Peoples’ Commission on Human Rights Violations in Punjab:

Why? And for What?

The first sitting of the People’s Commission on Human Rights Violations in Punjab, in spite of an inevitable measure of organizational confusion, was a monumental success. As already announced, the Commission will hold its next sitting in Ludhiana on 23rd, 24th and 25th of October 1998. Meanwhile, we invite you to carefully study the Rules of Procedure and Evidence adopted by the Commission on the first day of its sitting, enclosed at the end of this note.  The Rules lay down the terms of reference, the conceptual parameters and the legal purview of its inquiries, as well as the obligations and the safeguards provided for persons who come under its proceedings as complainants, witnesses and accused. Perusal of this document, which binds the working of the Commission, should dispel many misconceptions, insinuations and apprehensions that are being orchestrated by motivated people. Although we have no intention to argue with the myriad forces of insanity and the malevolent masters of subterfuge  that have worked for Punjab’s destruction over the last decades, this note aims to dispel misconceptions that may spring from unacquaintedness with the principles, rules and regulations which bind us.

The Peoples’ Commission on Human Rights Violations in Punjab has been constituted by the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab, which is a representative body of various human rights organizations under the Convenorship of Ram Narayan Kumar, a writer and a well known human rights activist with no political affiliation. The Committee’s objectives and the agenda are clearly spelt out in a position paper that was widely debated and adopted at its founding conference held in Chandigarh on 9 November 1997. The following are the main programs adopted by the Committee: (a)  To develop a voluntary mechanism to collect and collate information on disappeared people from all over the State, and to ensure that the matter of police abductions leading to illegal cremations of dead bodies proceeds meaningfully and culminates in a just and satisfactory final order, (b) to evolve a workable system of state accountability, and to build up the pressure of public opinion to counter the bid for immunity, (c) to lobby for India to change the domestic laws in conformity with the UN instruments on torture, enforced disappearances, accountability, compensation to victims of abuse of  power and other related matters, (d) to initiate a debate on vital issues of state power, its distribution, accountability and to work for a shared perspective on these matters with groups and movements all over India. It was also resolved that the Committee would not associate with any form of political activity outside its human rights mandate. We welcome donations in Indian rupees which, however, must be made only on receiving a signed receipt from one of the members of the Accounts Committee. Our accounts are open to public scrutiny. No one is allowed to ask for and make donations outside this procedure.

The first convention of the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab, held on 10 December 97 and presided by Justice (rtd) Kuldip Singh, called on the Punjab government to constitute a Truth Commission to investigate all reports of human rights violations in the State. This the Akali Dal had pledged in its election manifesto. However, the government of Punjab reneged on its electoral pledge. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the UN Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials, the UN Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment, and the UN Principles on the Effective Prevention and Investigation of Extra-Legal, Arbitrary and Summary Executions guarantee the fundamental human rights, which the Indian Constitution has also pledged to its citizens.  The State is under an obligation to fulfill these pledges. It is also the duty of the State to safeguard people’s life, liberty and property from the menace of terrorism. The State of India has miserably failed on both the fronts. Although there is the National Human Rights Commission and the State Human Rights Commission, they are bereft of the power to entertain complaints beyond the period of one year. No court - unless acting suo moto - would entertain the cases of human rights violations because of delay.  On the international scene, Jews are investigating such violations which happened nearly fifty years ago. South Africa set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the same purpose. The Security Council’s resolutions have established International Tribunals to investigate and prosecute crimes against humanity committed in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.  But the people of Punjab are allowed no such remedy and are left with no other way to unearth the gross violations of human rights except through a Peoples’ Commission. The Commission shall go into the accountability for the actions of those who in many cases are still in positions of power. Unless their involvement in gross human rights violations in understood more widely and dealt with according to law, there would be no deterrent for the future. The Commission’s findings are expected to give some relief to the families of victims who in many cases do not know whether their relatives are dead or alive. In cases where the victims died or are tortured, some avenue of redressal, minimum being compensation from the State, must be provided. The findings of the Commission shall have persuasive value before any court or forum which may be seized of any of these matters.

The terms of reference of the Commission are very wide and include investigations in all cases of human rights violations whether committed by the State agencies or by militants. The documentation projects undertaken by the Committee keep the focus on the victims of State power. The Committee aims to ensure completeness and reliability of all serious contentions of human rights abuses suffered by victims of State power and also to ensure that they are tested against the impeccable character of the primary data. However, it is open to all those who allege victimisation at the hands of militants - including police widows - to approach the People’s Commission, which would treat them equally with other complainants. Our own position on the methods of violence followed by the militants has been reiterated on a number of occasions. Firstly, in our opinion, it is futile to make indignant condemnation of militant violence that plagued Punjab without inquiring into the issue of how the State agencies managed to drive India’s “sword-arm” into its own bowels. That, however, is a larger issue which we cannot expound on here. Specifically on the methods of violence followed by the armed groups, we maintain that there is no point in protesting against the violence wrought by the State if we remain morally ambivalent about acts of indiscriminate violence perpetrated by armed groups. They evoke in us nothing but abhorrence. Indiscriminate violence, whosoever be responsible for it, stems from a world-view that blurs individual identities of oppressors and the oppressed behind blanket descriptions and stereotypes. This mentality, which we condemn as the precise antithesis of civilisation, undermines the very foundation of justice, namely the notion of concrete moral agent. However, as we all know, large number of militants have already paid for their deeds with their lives. We must also not forget that those who had nothing whatsoever to do with militancy were nevertheless - on extraneous considerations -  got abducted, tortured and killed in custody or staged “encounters”. There are hundreds rather thousands of such cases. The victims in this category include lawyers, doctors, workers, religious preachers, journalists and human rights activists. Bread earners - fathers, sons, husbands - belonging to large number of families are either missing or killed. The majority of these people are the poor, the uneducated and the powerless, who cannot afford the process of legal justice that is mechanical and grinding, who the elite across the lines of political divide do not mind seeing destroyed.  These are precisely the kind of cases which are being presented before the Commission.

Peoples’ Commission is functional-forum of the people to defend the human rights guaranteed to them under the domestic statutes, further supplemented by the pledges under the UN conventions and other international treaties. The Commission represents a consciousness, a craving for truth and justice, that has taken possession of the peoples’ mind, as demonstrated by their overwhelming participation even exceeding our own expectations. It is possible to demonize, jail, torture and even kill the people associated with our movement. But it would not be possible to suppress that consciousness that has taken possession of the peoples’ mind. We are confident that the Peoples’ Commission, for being emblematic of that consciousness, would triumph over all distractions to reinstate the supremacy of human rights which weld the institutions of the State and the people into a constitutional society.

India at its fiftieth anniversary of independence, confronts the overwhelming force of a reality which destroys the very notion of freedom, as reflected in its vast panorama of human rights abuses, the institutional matrix as well as the ideologies that rationalize them. If freed from the chains of foreign slavery, we seem to have to become tied to the cart of State-institutions that takes us round and round the circumference of our historical misfortunes, we must ask: Are the objective realities that explain our colonial era, and which survived the transfer of power in 1947, stronger than the sentiments that had guided our freedom struggle? Talking of obstacles and objective realities, we shall conclude this note with few stanzas from a poem which William Cowper had penned in 1781 to chide his compatriots of the East India Company. It is ironical and a matter of dismay, that these stanzas continue to aptly characterise those defenders of the status-quo who demonize the human rights activists as agents of disruption:                      

                              Hast thou, though suckled at fair freedom’s breast

                           Brought slavery to the conquered East,

                          Pulled down the tyrants India serv’d with dread,

                        And rais’d thyself, a greater, in their stead?

                      Gone thither arm’d and hungry, returned full,

                    Fed from the richest veins of the Mogul.

                  A despot big with pow’r obtain’d by wealth

                And that obtain’d by rapine and stealth?

               With Asiatic vices stor’d thy mind,

              But left their virtues and thine own behind…”

Ram Narayan Kumar

Convenor

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