Families Who Chose Not To File a Petition - Committee for Information and Initiative on Punjab (CIIP)

D. Families Who Chose Not To File a Petition

Some families chose not to file a petition for reasons related to the problems petitioners faced during the case, such as: harassment, fear for other family members, an inability to procure witnesses, lack of knowledge, lack of resources, the desire to hold on to jobs with the police, and the belief that filing a case would be ineffective. At least four interviewees did not know that the High Court existed.

Fear for the safety of other family members dominated decisions not to file a case. Baljinder Kaur described the years of police harassment that prevented her from filing a case, despite encouragement from various community members. The police detained her family after they killed her husband, Kiranpal Singh, before their eyes. When she returned home after the police released her, they had vandalized her two-bedroom apartment. Until 1998

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or 1999, the police visited her home continuously, threatening to kill her and her family if she filed a case:

They kept on coming continuously. We never knew what dawn they would come, what dusk. I was reunited with my oldest daughter after two years. She was a witness, too. My daughter didn’t tell us where she had been kept by the police those two years, saying she herself didn’t know.[77]

High Court lawyer R. S. Bains affirmed that eventually human rights lawyers started advising people not to file habeas corpus petitions because it was “a remedy that gave more pain to people than relief.”[78] People emphasized their desire to maintain what they had, instead of losing more while they chased justice.