Human rights activists condemn Gill's demand for amnesty

Human rights activists have taken strong exception to former Punjab police chief K P S Gill's demand for legal immunity for police officers.

The human rights campaigners have alleged that Punjab police officers were involved in extra-judicial killings and disappearance of thousands of young men during the anti-terrorist operations in the state.

Their representative organisation -- the Committee for Information and Initiative on P -- on Wednesday issued a rejoinder to Gill's letters to the media following former Taran Taran senior superintendent of police Ajit Singh Sandhu's suicide last fortnight.

The CBI, the committee said, had established Sandhu's involvement in the illegal cremation of more than 800 bodies by declaring them as ''unidentified.''

On the Supreme Court's direction, the CBI team had authenticated the cremation of bodies as ''unidentified'' at 'the Durgiana temple and the Patti cremation grounds,' committee representatives Ram Naryan Kumar and Ashok Agrawal said.

The CBI report submitted to the apex court noted that as many as 585 bodies had been identified completely, 274 identified partially while 1,238 of them had not been identified at all.

Kumar said Sandhu had been sent to jail on the high court's orders. The judges held him responsible for illegally abducting, torturing and eliminating people like human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra and Kuljit Singh Dhat, a relative of Bhagat Singh, one of the freedom struggle's greatest heroes.

Kumar, who worked for several years to document human rights violations in Punjab, said Khalra ''disappeared'' after he produced documentary evidence to show that in the years between 1992 and 1994 the police had cremated thousands of bodies in Amritsar and Taran Taran when Sandhu was superintendent.

The cremation of ''unidentified'' bodies was referred by the Supreme Court to the National Human Rights Commission for determination of the compensation to the victims's families, Kumar said, adding that ''Mr Sandhu might have driven to the extreme step of committing suicide fearing that these inquests would generate more evidence against him.''

Referring to Gill's ''emotional outburst'' after Sandhu's suicide, the committee said, ''The way Mr Gill indulges in a funeral oration, castigates human rights activists and inveighs the nation for being ungrateful towards police officers who ''fought'' terrorism ... is nothing new but the stock-in-trade of the Nazis and others who tried to save their countries from subversives by genocidal methods.''

In support of his contention, Kumar quoted several historical events like the pogrom of the Jews, Iranian killings of Bahais, Idi Amin's killings in Uganda, genocide of Hindus in Bangladesh when killings were perpetrated by branding them ''enemies of the State'' just to sniff out political dissent or for political expediency.

K P S Gill will appear on the Rediff Chat on June 11 at 2000 hours IST (0930 hours EDT) to discuss this controversy. Be there!