Akalis should point at themselves

Akalis should point at themselves
Siddharth Suresh

Last week, during an election rally in Lehirka village, Akali Dal Chief Prakash Singh Badal embarrassed the Congress as much as he could by harping on the legacy of repression under the Congress rule in the state. He pointed out that the atrocities committed by the Congress against the Sikhs, in the recent years, outdid the excesses of the Moghul and the British eras.

The rhetoric of rights from the Akali establishment in Punjab, as an electionstrategy, does not make sense when we consider its own imperviousness to issues of justice to the victims of state power.

After the police abduction of Jaswant Singh Khalra from his Amritsar home in September 1995, the Supreme Court had intervened and the National Human Rights Commission was mandated to investigate enforced disappearances leading to secret cremations. The Commission is still involved with the issue and a great deal of public pressure is being mounted to get it to deal with the case in earnest.

Punjab's Akali government has, however, consistently stonewalled all attempts at transparency, determination of facts and justice to victims. Its latest position in the matter, as recorded in the Commission's order of August 18, 2000, is that "it has neither conducted any detailed examination in these cases on merits nor does it admit its liability..."

International legal instruments define enforced disappearance as an ongoing crime, often committed by a network of collaborators who are generally pursuing state policy. It is an ongoing crime, not just towards the victims but also their families, who spend the rest of their lives caught in its tragic grip.

Their distress and suffering are compounded by the fact that invariably the person who has disappeared was the mainstay of their families, in terms of livelihood. This deprivation is further exacerbated by the costs of undertaking a search for justice. In psychological terms, the uncertainty of not knowing the fate of their loved ones makes their lives endlessly traumatic. Many commit suicide or die as a result.

Take the case of Ajaib Singh, on July 7, 1997. Ajaib Singh of Amritsar killedhimself inside the Golden Temple. His eldest son, Kulwinder Singh, had been arrested and had disappeared in December 1991. Ajaib Singh's suicide note said it all: "Self-annihilation is my only way out of a tyranny that leaves no scope for justice..." This is just one story among many.

A survey of 838 enforced disappearances, conducted by the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab, shows that 222 relatives of the victims either committed suicide or died as a result of insufferable grief. A larger number of surviving relatives report morbid psychological effects, including clinical insanity. Healing can only set in when the state becomes willing to undergo a retroactive process through acknowledgement, justice and reparation. That is the import of international human rights instruments,including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which has the force of customary law in India by its accession in July 1979.

The Supreme Court upheld this position in PUCL vs Union of India 1997 and earlier in D.K. Basu vs State of West Bengal 1996. The idea that sovereign authority becomes illegitimate when it oversteps certain permissible limits in the course of policing its people is not new to us. We are familiar with Vidura's counsel in Mahabharata: "Improper conduct under the confidence that `I have now gained kingdom' would not pay...An unjust king gets destroyed by people the same way as clouds get scattered by strong wind" (Udyoga Parvam).

The Akalis of Punjab would benefit by synthesising this old Indian wisdom with current developments in the international human rights regime.