subsequent letter to the Prime Minister, also published in its entirety, KPS Gill asked for a legislation that defines "appropriate criteria to judge the actions of those who fought this war on behalf of the Indian State". "Until the necessary criteria are sufficiently debated, defined and legislated, immediate steps should be taken to ensure that the pattern of humiliation through litigation and trial by the media is prevented forthwith". He repeated the insinuation that "for those who were comprehensively defeated in the battle for Khalistan, public interest litigation has become the most convenient strategy for vendetta."

Provocative as these arguments were, there was nothing substantially new in them: They had been the stock-in-trade of the Nazis, and others before and after them who tried to save their countries from "the subversives" by genocidal methods. Pakistan under investigation for genocide of Hindus in Bangladesh told the International Commission of Jurists that they had only been killed as "enemies of the State".

In January 1973, the American puppet in South Vietnam, was telling Oriana Fallaci that he prayed for the bombing of Hanoi to continue. "They have a purpose, and if we want to achieve that purpose, we have to bomb. Mademoiselle, speaking as a soldier, I tell you that the shorter the war the less atrocious it is." Nguyen Van Thieu was a Vietnamese, even if southern. K. P. S. Gill is a Punjabi, and an Indian who told the Indian Express: "it was an error that terrorism was brought to an end too quickly". He went on to add: "the fight against militancy in Punjab was one of the most humane operations ever". They stalk the same logic: "What are fifty thousand or hundred thousand people dead for a country? Don’t few hundred thousand people die every few minutes on this planet without any cause?" It was the same logic that provided the ideological backbone to the "Dirty War" in Argentina between 1976 and 1983 when the junta murdered thousands, imprisoned and tortured scores of thousands, and exiled almost half a million citizens.

The theory of counter-insurgency which Roger Trinquier systematised derived from the colonial experiences of the Western powers particularly the French in Vietnam and Algeria. The doctrine defines the strategy of counterinsurgency "as an interlocking system of actions - political, economic, psychological, military." Because the rebel organisations are clandestine and their weapon of choice is terrorism, their destruction requires unconventional and ruthless pursuits. A captured terrorist must be tortured for the knowledge of his organisation, and if he cannot be intimidated or induced to become a stooge, must be killed. The groups which do not sympathise with these imperatives of national security, particularly human rights groups, are also subversives whose destruction is also necessary to restore the pristine powers and the moral supremacy of the Nation-State.

The defenders of the State, particularly its soldiers must always remain alert against the enemy which is ubiquitous and fights the State not only by terrorism but also by other nefarious and indirect ways. When security forces in Argentina abducted a severely disabled girl-student restricted to a wheelchair, some journalists asked how the young woman could possibly be a terrorist. General Videla had responded: "...a terrorist is not just someone with a gun or a bomb, but also someone who spreads ideas that are contrary to Western and Christian civilisation."

From the very beginning of my researches in Punjab, I have been meeting important officers of the government, politicians, and journalists who privately admit that extrajudicial executions had become necessary in the situation that obtained in Punjab. I remember the words of a very eloquent exponent of this view point in Punjab: Owner and editor of Hind Samachar group of newspapers, Vijay Chopra. He told me: "No witness is willing to depose. No judge is willing to convict. No prosecutor is ready to argue. Investigating officers are policemen who live with their families in the towns and villages of Punjab. Terrorists kidnap and kill their family members. How can they investigate and gather evidence to convict the terrorists? In this situation, when policemen catch terrorists who have committed heinous crimes, they kill them and put out stories of their death in armed encounters. Do they have another option?" This is the logic, so convincing to the susceptible but so pernicious.

Law enforcing officers must know that it is no use telling the courts that so and so is a leading terrorist. Courts are supposed to operate on the rules of evidence. TADA modified the established norms of criminal trial system in India, going to the extent of shifting the presumption of guilt against the accused. It even allowed custodial confessions as admissible evidence. Punjab registered 17,529 cases under the TADA since its promulgation in 1985 up to 31 July 1994. In how many cases did the prosecution marshal the minimum necessary evidence to procure conviction?

Violent crime has been endemic to Punjab. Private notings of British officials who served in the state are full of references to their difficulties in handling the problem by the book. But they rose to the challenge. The system of maintaining a surveillance register No. 10 of bad characters was created in 1861 by E. A. Prinsep, the Commissioner of Amritsar division. Another District Officer posted at Jalandhar gives elaborate description of the police campaign against crime, based on careful selection of Station House Officers, cultivation of reliable informers, and persuasion of villagers to testify. Gerald Savage worked with the "Special Cell" to deal with organised crime.

"This meant living in rest houses and never really gaining civilisation for months on end". These standards of police work, which had been evolved in Punjab, were given short shrift by the team of officers responsible for anti-terrorist operations who had the aptitude for drama, but little training, inclination or the compulsion to do the dog’s work. Punjab at the beginning of the insurgency became a stage for their vainglory. In the end, they could only catch and kill.

In the middle of the last century, Sleeman and his team had succeeded in eradicating the menace of thugee from India. It would have been easy to eliminate thugs without legal ceremony. But Sleeman’s team opted for the arduous way, compiling lists of gang members, documenting incidents, procuring witnesses, and collating evidence that would stand judicial scrutiny. Between 1831 and 1837 more than three thousand thugs were convicted. If the officers of the Punjab police failed in bringing the terrorists to book, in spite of TADA and other draconian legislations like the Disturbed Areas Act and the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, their obsession with extra-judicial activities to the negation of arduous and lustreless tasks of regular police work, must squarely take the blame.

Another suicide that was ignored

9 July1997 issue of the Tribune, a newspaper published from Chandigarh, reported another suicide: A fifty-five years old former head of village counsel, Ajaib Singh Thodhian, committed suicide by taking poison within the precincts of Amritsar’s Golden Temple. A suicide note, which he wrote just before consuming poison, gave the reasons for his suicide: His son Kulwinder Singh had been picked up by the Amritsar police in November 1991. Father Ajaib Singh made all the efforts to trace him, but in vain. He moved the High Court of Punjab and Haryana, then the Supreme Court, and personally met senior officials of the Punjab government including four Chief Ministers, Beant Singh, Harcharan Singh Brar, Mrs Rajinder Kaur Bhattal, and Prakash Singh Badal. But no action was taken.

Ajaib Singh Thodhian’s suicide note said that he was ending his life over his "disappointment in gaining justice". The note also referred to the suicide of Ajit Singh Sandhu, "a sinner who had ended his life by jumping in front of a train". But Ajaib Singh Thodian himself, the note said, was committing suicide as a "disappointed man". This report, published in the Tribune and other vernacular dailies in Punjab, was altogether ignored by the national media which had orchestrated the massive publicity campaign against human rights groups and for legal immunity to police officials following Sandhu’s suicide.