This summer, Ensaaf interviewed over 1,000 individuals – including hundreds of survivors – to capture stories of disappearances, unlawful killings, and torture in Amritsar during the Punjab counterinsurgency.
This ambitious achievement, which represents the largest deployment of human rights investigators in Punjab in over a decade, was only realized due to the financial support we received from supporters like you. As a small token of our thanks, we created a short video tribute to show our immense gratitude for the generosity and trust given to us by our donors.
This video includes testimony about how the Punjab police detained and beat an unarmed Sikh youth, pulled his hair and chased him as he begged for his life, and then shot him at point blank range on July 8, 1990 in Mohali, Punjab. Eyewitnesses describe how the police staged the body, placed a gun in the victim’s hand, acknowledged the innocence of the boy to survivors and Member of Parliament Bimal Kaur Khalsa, but then gave a false statement to the press that the victim was a criminal. The footage was shot in 1990 by Baljit Kaur of the Movement Against State Repression.
In an SBS Dateline program on Punjab, Geoff Parish challenges former police chief KPS Gill about the secret cremations documented to have occurred when he was police chief of Punjab. The secret cremations have been confirmed in the Punjab mass cremations case proceeding before India’s National Human Rights Commission. (Apr. 2002, Uploaded with permission from SBS.)
Tarlochan Singh describes his son Kulwinder Singh’s abduction by the Punjab police, and his 18-year continuing legal struggle for justice for Kulwinder Singh’s extrajudicial execution. (Oct. 2007)
Rajvinder S. Bains, a human rights attorney in the Punjab & Haryana High Court for over 20 years, discusses his experiences with the High Court in cases filed on behalf of victims of disappearances or extrajudicial executions. (Oct. 2007)
Navkiran Kaur Khalra, daughter of murdered human rights defender Jaswant Singh Khalra, recounts her family’s struggle for justice and her father’s discovery of thousands of killings and secret cremations by the Punjab police to hide evidence of wrongdoing. (Oct. 2007)
In his last speech made to a Canadian audience, Jaswant Singh Khalra discusses his investigations into the thousands of illegal killings and secret cremations by the Punjab police and his readiness to die to expose the truth about these crimes. Jaswant Singh Khalra begins his speech with a moving fable about the struggle of truth and light against expanding darkness. He recounts how he traced the fate of many disappeared Sikhs to Amritsar’s municipal cremation grounds. Through government records obtained from these municipalities, Khalra exposed a detailed history of systematic human rights violations in which security forces abducted, murdered, and secretly cremated an estimated 6,017 Sikhs in Amritsar district alone–then one of 13 districts in Punjab–from 1984 to 1995. (Apr. 1995)
Excerpted from Ram Narayan Kumar’s video Disappearances in Punjab, the Chief Medical Officer of a hospital in Amritsar district describes how the post mortem process for victims of extrajudicial executions or custodial deaths was reduced to five minutes. He further discusses how the police brought an individual for a post mortem who was alive, took him away again, and brought the individual back dead. (Apr. 2002, Uploaded with permission from SBS.)
An SBS Dateline program on Punjab recounts how the Punjab police abducted human rights defender Jaswant Singh Khalra for his discovery of thousands of illegal killings and secret cremations by the Punjab police. (Apr. 2002, Uploaded with permission from SBS.)