CONCLUSION - Committee for Information and Initiative on Punjab (CIIP)

PART III

CONCLUSION

What are we then to think of India’s constitutional guarantees which the existing apparatus of justice cannot enforce? Is the law that cannot curb its offenders anything but a travesty. Is not a legal system that is so soft on murderers and torturers and so sympathetic to the ‘imperatives of political power’ seriously diseased.[32] Or, should we try to understand this legal dallying as an orchestration by the ‘performers of the law’, an expression for the judges and the lawyers that Sanford Levinson and J. M. Balkin use? [33] The expression is appropriate. It suggests that like the conductors performing from the musical scores, these legal professionals are responsible for interpreting and applying the legal texts as the sources of law into social practice. The point of this comparison, however, has no consolation to those victims of injustice who see the working of India’s legal system only as “a covenant with death and agreement with hell.” [34] As I pointed out earlier, in 222 out of 838 incidents, one or more members of the families either committed suicide or died under trauma. Relatives of 149 victims of disappearances approached the courts, mainly the High Court of Punjab and Haryana, with petitions for writs of habeas corpus. Most petitions were dismissed following routine denials by the police officials. The majority of victim families, 689 to be exact, did not approach the courts either because of police fear or from lack of faith in the judicial system.

In my estimate, only ten per cent of the survivors from the families that suffered enforced disappearances and arbitrary killings have, in any manner, come forward to give reports. That is also the ratio of people who approached the judiciary or other institutions for redress. This leaves about ninety per cent of the cases that have remained undocumented. This should be a cause for concern not only to human rights organizations but also to those members of the scholarly community who should be interested in preserving history. The bulk of victim-testimonies, which I have collected, has come from the people who are old and might not live very long. Most of them are poor and illiterate and do not understand the meaning of “evidence” or the point of recording it. Yet they are the repositories of that evidence, which, unless quickly collated, risks being lost altogether. It is perhaps a challenge for the members of the Punjab Research Group and similar other academic organizations to take up.

I will close this paper with a quote from George Mangakis, a professor of Penal Law at the University of Athens when in 1969 the military junta seized power in Greece. Dismissed from the university for “lacking in the spirit of conformity with the regime”, he was later arrested on charges of terrorism. In his “Letter to Europeans” from his prison cell, Mangakis wrote: “…humiliated nations are inevitably led either to a lethal decadence, a moral and spiritual withering, or to a passion for revenge, which results in bloodshed and upheaval. A humiliated people either take their revenge or die a moral and spiritual death. Once you realize the inevitability of your people’s destruction, one way or another, your personal humiliation is turned into a sense of responsibility…” [35]

Personally to me, this call to responsibility primarily suggests a duty to resist the attempts to obliterate defeated people, their sense of identity, aspirations and ordeals of life from the annals of history.