Under Sl. No. 42/110, the list identifies the 25 July 1989 cremation of Rattan Singh, s/o Chanan Singh, r/o Kalah, carried out by ASI Tarlochan Singh of Tarn Taran’s Sadar police station under FIR No. 63/89. The postmortem report number is not mentioned. The cause of death is given to be “police encounter”.

The Committee has the following information through its Incident-Report Form No. CCDP/01517. The main informant in this case is the victim’s widow Kulwant Kaur.

Thirty-five year old Ratan Singh, s/o Channan Singh and Guron, was a farmer resident of village and post office Kalla under Sadar police station in Tarn Taran subdivision of Amritsar district. He was married to Kulwant Kaur and they had two daughters, Ninder Kaur and Ramandeep Kaur, who are now 16 and 14.

Ratan Singh was a regular Punjabi farmer devoted to his land, family and village. His house was located next to his agricultural land in the outer fringe of the village. He did not belong to any political party and never had any militant connections. However, he was involved with the issues of development and welfare in his village and had been elected a member of the village council.

It was 24 July 1989, a hot sultry day, and Ratan Singh was just returning home in the evening around 6:30 p.m., after supervising the construction of a sitting platform in the village center for residents to gather in their sparetime. This was a part of his function as a member of the village council. By a coincidence that evening, a joint force of the Punjab police and the CRPF, engaged in a chase and hunt operation on the trail of some militants, was approaching Kalla village from the side of Ratan Singh’s fields and his house. As Ratan Singh was walking down to his house, through a peripheral mud path circumventing the main residential part of the village, the security personnel may have mistaken him to be a militant and started firing. Ratan Singh was already inside the courtyard of his house and his family members were coming out to welcome him when a bullet went through his chest and he collapsed on the spot. Ratan Singh’s family members did not know what was happening and assuming, in their state of panic, that intruders were breaking into the house with wicked intentions, they ran out in the direction of their fields. The security personnel stopped firing and, announcing themselves, asked the family members to come back. Then they conducted a search and found Ratan Singh’s dead body. The Punjab police and the CRPF personnel then loaded the body into their vehicle and went away. It was already dark and the family members could not do anything.

The next morning, the family members, together with a large number of village residents riding tractor trollies, reached Tarn Taran’s Sadar police station. The police officials, led by Sita Ram, were very conciliatory and admitted that they had killed Ratan Singh by mistake and on the basis of wrong information. Sita Ram promised to provide all possible help to obtain proper compensation to the family members and, expresseing regret, handed over the dead body to the family members. The cremation was carried out at the village cremation ground, in the presence of a large gathering of mourners, on 25 July 1989.

However, the next morning, several newspapers in Punjab drew from a police handout to report the incident as an “encounter” and identified Ratan Singh as a militant. It was a period of pervasive police terror and the family, not being in a position to fight the police establishment, decided to keep quiet.

It is not clear how this cremation figures in the CBI’s list of identified dead bodies cremated by the police officials at Tarn Taran cremation ground when, in fact, it had been conducted by the family at the village itself.')"

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