Human rights abuses, their documentation and the search for justice

PART II

Human rights abuses, their documentation

and the search for justice

Let me recount how I gathered these stories and how the institutional pillars of the Indian democracy have received them. My serious interest in the affairs of Punjab started on 31 October 1984, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two Sikh members of her security staff who held her responsible for the June 1984 destruction of the Golden Temple during the army operation. The assassination sparked off organized violence against innocent Sikhs all over North India. Over the next days, I witnessed the bloody pogrom in the streets of Delhi, which claimed more than three thousand innocent Sikh lives. I watched how murderous gangs led by political leaders, with policemen looking on, swarmed into Sikh houses, hacking the occupants to pieces, chopping off the heads of children, tying Sikh men to tires set aflame with kerosene, burning down the houses after sacking them. [15] The organizers of the anti-Sikh pogrom were able to carry out their plans with such ease because the labelling of the Sikhs as India’s enemies had substantially influenced the collective perceptions.

In early 1988 I began to travel within Punjab to investigate the reports of police atrocities amidst the escalation of the Sikh separatist violence. Since then I have been collecting the case studies of suspected Sikh separatists and their sympathizers who were whisked away by unidentified officials of the Indian security agencies, appearing out of the blue, in vehicles without number plates, to be taken to undisclosed places for interrogation, and to disappear for ever. Although some of the cases documented by me might have involved genuine extremists, I gained the impression that, for the most part, the sufferers were primarily victims of arbitrariness – of a police force that had gone haywire. My investigations constituted the basis for detailed case studies, which the Committee for Information and Initiative on Punjab published and circulated. We hoped that testimonies of victims might persuade the people of India that the ‘war without quarter’ would destroy the very basis of the nation in whose name it was being waged. These reports found some mention in the Indian press, but made no impact on the official policies. [16] The bulk of these early reports also form part of my first book on Punjab, published in 1991 under the title, “The Sikh Struggle: Origin, Evolution and Present Phase”. In 1997, I published my research on the historical context of the Sikh separatist violence, its political and psychological aspects and its irrationality as my second book on the subject, which appeared under the title: “The Sikh Unrest and the Indian State: Politics, Personalities and Historical Retrospective.” [17]

The period from 1988 to 1992 witnessed a runaway deterioration, with a steep increase in the daily reports of Sikh extremist outrages and summary executions by the security forces. In March 1988, the Indian parliament passed the 59th Amendment of the Constitution which enabled the central government to extend the President’s rule in the State beyond one year; to impose emergency on the ground of “internal disturbance” and to suspend Article 21 of the Constitution which guarantees that “no person shall be deprived of life and liberty except according to the procedure established by law”. [18]

The Union government dragooned this constitutional amendment through parliament, despite all the special legislation already at its disposal. The legislation already in force included the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, which provided the death sentence for terrorist actions resulting in death and the minimum term of five years in prison extendable to life for other offences. The Act commanded the presumption of guilt against the accused. Its definition of “abetment” eliminated the proof of criminal intention. The Act allowed a police officer of the Superintendent’s rank to record confessions of the accused in custody and to use them as evidence against them.

The TADA precluded the rule of anticipatory bail, thereby destroying the protection against manifest abuse of police power. It allowed sixty days of police custody of an accused under interrogation, and one year of judicial remand without bail. The TADA prohibited bail even when the prosecution failed to furnish a charge sheet after ninety days of arrest. The Act ruled that no person accused of an offence under its regime would be released on bail unless the designated court was satisfied on “reasonable grounds” that “he is not guilty of such offence and that he is not likely to commit any offence while on bail.” The Act did not explain how the accused should adduce the evidence of his innocence in the absence of a charge sheet, or how the judge should authenticate his guiltlessness ahead of the actual trial, and go on to certify that he would not “commit any offence while on bail.” The TADA cases were heard in special courts by executive magistrates who were appointed centrally. The hearings were held in camera, and could be held in locations far removed from the disturbed area. In March 1994, the Supreme Court of India upheld the validity of TADA. [19]

Apart from TADA and the Terrorist Affected Areas (Special Courts) Act, 1984, there were also other black laws like the National Security Act, 1980, as amended by the Act 24 of 1984 specifically with the reference to “the extremist and terrorist elements in the disturbed areas of Punjab and Chandigarh”. The Act provided for detention without charge or trial for one year in all parts of India, and two years in Punjab.

Also in force was the Armed Forces (Punjab and Chandigarh) Special Powers Act, which empowered the security forces to enter and search any premises, and to arrest any person without warrant. It also allowed the security forces to destroy any place on the suspicion of being a “terrorist hideout” and to shoot to kill a suspected terrorist with immunity from prosecution. In spite of these draconian laws available to the security agencies to deal with the situation of insurgency, they remained obsessed with extra-judicial methods governed by the formula to catch and kill suspected terrorists.

By the end of 1992, the Indian State succeeded in establishing the superiority of its power of violence over the Sikh militancy. According to the police figures, published in 1993, the security forces in Punjab killed 2,119 militants in the year 1992. [20] Hundreds of others surrendered. A larger number of people in the border districts, picked up by the police for interrogation, simply “disappeared”.

Following the decimation of the guerrilla groups, cleansing the countryside of militant sympathizers became the next main task of the security forces in the State. However, several human rights groups in Punjab, although disorganized and faction-ridden, had been embarrassing the government by publicizing police excesses. The government decided to first silence these groups.

In March 1992, Ram Singh Biling, a reporter with the Punjabi daily newspaper Ajit and the Secretary of Punjab Human Rights Organisation for his home district of Sangrur, was picked up and unceremoniously executed. Then came the turn of Ajit Singh Bains, a retired judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court and the Chairman of the Punjab Human Rights Organization. Since 1986, Bains had been doggedly campaigning against police atrocities and was a pivotal figure for the human rights movement in Punjab. His illegal arrest in April 1992 was not acknowledged for two days. Bains was manhandled, abused and publicly exhibited in handcuffs. Later, his arrest was formalised under TADA. Bains was accused of taking part in a secret meeting of militant leaders to hatch a conspiracy of “terrorist actions”. An inquiry later ordered by the High Court of Punjab established that his name did not figure in the original First Information Report about the “illegal meeting”. However, the idea of arresting Bains was not to secure his conviction under the law, but to paralyse the PHRO, and to demoralise other human rights groups with the example. Chief Minister Beant Singh told the State Legislative Assembly on April 6 that his government would not release Bains because his organisation was engaged “in defending terrorists”. [21]

A human rights lawyer, Jagwinder Singh, was picked up from his house in Kapurthala by a group of uniformed policemen on 25 September 1992 evening. Although the Chief Minister and the Chief Secretary promised to intervene, Jagwinder Singh never returned.

On 18 May 1992, Amritsar police picked up Param Satinderjit Singh, a student of Guru Nanak Dev University, from the university campus. He was forced to identify suspected sympathisers of the separatist cause within the university, who were also picked up. The police brought Param Satinderjit Singh to the university campus several times for this purpose. The university students held a demonstration to protest against the abduction, and his father went on a hunger strike. But Param Satinderjit Singh was not released and he also disappeared.

Punjab government kept up the pressure on the PHRO by arresting Malwinder Singh Malli, General Secretary of the organisation, in August 1992. Malli was also the editor of “Paigam”, a vernacular journal affiliated to a Marxist-Leninist group, whose work in the field had led to several exhaustive reports on police atrocities. Elimination of Ram Singh Biling and Jagwinder Singh, and arrests of Ajit Singh Bains and Malwinder Singh Malli effectively paralysed the regional human rights groups.

In January 1995, Jaswant Singh Khalra, a human rights worker from Amritsar, released some official documents to claim that the security agencies in Punjab had been secretly cremating thousands of dead bodies labelled as unidentified. Khalra suggested that most of these cremations were of the people who had earlier been picked up on the suspicion of separatist sympathies. The evidence consisted of entries at the office of the Registrar of Births and Deaths and in the firewood purchase registers maintained at the cremation grounds. These records showed that at the three crematoria of the Amritsar district alone, the police officials had illegally burnt 2097 corpses within a period of two years from 1991 to 1992. Khalra went with these records to the Punjab and Haryana High Court through a Writ Petition to ask for an independent investigation. [22] But the court dismissed the petition with the remark that the petitioner had no locus standi in the matter.

Following the dismissal, I, along with Khalra, traveled extensively in Amritsar to review and corroborate the evidence he had gathered. I talked to the attendants of the cremation grounds, the doctors who had conducted post-mortems and also the relatives of victims who furnished the necessary evidence to establish linkages between the disappearances and illegal cremations. The attendants of the cremation grounds told me that the police often bought firewood for one or two bodies but dumped many more on a single pyre. The Chief Medical Officer of a Civil Hospital in the district confessed that the procedure of postmortem had been simplified to the extent that it meant no more than filling a paper that announced the cause and the time of death, with the policemen providing the information. He also gave gruesome details of Sarabjit Singh’s post-mortem. On October 30, 1993, the supposedly dead body of Sarabjit Singh was brought to the hospital for post-mortem. A doctor at the hospital found out that the man with a bullet injury on his head was still breathing. Thereupon, the police officers took injured Sarabjit Singh’s body away, came back with his corpse, and forced a different doctor to fill-in the autopsy report. I was also able to interview many serving and retired police officers who, on the condition of anonymity, provided detailed narratives, which explained summary executions and illegal cremations as aspects of a strategy to weed out the Sikh separatist militancy from the roots. On the basis of these investigations, the Committee for Information and Initiative on Punjab moved the Supreme Court of India to demand a comprehensive inquiry. [23]

On the morning of September 6,1995, it was Khalra’s turn to disappear: he was kidnapped from his Amritsar home by officers of the Punjab police. In November 1995, Justice Kuldip Singh of the Supreme Court instituted two inquiries to be conducted by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The first inquiry aimed to determine what happened to Khalra. The second inquiry intended to establish the substance in the allegations, which Khalra had made before himself disappearing. In July 1996, the report of the first inquiry held nine officers of the Punjab police, led by Senior Superintendent of Police Ajit Singh Sandhu, responsible. In December 1996, the report of the second inquiry disclosed “flagrant violation of human rights on a mass scale”, and 2097 illegal cremations at three sites in the Amritsar district. Although the court decided to keep the full contents of the report secret, it directed the National Human Rights Commission to comprehensively investigate and to “determine all the issues”. The court’s order also said that any compensation awarded by the Commission shall be binding and payable, and the CBI will continue to investigate the issues of criminal culpability.

When the Commission took up the matter on 29 January 1997, the Union and the Punjab governments vehemently opposed our plea that its mandate was to discover the depth and magnitude of all violations divulged by the CBI’s report and to restore justice through compensation and other reparative measures. We argued that the proceedings had to cover not only the illegal cremations at the three sites, but also the disposal of dead bodies in other ways throughout the seventeen districts of Punjab, if it was established that they are linked to disappearances and summary executions followed by illegal abductions by the State agencies.

The Commission’s first order on August 4, 1997 seemed to resolve the quarrel. It declared that the Commission’s inquiry would be guided by Article 32 of the Indian Constitution, a ‘guaranteed remedy’ against infringement of fundamental rights, which conferred on the judiciary all the powers necessary to protect them. The Union government disagreed with the ruling and moved the Supreme Court for a clarification.

The Union government’s application was still pending for a decision when Ajit Singh Sandhu, a senior officer of the Punjab police, reportedly committed suicide on 23 May 1997 by throwing himself under a moving train. The Supreme Court had held Sandhu responsible for Khalra’s abduction. 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.” The officer had been a trusted lieutenant of the State’s former police chief, K. P. S. Gill, who had spearheaded India’s ruthless war against the Sikh secessionist militancy. Charged 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 acted. Instead of asking for an inquiry into the reported suicide, Gill seized the opportunity to launch his campaign against “an utterly compromised human rights lobby.”

He called a press conference on the 24th May evening “not to express grief”, but to discuss the larger political and policy issues. The newspapers across the country dutifully carried the full text of his statement, which held the nation to shame for showing ingratitude towards the “brave” officers of the Punjab police who had saved India from disintegration. The statement castigated the Indian institutions for coming under the pressure of “an utterly compromised lobby of” human rights activists “who will work with any cause that serves their personal ends, whether criminal, political or secessionist”. Gill wanted the State to “educate itself on how to tackle these individuals and groups” and, meanwhile, to protect the courageous officers of the Punjab police from the kind of humiliation that had driven one of them to suicide. [24]

The campaign against human rights organizations launched by Gill soon swelled into a crusade. Responsible political leaders accused the National Human Rights Commission of being prejudiced against the police. Others warned of police revolt. India’s current Foreign Minister, Jaswant Singh, said: “Sandhu (the officer who apparently committed suicide) was not just left to fend for himself, the State abandoned him.” [25] Tavleen Singh, a senior journalist, explained in her column: “the murderers of Sandhu are the ‘human rightswallahs’. They have been unable to see that it was war…: If in fighting it Sandhu broke a few rules, there was no other way.” In his subsequent letter to the Prime Minister, also published in its entirety, K. P. S. Gill asked for a legislation that would define “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 is prevented forthwith”. [26]

Against the backdrop of this vehement campaign for impunity, the Supreme Court took up the Union government’s objections about the mandate of the inquiry before the National Human Rights Commission. Its verdict, delivered on September 10, 1998, seemed ambiguous and somewhat contradictory. It said: “The matter relating to 585 dead bodies, which were fully identified, 274 partially identified and 1238 unidentified dead bodies, has already been referred to the Commission.” This emphasis on the number of bodies cited in the CBI’s report suggested that the inquiry would not encompass the wider patterns of police abductions leading to disappearances and secret disposal of bodies in the whole of Punjab. But the judgment also said: “In deciding the matter referred by this court, the National Human Rights Commission is given a free hand and is not circumscribed by any conditions.”

In the wake of this order by the Supreme Court, the Commission decided to review the scope of its pending inquiry by posing the conflict of interpretation succinctly: According to the petitioners, the inquiry had to cover all incidents of “abductions”, “custodial killings”, “involuntary disappearances”, and “illegal disposal of dead bodies”, attributed to the State agencies in the period from 1984 to 1994. The government claimed that the inquiry had to be limited to 2097 cases of cremations. The Commission’s order passed on 13 January 1999 decided that it was “unable to subscribe to the expansive interpretation of the scope of its task suggested by the petitioners.” [27]

With the crucial emphasis on “cremations”, the Commission was shifting the inquiry from its basis in the fundamental rights law to a very limited technical issue. By one of its absurd implications, the State wasn’t to be held accountable for those dead bodies that had been quartered, buried or thrown in rivers and canals. The Commission was going to examine the illegality of the cremations, but not the destruction of the fundamental rights to life and liberty, which preceded them. It was also not going to examine any case that belonged to the 16 other districts in Punjab. Only the cremations of Amritsar listed in the CBI’s report came within the purview of its inquiry although there existed no method to determine the origins of the 1500 bodies described by the report as unidentified.

The notification and the questionnaires circulated by the Commission, in the wake of this order, suggested that it was going to award compensation arbitrarily without developing a comprehensive criterion. The questionnaires sought details of occupation, income, property owned by claimants and persons whose bodies had been cremated. But they had no columns for the claimants to inform the Commission about destruction, theft and confiscation of their immovable property, cattle, crops and chattels. Likewise, they had no columns on psychological damage and its consequences suffered by relatives of victims.

The rules of evidence and some other aspects of the procedure suggested by the Commission suffered from basic legal defects. The notification invited claims from legal heirs of people who were illegally cremated in Amritsar district in the period between 1984 and 1994. It also asked the State government to file before the Commission a list of all the unidentified cremations in the district done by the police in the same period, putting the initial burden to prove legality of the cremations on the State authorities. The onus of proof on the State was meaningless in a situation that did not afford the victims any means to challenge what it contended as plain lies. Sections 107 and 108 of the Evidence Act turns the burden to prove the death of a disappeared person on whoever claims it. The State authorities can take the cover behind these sections to disclaim responsibility for such cases of enforced disappearances. Within this legal framework, payment of compensation was unlikely for so long as the presumption of death was not established.

Some countries like Chile and South Africa have exhumed mortal remains from graves and other undesignated places to forensically identify people who were clandestinely buried after having been abducted by the security agencies. But exhumation and other forensic methods would not salvage the identities of those who were surreptitiously burnt and whose ashes were washed away in rivers and canals. A judicial declaration on presumption of death could help. However, no such declaration could come forth through a process that excludes enforced disappearance as an issue for scrutiny. [28]

The Commission derived its authority to deal with this matter by overriding the statutory limitations under the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993, through the “guaranteed remedy” of Article 32, which bound the Supreme Court to act against all complaints of human rights violations. The Commission was employing the competence of Article 32 to amplify its powers beyond the statute that created it. Simultaneously, it insisted on disallowing the benefits of this guaranteed remedy to the citizens who have suffered the violations. This indeed was extraordinary.

All the references to concepts of damages, fair and adequate compensation in public law, the right to rehabilitation and redressal of established infringements revolve around Article 21 as a compendious guarantee that “no person shall be deprived of life or personal liberty except in accordance with the procedure established by law”. It is only through the mandate of this article that the State loses the argument of sovereign immunity, becoming vicariously liable justly and adequately to compensate the citizens for acts of infringement by public servants. [29]

After failing in a review application before the Commission, the Committee moved the Supreme Court once again. [30] Its investigations to acquire further evidence had resulted in the acquisition of partial records of “illegal cremations” from six other districts in Punjab. These records showed illegal cremations of 934 bodies. The Committee had also completed a survey of 838 Incident Reports of illegal abductions leading to disappearances from all over Punjab. The survey showed that in 222 of the 838 incidents, one or more members of the families either committed suicide in despair or died under trauma. In 58 out of these 222 cases, the security forces had also illegally destroyed, damaged and confiscated family properties. In 290 cases of abductions, the persons who eventually disappeared had been seen in the police custody. In 129 cases, the surviving relatives possessed sensitive information on 390 other incidents of enforced disappearances. In 759 of the 836 incidents, the family members of the disappeared had also suffered brutal torture in police custody. The relatives of 149 victims of disappearances approached the High Court of Punjab and Haryana with petitions for the writ of habeas corpus. Most of these petitions were dismissed following routine denials by the Punjab officials. [31]

The Committee placed all of this evidence before the Supreme Court to argue that the ‘flagrant violation of human rights on a mass scale”, as confirmed by the CBI’s report, could not be confined to the limited scope of the inquiry the National Human Rights Commission had imposed. In the second week of October 1999, the Supreme Court rejected the Committee’s petition with the remark that the Commission was proceeding satisfactorily with its mandate.

We had also objected to the procedure adopted by the NHRC to circulate and elicit claims only through the office of the District Commissioner and had suggested that other agencies, including post offices and panchayats, be used for the purpose. But the Commission was deliberately following a restrictive method. As a result, the Commission received only 88 claim forms, which it further divided in three Lists. The first List called Annexture A included 23 claims, which came from outside Amritsar. They were excluded as falling outside the Commission’s jurisdiction. The second List called Annexture B included 47 claims, which the State of Punjab and the Union government disputed on various grounds, including the grounds of merit. The third List called Annexture C consisted of 18 cases in which the State of Punjab took the curious position that “without examining the correctness of the claims”, and “without going into the merits of the matter, compensation may be determined.” The State of Punjab suggested a payment of one hundred thousand rupees each. It also wanted the Union of India to bear the burden of payment as part of its “constitutional obligation to support the State government in preventing internal disturbance at the behest of Pakistan…”. The Commission’s 18 August 2000 order on these Lists explained that the government has “neither conducted any detailed examination in these cases on merits nor does it admit its liability… but it offers payment of compensation…” The order then went on to endorse this position in the following words: “For this conclusion, it does not matter whether the custody was lawful or unlawful, or the exercise of power of control over the person was justified or not; and it is not necessary even to identify the individual officer or officers responsible/ concerned.”

Thus, the Commission endorsed the State government’s proposal to pay one hundred thousand rupees each in these eighteen cases, without admitting liability, and to close the matter. The Commission was not even embarrassed by the anomaly that the State was simultaneously disputing 47 claims in the Annexture B on merits. Earlier, the Commission used the CBI’s report to limit the scope of inquiry to Amritsar district. The report included a list of 2097 cremations, 585 fully identified, 274 partially identified and 1238 as yet unidentified. By its 5 August 1999 order, the Commission rejected our application for disclosure and inspection of the CBI’s report, as also the periodic reports on the progress of its investigations into the issues of criminal culpability ordered by the Supreme Court, on the grounds of confidentiality and public interest. What did the Commission do to identify 1238 cremations listed in the CBI’s report? What did it do to compensate the legal heirs of 585 fully identified and 274 partially identified cremations? In its 5 August 1999 order, the Commission referred to the CBI’s investigations into the criminal liability of public authorities for the deaths and the cremations. What meaning could these opaque investigations have while the Commission exulted in the government’s offer to compensate 18 claimants of the Annexture C without admitting liability while disputing 47 claims of the Annexture B on merits? Why shouldn't these aggrieved families in Punjab believe that the NHRC is anything other a puppet arm of the State, organized for the consumption of Western donors?

The surviving family members of victims, although living on the threshold of destitution, refused to accept the proposal of compensation on these terms, which the National Human Rights Commission had endorsed. They had been coping with the trauma of their relatives’ enforced disappearance in the hope that some day the institutions of India would wake up to the imperatives of justice. They filled the claim forms circulated by the NHRC in the belief that justice, founded on an impartial and thorough investigation into their complaints, would form the basis for compensation and other reparative measures.

The proposal of compensation without admission of liability was directly affronting the surviving relatives of victims for the reason that, even if indigent, they had not gone to the NHRC begging. The proposal of compensation was offensive also for the reason that no attempt had been made to determine the wrongs and losses, which they and their families had suffered in the course of coping up with the atrocities inflicted on them by the authorities.

The Supreme Court had granted a compensation of Rs. 10 lakhs to the widow of Jaswant Singh Khalra, who first highlighted the matter of illegal cremations and was thereafter disappeared by the police. In the connected cases arising from the same matter, the Commission was offering Rs. 1 lakh. In the case of Khalra’s disappearance, the Court granted compensation after conducting an impartial enquiry and determining the guilt of the officials responsible. In other cases, the proposal of compensation rested on the basis that there will be no determination of liability or a finding of guilt. The proposal was embedded in a discriminatory mindset as evident by the fact that the State was disputing on merits the claims of 47 others in the list B, while proposing to grant compensation to 18 victim families in the list C without admitting liability or the merits of their complaints. The proposals become invidiously discriminatory by excluding those who suffered similar abuses in other districts of Punjab but were not cremated in one of the three cremation grounds specified in the CBI’s report to the Supreme Court.

In January 2001, all the 18 claimants in the Annexture C jointly moved the National Human Rights Commission to demand that it should either restore the original intent of justice, the universal nature of the right to life and liberty and equal protection of the laws to the proceedings, or put an end to this farce and stop further proceedings in the matter.

On 15 February 2001, the Commission passed an order holding that “…as far as practicable efforts must be made to enquire into all or as many out of 2097 cremations as possible…” The Commission also made it clear that its order of 18 August 2000 did not amount to a determination of compensation in the 18 cases mentioned therein.

On 20 March 2001, the Commission recorded that the CBI would provide lists of the 2097 persons cremated in the three cremation grounds in Amritsar, Majitha and Tarn Taran.

On 3 May 2001, the Commission noted that the CBI had provided three lists marked as “List A” (582 identified dead bodies), “List B” (278 partially identified dead bodies) and “List C” (1237 unidentified dead bodies)…” The Commission directed the CBI as well as the State government to make available the entire material with them in respect of the three lists for inspection by counsel “representing different interests so that the first stage of enquiry of full identification of the maximum number possible out of the total of 2097 is completed as early as possible, to enable further progress in this matter”. Lastly, the Commission directed that copies of the CBI reports (which had been kept secret all this while) be given to the counsel for the various parties before the Commission, as suggested by the Amicus Curiae appointed by the Commission to assist it in the case.

On 19 July 2001, the Commission reiterated that the counsel for the parties inspecting the records produced by the CBI would be entitled to assistance of officers/ members of the petitioner committee, named by them.

However, on 20 July 2001, the Inspector General of Police (Litigation) Punjab faxed a letter to the Chairperson of the Commission submitting that “the record should only be inspected by the Joint Task Group, the constitution of which should be as follows:

(i) Representative of the Hon’ble Commission, the Convenor

(ii) Representative of the CBI

(iii) Representative of the State of Punjab

(iv)Representative of the Punjab police

(v)The counsel of the petitioner representing in the Commission

The letter expressed apprehension that : “…if any of the petitioner is allowed to inspect the record his purpose will not be really to facilitate and expedite the process of identification, rather… to rake up undue and irrelevant issues with the aim of obstructing the process of identification.”

These letters were followed by further submissions dated 23 July 2001 and 30 July 2001. Both were elaborations on the theme initiated in the earlier letter dated 20 July 2001.

Pursuant to the order of the Commission dated 19 July 2001, the Committee’s lawyer inspected the CBI records on the 23rd and the 26th of July 2001. On the latter date, there was a large posse of the Punjab government and police officials, ostensibly present for inspecting the CBI records. However, it soon became apparent that the real object of these persons was to keep tabs on the Committee’s lawyer and his associates who were also inspecting the CBI record. The inspection on the 26th of July was brought to an abrupt end by the Punjab government officials who raised an objection to the Committee being allowed to inspect the “confidential” record.

The matter came up before the Commission on the 7th of August. On that date, the Commission expressed annoyance at the tactics employed by the IGP (Litigation) Punjab government. However, the Commission asked all the parties to file their replies and directed that the issues raised in the letters of the IGP (Litigation) would be decided in the course of the proposed hearing on 23 August 2001. But the Commission disposed of the matter only on 21 September 2001, rejecting the objections which the Punjab government and the CBI raised but also asking the Committee’s counsel to carry out the inspection on a consensual basis. The inspection of these records may take long and the case pertaining to the “flagrant violation of human rights on a mass scale” goes on its typical Indian ways.