The Committee has addressed the following letter to the US ambassador in India to express its dismay at the manner in which the substantial issues of democracy and human rights, in Punjab and also in kashmir, have been ignored during the US President's visit. Of course, the press here has totally ignored this position, and is busy in using the incident of massacre at Anantnag to mobilize the Sikh opinion against both Pakistan as also the Kashmiri militants. Well, this role of the press here reminds me of a point George Orwell had made in his preface to Animal Farm. Orwell said that voluntary censorship is more sinister than that which is imposed by the State. It is possible to fight against the imposed censorship. But it is not possible to do much against voluntary suppression of unpopular ideas and inconvenient facts. This role of the press creates the climate of impunity in which constitutional guarantees become no more than "parchment barriers", as James Madison once described them, totally meaningless for defending human rights from their abuse. Of course, the Sikh leaders themselves have maintained a defeaning silence on the substantial issues, and I have not seen a single statement even on this matter of the disappeared people.

Best wishes to all,
Ram Narayan Kumar

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The Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab
742 Sector 8-B, Chandigarh Tel. 0172 779681

His Excellency the Ambassador of the United States in India
The American Embassy,
Chanakya Puri
New Delhi
22 March 2000

The President of the United States is visiting South Asia for the first time after the end of the so-called Cold War. Presumably, the visit marks not only the successful inauguration of the New World Order in the region, but also the confidence that India, the former ally of the Soviet Union, would lead and sustain it.

The visit has occasioned a sustained but orchestrated discourse on the issues of democracy, terrorism, nuclear proliferation and human rights in the region, which is ominously tainted by the perspective of the Indian political Establishment.

Large sections of people in the peripheral parts of India, who radically impugn the legitimacy of the State, have not been the beneficiaries of freedom, democracy and human rights, which the Indian State claims to represent. However, their concerns for human rights and democracy have not found any echo in the articulation of American interests in the region. The omission suggests the success of the Indian political Establishment to obtain international immunity for its crimes against human rights and democracy in the region.

Those who have monitored the human rights situation in Punjab over the last two decades know that abuses have occurred on a massive scale. The government of India and its protagonists deny the accusations. At the same time, they refuse to permit the United Nation's human rights mechanisms and even non-government organizations, like Amnesty International, from visiting the State to investigate. The official claim is that India has a broad range of guarantees built within its constitutional system, and can do without foreign intervention. The experience of the Sikhs in Punjab diametrically contradicts this claim, as we shall highlight with three well-known examples.

On June 3, 1984, the Indian army, deployed on a war scale, stormed the Golden Temple of Amritsar, the Sikh Vatican, which had become the bastion of the Sikh agitation for political decentralization. Many responsible observers of the developments in Punjab have alleged that the army assault had been conceived not only to scathe the Sikh psyche, but also to destroy the popular character of their political demands. No attempt was made to restrict the flow of thousands of pilgrims, who had been converging there to commemorate an important day in their religious calendar. Eight battle tanks pounded the most sacred Sikh shrine inside the temple complex, the Akal Takht, until it was rubble. The Sikh Reference Library, which housed rare manuscripts of Sikh scriptures, burnt down. Eye-witnesses claim that 7 to 8 thousand innocent pilgrims were killed. The impact of this episode played in fanning the virulent unrest, which plagued the State for the next decade and a half, is acknowledged by all. But the government has not conducted a independent inquiry to resolve myriad questions that arise from the army operation.

Following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on 31 October 1984, the political party which then controlled the State apparatus, condoned by the security forces, orchestrated a massacre which claimed three thousand innocent Sikh lives over the next three days of the pogrom in Delhi alone. In fifteen years since the massacre occurred, there have been six Commissions of Inquiry to investigate the carnage. All of them have called for action against the police officials and others, including important politicians. However, as Amnesty International complains, none of the recommendations have been implemented, "nor have any of the accused policemen and politicians been brought to justice."

In early 1995, Jaswant Singh Khalra from Amritsar produced officials records to show that the security forces in his district had been secretly cremating thousands of dead bodies of those young Sikhs who had earlier been abducted for interrogation. Khalra himself disappeared when the matter was taken to the Supreme Court for a comprehensive investigation. Moved by Khalra's enforced disappearance, the Supreme Court directed the Central Bureau of Investigation to examine the allegations about the illegal cremations. The report of the inquiry, submitted to the court on 10 December 1996 substantiated the allegations. The Court mandated the National Human Rights Commission to comprehensively investigate and to "determine all the issues" that arise from the matter. The mandate was to discover the depth and magnitude of all violations divulged by the CBI's report and to restore justice through compensation and other reparative measures. But the forces of impunity have succeeded in pressurizing the Commission to limit the inquiry into few technical aspects of abuses, limited to only one district. Thousands of people vanished as though they had never been. Their relatives continue to live in the fog of horror and uncertainty.

Meanwhile, the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab, an umbrella organization of several human rights groups, set up a panel of three retired judges of the Indian High Courts to examine and give their independent findings on complaints of State atrocities. The panel held its first public hearing at Chandigarh, the capital city of Punjab, on August 8-10, 1998. Thousands of people gathered to place their complaints before the panel, which also requested the government officials to furnish the evidence to extenuate themselves. The panel's popular success generated hysterical reactions from nearly all the major political parties in India and the police officials, who concertedly demanded its ban. A petition filed before the Punjab and Haryana High Court asked for a judicial prohibition on the functioning of the panel. The High Court pronounced its order on December 20 1999 to impose fundamental restrictions on both the People's Panel and the human rights Committee that had created it. The High Court said that their working "may adversely affect the public order, discipline and the society". The Court also exhorted the retired judges of the High Courts, who had joined the panel, to dissociate from the activities "which undermine the authority of the State established by law."

The American Supreme Court ruled, in the infamous Skokie case, that the Constitution's First Amendment protected even the neo-Nazis's right to march through an area of Holocaust survivors in Illinois carrying swastikas. Here in the largest democracy of the world, we are not even allowed to hear complaints of heinous human rights crimes from the people whom the State has decreed to disappear in total obscurity. A State that deems the victims of human rights crimes to be too ignoble even to be heard should at least stop pretending that it respects their citizenship.

This is the nature of India's democracy, which receives wholesome praise from the United States with no reference to human rights abuses, either in Punjab or in other peripheral parts like Kashmir where they are ongoing. The problem in Kashmir has been articulated purely in terms of the separatist violence and the support it receives from across the border, as if that alone should explain the tenacity and the pervasiveness of the unrest, with no reference to either the will of the people or the past resolutions adopted by the United Nations to resolve the problem. India has pointedly rejected mediation by the international community although its accountability under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, by the dint of purposeful accession, is binding. The United States had recently led the bombing of Yugoslavia, ostensibly to prevent it from committing human rights abuses in Kosovo and later, for the same reason, compelled it to surrender the region as an international protectorate. India's own intervention against the Pakistani forces in 1971 leading to the creation of Bangladesh, which the US President has visited for the first time, is cited as a positive case of human rights intervention. However, the exigencies of the New World Order which now inspires the United States to endorse India's position of non-interference in its own human rights record have raised serious doubts that its human rights rhetoric might only be an instrument of strategic and economic interests.

We find this very unfortunate that the focus of the discussion on India has altogether moved away from the realities of internal injustices and violence directed against the teeming millions of its faceless people by its elite, largely Hindu, to focus on strategic and economic interests of the western countries in the region. The convergence of these interests with the Indian Leviathan's claims of sovereign prerogatives to brutalize its citizens, can only mean greater perversions of history, violent suppression and suffering to legitimate dissent. More than anything else, this portrayal of India as an island of rationality in the region is absolutely outrageous from the perspective of its own people, not only the restless minorities in the peripheral States but also the hapless majority in its heartland who continue to suffer squalor and deprivation without any hope of a better future.

The Committee hopes that Your Excellency would seriously reflect on these concerns, and also convey them to the President of the United States. We also hope that closer cooperation between the governments of the United States and India would not further diminish the possibilities of justice, true democracy and human rights for our people.