Press Release
June 29, 2004
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Twenty Years of Impunity:
The November 1984 Pogroms of Sikhs in India
“This is an age when countries as diverse as Mexico, Peru, Cambodia and Ethiopia, among others, are digging into violent eras of their histories to set records straight and name those in power who allowed human rights abuses to occur or, worse, ordered them. In two decades, there has been no similar movement for a day of reckoning in India.” — Barbara Crossette (San Francisco, CA, June 29, 2004) Ensaaf— a new U.S.-based organization launched to enforce human rights and fight impunity in India—releases its first report Twenty Years of Impunity: The November 1984 Pogroms of Sikhs in India. This in-depth 150-page report, available at http://www.ensaaf.org/docs/20years.php, analyzes thousands of pages of previously unavailable affidavits, government records and arguments submitted to the 1985 Misra Commission, established to examine the Sikh Massacres in Delhi, Kanpur, and Bokaro.
The report reveals the systematic and organized manner in which state institutions, such as the Delhi Police, and Congress (I) officials perpetrated mass murder in November 1984 and later justified the violence in inquiry proceedings. After a thorough discussion of administrative and judicial impunity, the report applies the international law of genocide and crimes against humanity to the pogroms, relating the massacres with international understandings of gross violations of human rights.
“This is an age when countries as diverse as Mexico, Peru, Cambodia and Ethiopia, among others, are digging into violent eras of their histories to set records straight and name those in power who allowed human rights abuses to occur or, worse, ordered them. In two decades, there has been no similar movement for a day of reckoning in India,” writes retired New York Times reporter, and eyewitness to the massacres, Barbara Crossette in her foreword to the report. Given the recent appointment of key perpetrators to ministerial positions in the Indian government, the report encourages survivors and witnesses to take private initiatives to help end impunity.
“Unless the voices of survivors are heard and recorded, history will eclipse their narratives and the silence of impunity will prevail. We hope survivors, including those in the diaspora, will lead us and other concerned individuals in organizing and initiating documentation projects and spearheading the campaign for justice,” said Jaskaran Kaur, executive director of Ensaaf. The report describes and summarizes key failings in the Indian state’s enforcement of the survivors’ rights to knowledge, justice and reparation.
Ensaaf (www.ensaaf.org) works with survivors to engage in advocacy and outreach, documents violations, and educates the public about human rights violations in India. Ensaaf’s programs include Community Advocacy, Legal Advocacy, United Nations, Education and Human Rights, and Media and Human Rights. Ensaaf, which means justice in many South Asian languages, acts to implement the international rights to knowledge, justice and reparation.
