21 August 2001
South China Morning Post
By Maseeh Rahman
A suggestion by India’s hardline Home Minister, Lal Krishna Advani, that the Government might soon grant a general amnesty to army and police personnel accused of crimes in Kashmir and other troubled provinces has provoked a backlash from human rights organisations.
“The Government has already hobbled the prosecution of a large number of cases pending before courts in Kashmir, Punjab and the northeast,” Ravi Nair, of the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre in New Delhi, said yesterday.
“Does Mr Advani now want to completely undermine the rule of law?”
Mr Advani dropped his bombshell while addressing a meeting on Sunday in a town in Punjab, a north Indian state bordering Pakistan where in the 1980s police and paramilitary forces crushed an armed insurgency by Sikhs demanding independence.
About 700 Punjab policemen were later charged in cases relating to torture, extortion, extra-judicial killings and the disappearance of hundreds of Sikhs.
The cases are still being heard in Punjab courts. Mr Advani’s offer to “provide relief to personnel of the forces facing trial in various courts for their fight against terrorism” was made at a function organised by a newspaper group to honour those who died during the decade-long violence in Punjab.
Mr Advani’s statement has been interpreted as an indication that the Government has caved in to pressure from security forces not to prosecute officers and men charged with human rights violations.
Several suspended or retired police officers organised meetings across Punjab on August 15, India’s Independence Day.
At the gatherings, they declared that if they were not protected from prosecution they would demonstrate outside the Presidential Palace in New Delhi, just across the street from Mr Advani’s office.
“The Punjab police have been demanding this kind of let-off since 1996,” Mr Nair said. “The Home Ministry now realises that if it doesn’t give a general amnesty, the lower-level policemen will eventually implicate officials at the very top in all the ghastly crimes.”
The hawkish Mr Advani’s backtracking on New Delhi’s earlier commitment to bring to justice security personnel charged with human rights violations also is viewed as evidence of the Government’s resolve to crush insurgencies in two areas – Muslim-dominated Kashmir and in the ethnic tribal states such as Assam, Nagaland and Manipur in the northeast bordering Myanmar.
“During just three months beginning this May, there have been more than 100 instances of torture, summary execution and indiscriminate shootings at public places by security forces in the northeast,” said Roy Laifungbam, of the Centre for Organising Research and Education, a Manipur-based rights group.
Mr Nair said that after showing signs of improvement, the human rights situation in Kashmir had been reversed in mid-1999 when the army and paramilitary forces went on the offensive after the invasion by Pakistan forces of Indian-held territory in Kargil.
“There has been little progress even in cases filed earlier in Kashmir courts,” Mr Nair said.
He said that after a case was filed against an army major in relation to the killing of prominent civil rights lawyer Jalil Andrabi, the authorities failed to reveal the officer’s whereabouts.
The body of Andrabi, who had documented instances of custodial killings, arbitrary detentions and disappearances in Kashmir, was found in a river in March 1996, just before he was to appear before the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva.