Human Rights in Punjab: Constitutional Guarantees and Institutional Practice

HUMAN RIGHTS IN PUNJAB:
CONSTITUTIONAL GUARANTEES AND
INSTITUTIONAL PRACTICE

On January 26 2000, India celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its declaration as a Republic. This day in 1950, India adopted a Constitution that guarantees a system of bicameral parliament, an independent judiciary and inalienable human rights to now more than one billion citizens. India also claims a free and vigilant press. With these trappings of a modern democracy, India professes to be the largest functional democracy in the world where widespread human rights abuses, systematic persecution of disgruntled communities, and suppression of political dissent cannot occur. This paper argues that Indian constitutional professions on fundamental human rights are diametrically contradicted on the plane of institutional practice, specially from the perspective of those ethnic and religious minorities in India’s peripheral States that become engaged in virulent conflicts with the Union on the issues of political autonomy in the regional sphere. The paper illustrates the proposition with a detailed discussion on the matter of enforced disappearances leading to secret cremations in Punjab, carried out by the security forces to stamp out the Sikh separatist unrest that plagued the State in the decade from 1984 to 1994. The matter, as corroborated by the Central Bureau of Investigation in December 1996, is pending before the National Human Rights Commission for determination of all the issues under reference from the Supreme Court of India.

PART I

PART II

PART III

ENDNOTES