Twenty Years of Impunity
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i-vi 1/25/07 9:11 PM Page i TWENTY YEARS OF IMPUNITY The November 1984 Pogroms of Sikhs in India JASKARAN KAUR A Report by Ensaaf 2nd Edition October 2006 i i-vi 1/25/07 9:11 PM Page ii 2nd Edition published in October 2006 by Ensaaf http://www.ensaaf.org [email protected] PO Box 25731 Portland, OR 97298-0731 Copyright © 2006 by Jaskaran Kaur All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by an electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. ISBN-13: 978-0-97870-730-9 ISBN-10: 0-9787073-0-3 (First edition published by Nectar Publishing as ISBN 0-9548412-0-4) ii i-vi 1/25/07 9:11 PM Page iii Ensaaf Ensaaf, which means “justice” in many South Asian languages, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to ending impunity in India for mass state crimes, and to survivors’ rights to truth, justice and reparations. Impunity means the impossibility of holding perpetrators accountable because they are shielded by law or protected by political institutions and powers. Ensaaf’s cutting edge advocacy is implemented though four coordinated programs: Community Organizing to mobilize survivors to become active participants for change; Documentation & Education to expose violations and counter official denials; Legal Advocacy to remove perpetrators from power through legal accountability; and United Nations advocacy to build international consensus, support and pressure to end impunity for mass state crimes in India. Ensaaf also publishes a quarterly newsletter. Its website www.ensaaf.org provides detailed information on the organization and its programs, as well as a library of documents relating to human rights in Punjab and India. About the Author A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, Jaskaran Kaur is the co- founder and Co-Director of Ensaaf. She has authored seminal reports on human rights abuses in India, including Twenty Years of Impunity: The November 1984 Pogroms of Sikhs in India, and is a contributing author to Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab, which analyzes over 600 cases of extrajudicial execution and disappearance by Punjab’s security forces. Kaur is a 2006 recipient of an Echoing Green fellowship. Kaur currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Discrimination & National Security Initiative of the Pluralism Project at Harvard University. From 2003 to 2005, Kaur was the recipient of the Irving R. Kaufman Fellowship from Harvard Law School. In 2001, she went to Punjab on a Harvard Human Rights Summer Fellowship to study the role of the judiciary in handling habeas corpus petitions filed before the Punjab and Haryana High Court by families of the disappeared; her study was published in the Harvard Human Rights Journal. Kaur has interned for numerous public interest organizations, such as Legal Aid, US Committee for Refugees, Human Rights Watch, and Center for Constitutional Rights. Ensaaf www.ensaaf.org [email protected] iii i-vi 1/25/07 9:11 PM Page iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface to Second Edition viii Foreword by Barbara Crossette 1 Introduction 4 Chapter 1: Background: State Oppression in Punjab 9 Affidavit of Gurbachan Singh 24 Chapter 2: Patterns and Characteristics of Violence 27 Congress-Led Meetings and Distribution of Weapons 27 Identification and Tracking of Sikhs Killed 30 Slogans of Extermination 31 Rumors 32 Attacks on Sikh Dignity, Articles of Faith & Structures 33 Persistence of Death Squads 35 Sexual Violence 37 Refusal of Medical Care 39 Attacks on the Media 40 Further Questions 40 Affidavit of Rahul Kuldip Bedi 42 Chapter 3: Role of the Police 45 Police Structure 45 Police Inaction 46 Police Instigation of Violence Against Sikhs 47 Manipulation of Records and Investigations 51 Sufficient Force and Knowledge 57 Railway Protection Force 59 Fire Brigade 60 Further Questions 61 Chapter 4: Congress (I) Party and the Delhi Administration 62 Congress (I) Party Planning 62 Deployment of Army 66 Inadequate Relief Measures 70 Censorship of the Press 72 Further Questions 73 Affidavit of Narinder Singh 74 iv i-vi 1/25/07 9:11 PM Page v Chapter 5: Aftermath: Elections and Impunity 78 Post-Massacre Elections 78 Misra Commission of Inquiry: Establishment and 81 Operations Written Arguments of the Delhi Administration 84 Analysis of the Misra Commission Report 88 Subsequent Committees 93 Independence of Judges and Lawyers 97 Chapter 6: Genocide 102 Naming the Crime 102 Origins of “Genocide” 103 Requirements of Genocide 105 Definition of Intent 105 Inference of Intent 106 Plan 108 In Whole or In Part: A Quantitative Criterion? 109 Individual Responsibility 113 Superior Responsibility 115 Crimes Against Humanity 116 Persecution 118 Chapter 7: Knowledge, Justice, and Reparation 119 Political Careers of Key Perpetrators 119 Search for Justice 120 Article 32: Fundamental Freedoms 122 Reparation and Impunity Principles 123 Further Documentation 125 Community Organizing 127 Conclusion 128 Supplement: Stonewalling Justice: The Nanavati Report 129 and its Aftermath The Justice Nanavati Commission 130 Failings of the Nanavati Report 131 The Government’s Response 135 Rehabilitation 139 Conclusion: Quest for Justice 139 v i-vi 1/25/07 9:11 PM Page vi Appendices I: Map of India 141 II: Abbreviations 142 III: Delhi Development Authority: Letter and List of 143 Gurudwaras Repaired IV: Railway Protection Force: Annexure on 148 Unauthorized Stoppages V: Delhi Police Chart and Key Police Stations (1984) 150 VI: Reply by General Manager’s Office (Northern Railway) to 151 Interrogatory on Arrests VII: Congress (I) Leaders of the Massacre 152 vi i-vi 1/25/07 9:11 PM Page vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Echoing Green Citizens Justice Committee and the Human Rights and Democracy Forum for the provision of some of the survivor affidavits Creative Stride for cover design vii i-vi 1/25/07 9:11 PM Page viii PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION Two years have passed since the publication of the first edition of Ensaaf’s report on the November 1984 massacres, Twenty Years of Impunity. During that time, the Justice Nanavati Commission of Inquiry submitted its report to the government, the government submitted an Action Taken Report to Parliament, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh apologized, but refused to accept state responsibility, for the massacres. The second edition of Twenty Years adds a supplement that reflects on these developments, but does not engage in further evidentiary discussion. Twenty Years provides a thorough analysis of the evidence that was before both the Misra and Nanavati Commissions. That analysis clearly demonstrates that senior Congress (I) party officials and police sponsored, organized, and executed the November 1984 massacres of Sikhs. The second edition also corrects typographical errors in the first edition. viii 1-8 V5 1/25/07 9:12 PM Page 1 FOREWORD Any outsider who has lived in India acquires a rich store of indelible images. India dazzles. Its colors, its talented people, its vast stretches of rocky land punctuated by many thousand villages, its cacophonous street life recharge the senses daily and linger long in memory. But behind the nonstop theater of the streets, the music, the art and the mirrors, some monstrous darker images also take hold. For two decades, I have been haunted by one such disturbing scene: the mutilated body of a man sprawled across the open doorway of a railway carriage at Old Delhi station. He may have been trying to reach the steps to escape a mob rampaging through the train bent on massacre. His turban, the hallmark of all observant Sikh men, had been ripped from his head. Someone wielding a knife or machete had slashed his scalp to lop off his hair, which religious Sikhs never cut. In death, he had been cruelly and deliberately stripped of his identity as a Sikh, India’s warrior people and the farmers whose hard work and rich Punjabi soil fed the nation. It was November 2, 1984. This man, left bleeding at the gateway to one of Asia’s great cities, was only one of several thousand Sikhs slaughtered over several days that week in India. It was a vicious pogrom, and reports of it would have been hard to believe had I not witnessed its atrocities. While this was a calculated assault on a visible minority group it was also an attack on all the decent people of India and what their country stood for. If the hardworking Sikhs were not safe, what minority could ever be? The massacre was triggered by the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who had sent the Indian Army into the Sikhs’ holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in the Punjabi city of Amritsar, in June 1984, to roust militants. On the last day of October that year, she was gunned down in an act of revenge by her own Sikh bodyguards. I was in Beijing that day, after a trip with a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees team looking at the conditions of Vietnamese boat people who had landed in Hong Kong and southern China. I had skipped a tourist visit to the Great Wall so that I could transmit photographs to New York through the office of an international news agency in the Chinese capital. Coincidentally, I was still there in that office when bells began to ring on the old machines that in those days alerted reporters to urgent news bulletins. Gandhi had been shot, the bulletin from Delhi said. In hours, I was on my way to Karachi on a Pakistani flight to join a team of New York Times reporters heading to New Delhi.