Methodology 147

METHODOLOGY

CHAPTER THREE
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Methodology 149
One of the main objectives behind the creation of the Committee for Coordina
tion on Disappearances in Punjab (CCDP), as its memorandum of aims adopted
on 9 November 1997 says, was to “develop a voluntary mechanism to collect and
collate information on those who had disappeared 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”.
From the beginning of our documentation efforts in Punjab, we recognized that
the arguments about the state’s human rights obligations and the rights of victims to
acknowledgement, restitution and reparation could have force only when the information
on the violations and their magnitude became available in an objective,
accurate and standardised form. In the face of stout denials by the state agencies
and a vehement campaign for impunity, a fault-proof case had to be presented if we
really cared enough about the matter of police abductions leading to secret disposal
of corpses, reaching a just and satisfactory conclusion. This required an effective
mechanism to undertake thorough investigative work at the grass-root level. Unfortunately,
the large number of organizations and individuals who joined the CCDP
were unable to participate in the tedious and unglamorous work of documentation
that involved traveling and living in villages for weeks on end. Only a small team of
volunteers persisted with the main objective behind the committee’s formation.
The first stage of documentation involved the filling of an incident report form
designed and circulated by the CCDP, by close relatives of victims, assisted by the
committee’s volunteers if the relatives could not read and write. The form was
designed with an equal emphasis on descriptive and factual information, seeking
political and family background, general circumstances of the disappeared persons,
as well as the dates and facts of atrocities and the evidence to corroborate the allegations.
1
The number of forms and the dates on which the committee’s volunteers took
them were entered in a register, along with the volunteers’ names and addresses.
Similar entries, with names and dates, were also made when the volunteers returned
them to the office.
Those forms that were sent back by mail were entered in a separate register.
Every form was given a unique number and acknowledged.
If the information was inadequate or confusing, we wrote back with requests for
clarification and supplementary details.
A status report was prepared for every form after cross-checking the information
with the lawyer, if there was one involved, and the volunteer who assisted the
complainant to fill the form. This led to the second stage of verification, which
1 See Appendix II.
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involved new interviews, to understand the complex and unique situation of each
victim and to guess its likely influence on the presentation of facts.
Transcripts of all interviews, when tape-recorded, and also all hand-written notes,
are included in the files of the incident reports with their unique numbering, along
with any other material, including press reports, court papers and personal letters
containing information on the cases. Their perusal would show the staggering complexity
of the verification process, with repetitive and circular questioning, checking
and cross-checking, all aiming at a complete and authentic reporting process.
Although the process was time consuming, strenuous and emotionally exhausting,
not least because the dignity of victims requires that we talk to them at their
own pace and on their own terms, it has rewarded us with a wealth of information
and insights, which help us to better understand the larger systemic aspects of violations.
The experience has also taught us some lessons in the techniques of factfinding.
These should be useful to others involved in data collection in rural and
largely illiterate societies torn by political violence and state repression.
The Interview Process
To illustrate the intricacies of the work, we shall give one standard example: A
relative of the victim of enforced disappearance, such as a mother, a father, or a
wife, who is reporting the incident, is illiterate. The relative has acquired a copy of
the incident report form and has approached a local social worker who can fill it.
Most probably, a political worker from the area, loosely affiliated to the CCDP, has
gone to the family to record the incident. The straight and simple question in the
column to be answered is: When did the incident take place? That sounds simple,
but the reporting family member does not possess written notes on the incident’s
details. The local newspaper either did not report the incident or the copy has been
lost. The reporter does not exactly remember whether it was four or five years ago.
It was just approaching winter and crops in the fields were “so high”; harvesting
was still “so many” weeks away. That is as close to the time of occurrence as you
can get by the narration. Or again, the family member may know the year but not
the month and the date; perhaps, if one is lucky, he may know even those details but
by the local variation of the Indian system of calendar, let us say 16th of Magh!
The volunteer who is filling the form can, of course, take down the information
verbatim. That would be easy to classify and enumerate, even resolve. He may have
his own ideas of exactitude, but not enough sense or training to extract it. Not liking
uncertain statements, he might resolve four or five years into a certain number and
calculate the year back as 1992.
Of course, there are methods to extract the definite year, month and date of the
incident even when the reporting relative is confused and does not have any written
evidence to offer. Someone in the village might have gotten married around that
time. Perhaps, someone in the neighbor’s family had had a baby, or a cousin of the
disappeared person had passed the school examination or had come home on a
short vacation from the army. Perhaps the Congress party had formed the state
government earlier in that summer, or there was an election to the village council of
elders a few months later.
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Methodology 151
By determining a few such definite occurrences in the recollection of the reporting
member, it would be possible to work one’s count closer to the actual time.
However, the process involves tiresome investigative work, hours of interviews,
checking and cross-checking of facts and scanning of old newspapers. The volunteer
might not have the patience, time or training for the task and so he might,
through his own guesswork, mention a wrong date in the form that carries the thumb
impression of the illiterate complainant.
The reporter says the incident happened on 16th of Magh. Our volunteer should
normally know that the Indian month of Magh belongs to the winter season, but
might not be able to work out the corresponding month of the Gregorian calendar.
In stead of recording exactly what he has heard, he may write down his conjecture
of the analogous month, which can be both January and February, and further vitiate
the possibility of correction by swiftly guessing a date.2
We have taken care to ensure accuracy of information and to correct errors that
could creep into the information system because of the “uncertainties and ambiguities”
of the interview-process in rural Punjab. It is, however, possible that our
database may still contain errors, hopefully not too many and only of trivial implications.
A Case for Exclusion
Let us consider one more example. A complainant, say XY Singh, is a well-to-do
farmer and can also read and write. On 22 August 1991, his son is abducted from
the local bus stand by unknown men. A shopkeeper who sees the kidnapping but
cannot identify the kidnappers, or does not want to reveal their names out of fear.
He is also afraid to become a formal witness.
Five days later, a newspaper reports the death of his abducted son in a supposed
armed combat between some officers of a police station in the district and a group
of unidentified militants. The report says that one militant, later identified as XY
Singh’s son, is killed while others escaped.
XY Singh knows the report is false. He does not actually know which officers
abducted his son. But after reading the news report, he is convinced that the officers
who killed him in the supposed combat are the ones responsible.
With the intention of filing a petition before the high court, XY Singh consults
a local lawyer who tells him that unless there is a witness to identify the police
officers as abductors, the court would not entertain his allegation. So, under
the influence of this expert advice, XY Singh decides to introduce a false witness,
a relative, to claim that he was also at the bus stand when such and such
2 The Indian calendars divide a year of 360 days into 12 lunar months of 28 or 29 days, adjusting the
discrepancy with a complicated system of intercalating a leap month. The names of the months are:
Caitra or Chait (March-April), Vaishakha or Baisakh (April-May), Jyaistha or Jeth (May-June), Asadha
or Ashad (June-July), Shravana or Savan (July-August), Bhadrapada or Bhadon (August-September),
Ashvina or Asvan (September-October), Karttika or Kattik (October-November), Margashirsa or Makar
(November-December), Pausa or Paus (December-January), Magha (January-February), and
Phalguna or Phagon (February-March). Confusion and error, without a correct comparison, is
inevitable because the Indian months overlap two Gregorian months.
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officers carried out the kidnapping. Or, he decides to change the scene of the
abduction to claim that the officers have picked up his son from his own house.
After receiving notice from the high court, the officers swear in an affidavit
disclaiming responsibility. The affidavit also contains some information
suggesting that they were at some other place when the abduction allegedly
occurred, and the court dismisses the petition. But the father feels compelled to
repeat the invented evidence before our volunteers, lest his incident-report should
appear inconsistent with the record of his statement before the high court. If the
person interviewing him is patient and persistent, and would not hesitate to revert
to him a few times after cross-checking the facts locally, he would know the
truth. If then XY Singh insists on “consistency”, the incident report is excluded
from the survey.
Integrity in Fact-Finding
It is through such a difficult process that our team of primarily three volunteers has
managed to collect 1,703 incident report forms in five years of its investigative
work starting from October 1997 to October 2002. An account of our experiences
in the field and the difficulties encountered by us in completing this task would
make an interesting saga, also useful to persons and organizations involved in similar
work. That story will have to wait to be told another day, but some reflections
pertinent to the issues of integrity, credibility and fairness of fact-finding exercises
would be in order.
The fact-finding enterprise of the CCDP stemmed from the December 1996
reference to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) made by the Supreme
Court after the CBI’s report substantiated 2,098 illegal police cremations
carried out by the Punjab police in the three crematoria of Amritsar district and after
the Supreme Court concluded that “flagrant violation of human rights” on a massive
scale had taken place. This was a conclusion already reached by the individuals
and organizations that joined the CCDP, after years of human rights work in
Punjab. The terms of reference for the fact-finding enterprise defined themselves
by the necessity of capturing information on illegal arrests and detentions, custodial
torture, illegal confiscation and destruction of property, arbitrary executions, enforced
disappearances and illegal disposal of bodies carried out by the security
forces in Punjab in a standardized and verifiable form helpful to the objectives of
justice and determination of reparation and compensation. We assumed that these
actions of the security forces in Punjab were wicked and violative of India’s domestic
constitutional guarantees as well as its international human rights obligations.
These assumptions constituted the “subjective perceptive set” or the normative propositions
guiding our field research. In order to apply these clearly defined normative
standards to the endeavor of fact-finding, we reduced them into a set of neutrally
stated questions of particulars to be elicited objectively, through the design of the
incident report form, without interference from political passions and subjective
notions. Whereas our fact-finding enterprise has, thus, been circumscribed by the
“given” framework, we chose to apply a rigorous approach to obtain “non-given”
facts in question, to let the specifics of each case, captured in a standardized format,
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Methodology 153
decide whether the “wicked violations” of fundamental human rights did or did not
occur. By getting every complaint on an incident report form, we have ensured that
the full results of our fact-finding remain open to disclosure, scrutiny and further
investigations. This also means that the allegations contained in the reports are written
down, specific in facts and can be called to scrutiny for disproof if the state agencies
choose to provide contrary evidence. Our method of capturing data guarantees that
the officials suspected of crimes against humanity can always obtain the specifics
of allegations to which they must respond, if they wish to, and cross-examine the
evidence and rebut them, if they can.
Unfortunately, as our experiment with the people’s commission revealed, the
state of Punjab and the agencies of the Union government involved in the counterinsurgency
operations implacably turned their back on our appeals to associate with
a more open and public discovery of facts. Their adamant refusal to cooperate in
any manner foreclosed our chances of testing the victim testimony against the contrary
evidence possibly possessed by the state agencies. This not only compelled us
to limit our research to the testimony of the victim community, but also forced us to
follow rigorous standards in building our empirical and normative data base. While
designing the incident-report form, we had chosen to obtain signatures of our informants
and to altogether exclude anonymous complaints. All the case summaries in
the following chapter disclose the full identifies of our informants from the conviction
that the Supreme Court and the NHRC, having retained “seisin” over the matter,
would shield them against possible vengeful reactions. Naturally, we have taken
care not to disclose the names of witnesses, outside the immediate family responsible
for the complaint, to protect them from retribution by the state agencies.
We paid special attention in the selection of our field researchers to be sure that
they were impartial, free of commitment to a specific outcome, “responsible to
their consciences alone” and qualified to distinguish objective facts from slanted
information, as C. Wildred Jenks of the International Labor Organization insisted.3
The emphasis on impartiality and independence of researchers actually contributed
to the thinning of the committee’s ranks. But we chose to loose the bodily strength
of the committee rather than compromise with the sanctity of data and the inflexibility
in the standards of research.
Interim Report
By the end of July 1999, the CCDP had already compiled 849 cases, involving
involuntary disappearances and arbitrary executions. The compilation served as the
basis for an in-depth analysis of 838 incident reports, which was included in the
committee’s interim report released in August 1999. The survey had the following
highlights:
3 C. W. Jenks, “The International Protection of Trade Union Rights”, in The International Protection of
Human Rights, 210, 239, [Ed. Luard, 1967]
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Educational Profile
Year Number of Cases
Primary 96
Middle 136
High School 280
Higher Secondary 68
Arts graduates 57
Science graduates 4
Law graduates 3
Medical graduate 1
Diploma in Engineering 4
Post-graduates 7
Illiterate 182
Total 838
Distribution by Age
Age Number of Cases
15-20 142
21-25 256
26-30 157
31-35 86
36-40 51
41-45 34
46-50 21
51-55 17
56-60 15
61-65 4
66-70 7
71-75 3
76-80 4
Unknown 38
Total 838
Distribution by Year
Year Number of Cases
1984 22
1985 2
1986 7
1987 28
1988 33
1989 47
1990 57
1991 181
1992 257
1993 135
1994 21
1995 9
1996 0
1997 0
Unknown 39
Total 838
Occupational Profile
Occupation Number of Cases
Farmers 398
Wage earners 81
Students 69
Technical self-entrepreneurs 47
Policemen & officers 37
of security forces
Drivers 35
Businessmen 31
Religious workers 22
Professionals 22
Electricity workers 16
Revenue & administration 16
Agro-enterprises 17
Miscellaneous 12
Bank & accounting 4
Unemployed 28
Unknown 17
Total 838
Distribution by District
District Number of Cases
Amritsar 287
Bhatinda 47
Faridkot 2
Fatehgarh Sahib 19
Ferozepur 11
Gurdaspur 119
Hoshiarpur 9
Jalandhar 9
Kapurthala 11
Ludhiana 69
Mansa 7
Moga 11
Nawan Shahr 4
Patiala 23
Ropar 79
Sangrur 126
Other 5
Total 883
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Methodology 155

Marital Status
Out of 838 victims, 403 were married and 435 unmarried.
Deaths Under Trauma
In 222 out of 838 incidents, one or more members of the families are reported to
have died under trauma.
Psychological Impact
The psychological impact of these incidents, leading to psychopathological consequences,
is widespread. This presumption follows from the fact that 500 out of 838
cases report morbid psychological effects, including insanity, on one or more members
of their families.
Destruction of Property
In 58 out of 222 cases, involving deaths of close relatives under trauma, the security
forces also illegally destroyed, damaged and confiscated family properties. In all,
the security forces, mainly the Punjab police, destroyed, damaged and confiscated
family properties in 224 cases.
Abductions from Homes
More than 241 persons, who subsequently disappeared, were abducted from their houses.
Eyewitnesses
There are eyewitnesses to 530 cases of police abductions.
Seen in Police Custody
In 290 cases, persons who eventually disappeared or were said to have been killed
in armed combats, had been seen by their relatives in police custody subsequent to
their abductions, most often in lock-ups of police stations and interrogation centers.
Judicial Recourse
Relatives of 149 victims of disappearances approached the courts, mainly the High
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Court of Punjab and Haryana, with petitions for writs of habeas corpus. Most petitions
were dismissed following routine denials by officials. Some petitions are still
pending although petitioners themselves remain ignorant about the proceedings.
The majority of victim families, 689 to be exact, did not approach the courts either
because of fear of the police or indigence.
Newspaper Reports
Four-hundred-sixty-seven of these incidents were reported in the local newspapers,
mainly on the basis of police briefings and handouts claiming deaths either as the result
of supposed armed skirmishes, called “encounters”, or as escapes from police custody.
Disclosure of more Disappearances
In 127 cases, relatives claimed to possess sensitive information on other incidents
of illegal abductions and custodial murders. They disclosed 390 additional cases of
illegal abductions leading to disappearances and custodial murders explained as
encounters or escape from custody.
Multiple Family Incidents
In 193 cases, more than one member of the family was abducted, disappeared and
killed.
Return of Dead Bodies
Only in 74 cases, the police returned the bodies to the families for cremations.
Custodial Torture
Seven-hundred-fifty-nine incidents report brutal custodial torture, including rape,
not only of the victims who eventually disappeared or got killed, but also of their
close relatives.
The analysis and the highlights of all the 1,703 incident reports, which the CCDP
has compiled so far, would be presented in the second volume of this final report.
First Volume of Final Report
In this first volume of the final report, we are presenting the summaries of 513 cases
of police abductions leading to illegal cremations in Amritsar district that figure in
the three lists of cremations offered by the CBI along with its December 1996
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Methodology 157
report to the Supreme Court of India. We have personally investigated these 513
cases which offer information on 672 people from the CBI lists. Out of the 672
cases, 444 are from the list of 582 identified cremations, 79 are from the list of 278
partially identified cremations and 149 are from the list of 1,238 unidentified cremations.
Besides matching names, fathers’ names and places of residence, where
available, we correlated the records in the CBI lists with our incident report forms
by matching police stations and by comparing dates of cremation with newspaper
reports based on police handouts giving the date of death, or our informants’ knowledge
about the death or cremation. The analytical notes, before the presentation of
summaries, highlight their salient points and underscore the legal anomalies and
factual discrepancies in the CBI’s investigations, the police operations, the use of
TADA, custodial torture, expropriation and destruction of property belonging to
victim families, the role of the military and paramilitary forces, functioning of the
lower judiciary and the role of doctors, as evinced by 513 case summaries.
The CCDP’s database contains a total of 889 incident reports from Amritsar
district alone. The remaining 376 incident-reports from Amritsar district, along with
814 from other districts in Punjab, will be presented in the second volume of the
final report. The second volume will also contain a comprehensive analysis of the
CCDP’s entire database and its highlights.
According to our estimates, only 10 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 90 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
interested in preserving history. The bulk of victim-testimonies, which we have
collected, have come from 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 human rights groups and others involved in recording contemporary
history to take up.
We will close this note with a quote from George Mangakis, a professor of
Penal Law at the University of Athens in 1969 when 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.”4
4 W. L. Webb & Rose Bell, Eds., An Embarrassment of Tyrannies: 25 years of Index on Censorship,
George Braziller Publisher, New York, 1998, p. 31
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