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KPS Gill responds to criticism of false tagging of bodies
March 2, 2006 | Comments Off on KPS Gill responds to criticism of false tagging of bodies
Since Director-General of Punjab Police SS Virk revealed that police falsely declared dead cooperative militants during the counter-insurgency, he has faced criticism from human rights groups concerned about the identity of the falsely tagged bodies. In response, former Director-General of Punjab Police KPS Gill released a letter to Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on February 23.
According to the media, in the letter, Gill defends Virk by arguing that during the counter-insurgency, the judiciary was corrupt, faking deaths was normal procedure, and the Punjab police’s anti-terrorism campaign was necessary and relatively humane. This rhetoric is typical of what Gill uses to justify human rights violations, and ignores the extensive documentation of systematic violations of human rights, judicial partiality, and lasting effects on survivors.
“My intention was that the attempts to demoralise police officers and men who had fought terrorism at great personal risk and risk to their families, should be protected from malicious campaigns of vilification based on prejudiced evidence and being furthered by a section of the judiciary which had been too frightened to act during the days of terrorism, but had been totally subverted through bribery and ideological sympathies, to act in a most prejudicial manner after the end of terrorism,” said Mr Gill.
This claim that the judiciary was prejudiced in favor of militants is countered by evidence that the courts generally condoned the police’s human rights abuses during the counter-insurgency. A Judicial Blackout: Judicial Impunity for Disappearances in Punjab, India examines cases in which the the judiciary ignored police abuses such as faked encounters and extrajudicial executions. By dismissing petitions based on police versions of cases or delays, the courts attempted to “sweep the matter under the carpet” and reinforce impunity of police.
Gill further claimed that the practice of faking the deaths of militants who helped the police is acceptable because this method is normal procedure, and had been used extensively in Punjab and elsewhere.
“The present controversy, consequently, has no merit, and relates to tactics that were routinely used,” he added.
However, this argument ignores the issue of who the falsely tagged bodies were and how they were killed. Further, the extent of this human rights abuse does not justify its use. Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab analyzes 672 cases, documenting the systematic human rights abuses under Gill’s tenure. During the 1984 to 1995 period of counter-insurgency in India, the Punjab police headed by Gill used brutal tactics against more than 10,000 Punjabi Sikhs, including torture, extrajudical execution, arbitrary arrests, “disappearances,” and illegal cremations. In Amritsar alone, the Central Bureau of Investigation listed 2,097 bodies as having been illegally cremated, of which 1,238 were unidentified.
Gill also claimed that the anti-insurgency campaign in Punjab was relatively humane compared to other anti-terrorist movements. However, Human Rights Watch has characterized Gill’s counter-insurgency campaign as “the most extreme example of a policy in which the end appeared to justify any and all means, including torture and murder.”
The survivors of human rights abuses face continuing psychological and physical trauma. Physicians for Human Rights and the Bellevue/NYU School of Medicine Program for Survivors of Torture conducted a study of 127 families who survived the disappearance of a family member in Amritsar, Punjab. They found that nearly half of those interviewed continued to describe symptoms of severe psychological disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder more than ten years after the traumas occurred.
ENSAAF’s Punjab Human Rights Library lists more sources that document human rights abuses by Indian security forces.
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