Finding Punjab's lost sons: How PDAP is trying to bring closure to families after three decades

Justice can take many forms. 

It could be ensuring that the perpetrators are punished. 

It could be receiving financial compensation. 

It could be an apology or policy changes that ensure that the crime is never repeated. 

But how do you begin to define justice for victims whose only hope and plea, even after two decades, is for their stories to be heard — for their complaints to be officially acknowledged and registered? According to a hard-hitting documentary by the Punjab Documentation and Advocacy Project (PDAP), that’s what families in Punjab have experienced, for two decades, after people were believed to have been extra-judicially executed and secretly cremated.

(Watch the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rONhLvZXqII)

Visit: https://punjabdisappeared.org/

Satnam Singh Bains, a barrister and his wife Jaswant Kaur, a human right activist, came from England to India about ten years ago and with other activists and lawyers in Punjab formed the Punjab Documentation and Advocacy Project (PDAP). Their main mission was to investigate and document the killings. Jaswant has now released a documentary that reveals testimonies of some of the victims’ families. “While the documentary is about Punjab, we’ve also covered stories about Chhattisgarh, Kashmir and Manipur. We’re trying to say that while this has happened in Punjab, it continues to happen in other states as well. The faces change, but the stories are the same,” says Satnam. 

Power couple: Satnam Singh Bains and Jaswant Kaur have been relentlessly investigating these deaths since 2008

Back in time

From 1984 to 1995, just after the Khalistan movement, a separatist Sikh rebellion that witnessed thousands of human rights violations was brought to an end, militancy and counterinsurgency resulted in thousands of people being killed and executed. No court. No witness.

(The Khalistan Movement was a movement that sought to create a separate, independent state for the Sikhs. It reached its zenith during the 1970s and 1980s, including the assassination of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. However, by the 1990s, the movement died down after heavy crackdown by the police)

In 1995, Jaswant Singh Khalra, a human rights activist and bank manager uncovered secret cremations in three crematoriums in Amritsar. From crematoria records he discovered that when the victims’ dead body was brought in from cremation, it was registered as ‘lawaris’ (unclaimed) or ‘unpechathi’ (unidentified). While the truth was that up until the mid-90s, everyone, especially in rural areas knew the identity of these victims who had been abducted from their homes by the police and security services, tortured and then killed. The Amritsar cremation list revealed two to three such bodies were brought in every day and Khalra sought to expose the truth. Khalra estimated that there had been 25,000 killings, but before he could go on to prove any of that, he himself was tragically killed. He was then listed as 'disappeared' by the Punjab Police.
 

Uncovering a travesty

Until Satnam and Jaswant came around in 2008. They found evidence of at least 8,257 extrajudicial killings and secret cremations — of which the identities of 2,609 people were uncovered. “No one died unidentified. It’s a small community and everyone knows each other. Everyone knew this was going on. It was almost like a consensus of keeping silent on the issue in Punjab for a decade, largely due to the fact that everyone was party to it on some level." 

Unheard stories: An old man in tears as he holds up a picture of his 'lost' son

The identities changed, but the stories of how they died remained frighteningly similar, "Every time, the security forces would say this person has been encountered here, every day it was the same story, it was just the names that were changed. And if you’ve been printing that for a long time, you just become complacent to the fact that this has been going on, all the way to the doctors and the post-mortems,” says Jaswant. She adds, “There was the real post-mortem that would be conducted. But within an hour of all the details being taken, that body was cremated unclaimed or unidentified in a crematorium.”

PDAP concentrated mainly on the border districts, 14 out of the 22 districts. As far as who the victims were, while they were predominantly young Sikh men, there were also cases registered against journalists, lawyers, or teenagers. “Every time an encounter happens, eventually you find victims everywhere, across religion, sex, economic backgrounds or ethnicities. It stops being just about the Sikhs,” says Satnam. 

Recalling the absolutely callous nature of some of the cremation records, “If there are six bodies for example, the reports simply state 18 to19-year-old or 19 to 20-year-old died of a heart attack, just random ages and causes. There was no proper post mortem. You can’t say unclaimed and unidentified and then know how they died. How many 20- year-olds have heart attacks? The cover-up became so blatant that it wasn’t even needed anymore. It was just shocking,” says Satnam.

Justice delayed?
Like most other things with the Indian legal system, pendancy is a pain, Satnam says, “The CBI investigated 40 cases, which are ongoing in the CBI courts in Mohali. If someone has committed a crime, it’s for the courts to determine if someone is guilty, according to their rule. If the police become judge, jury and executioner, how do you know that the person they claim was a militant was in fact so? In all of the CBI cases, the CBI found that that the victims had no history and had been falsely labelled as militants. This was the tip of the iceberg.”

How much longer?: The CBI investigated 40 cases, which are still pending in the CBI courts in Mohali

Jaswant recalls one of her interactions with the mother of a victim named Balwinder Singh. Her son was picked up in a case of mistaken identity. The police admitted to her that they killed him because they had mistaken him for a militant having the same name and added that “what’s done was done”. The name that he was given 18 years ago led to his death 18 years later.

You have all these statements on record, you have witnesses and a mass public awareness of the illegal killings, why then is it so difficult to take action, you may wonder. “For a number of reasons,” says Satnam. “It’s been happening for over a decade and everyone’s become complacent. It’s not in anyone’s interest to take action. It’s not in any political party’s interest, it’s not in the interest of the police, it’s in nobody’s interest apart from the families to seek justice. Families are not in a financial position to pursue a case. If they are, there are huge delays.”

Celluloid hope
The PDAP was mainly formed to raise awareness on the issue and clear all the misinformation about what’s happened in Punjab. For a very long time, the narrative of what happened in Punjab belonged to the perpetrators. The documentary is only one part of the larger issue. "For me, the hardest part was to decide whose story to include in the documentary. It was 20 hours of people saying what happened to them. To go through all of that and decipher who would be on the documentary was the most difficult,” she says. The PDAP found that even politicians, whoever came to power, used it as a political tool. “So, we wanted to raise awareness about what happened, and also say that it continues to happen in other states,” says Satnam, “It’s a policy almost on how to deal with these types of conflicts across India. The 8,257 are the most serious criminal crimes — mass state crimes, where it is the duty of the state to investigate these killings. The families deserve justice. They deserve to be heard. It’s as simple as that.”

Justice can be different for different families, but to not even be acknowledged is cruel — as you will hear many families admit while breaking down on camera. “For a lot of these families of victims, their pleas are not even acknowledged, there’s no FIR pending, there’s no habeas corpus. One day you have a son, and the next day you don’t. For a lot of their families, unfortunately, they still cling on to that little bit of hope. Because when you don’t see a dead body, when there’s no report, everyone’s in denial, It’s killing them twice. The hope remains. There’s no closure. There was a mother who told me that 25 years later, sometimes, she sees a glimpse of her son in the crowd. That feeling will never go,” says Jaswant.
 

Trial by determination

The PDAP, along with the Human Rights Law Network organised an Independent People’s Tribunal in Amritsar in April 2017. “We had been documenting these cases for a while and what we often heard from the families was that no one has ever listened to them. Some said that we were the first people to knock on their door to even ask. And we’ve come 20 years later. The Independent People’s Tribunal was for all those whom the courts weren’t listening to,” he adds.

Giving them a voice: The PDAP and the Human Rights Law Network organised an Independent People's Tribunal where families of victims came together and shared their experiences

The panel had retired Supreme court judges, Retired Supreme Court Judge, Justice Ganguly, Justice Suresh from the Bombay High Court, Kavita Srivastava from the People’s Union of Civil Liberties, Colin Gonsalves a senior supreme court advocate and human rights lawyer and activists across India, including Babloo Loingbotum from Manipur, Parveena Ahanger from Kashmir and Soni Suri from Chhattisgarh. There were about 400 to 500 people. Jaswant says, “We didn’t even have enough chairs for them to be seated. Not everyone’s going to read human rights reports, we needed something that’s easily digestible so that people can understand what happened in Punjab." 

But apart from seeking justice, why is it so important for these cases to be brought to the limelight after all these years? Jaswant says, “One problem that the victims face is that there’s no acknowledgment of the death, there is no death certificate. If there’s no certificate, there’s no inheritance. The wife gets no right to the land or a pension, the child gets no subsidies for education. When people ask us why it is so important now, we say, it continues to be important because there are young boys and girls who have had to go through the whole system of no one ever acknowledging the death of their fathers and then seeing the mothers struggle. These issues continue to plague the families. It’s hugely important that this is exposed, that there is justice and there is some compensation and of course, non-repetition. It shouldn’t happen anywhere again. Anyone can be the 1980s Sikh tomorrow.”

And therein lies the danger.