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An Open Letter to Hon’ble President A P J Abdul Kalam, Prime
Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh And Smt Sonia Gandhi, Chairperson of
United Progressive Alliance-Present Ruling Group i.e. Government of
India
By: SIKH VICHAR MANCH-VOICE FOR JUSTICE
Most respectfully, you are known powerful individuals in power for
liberal and progressive thinking not like your predecessors and
other leadership presently available in
India leaving some exceptions as Mr. Som Nath Chatterjee, Speaker of
Lok Sabha, Sardar Simranjit Singh Mann etc. if Sikh Vichar Manch is
not wrong to say so.
You all are well aware of that minorities faced injustice though the
Manch shall specifically pointed injustice meted out to the Sikhs in
the past and continuing so till date without any check, justice and
the criminals in uniform or in the shape of agents and double agents
are being patronized by Indian government agencies.
You know, if at all any inquiry is ordered and investigation is made
by the Hon’ble Courts, National Human Rights Commission etc or at
their instance (though those are not so Hon’ble due to the bindings
on their independent functioning and decision making checks of
legislature, executive and other corrupt considerations and
offerings) that is finally thrown in dust-bin without any action and
justice or a mere eye wash action taken as was the practice in this
independent India. For example: the Manch requests to pay attention
to the writings displayed on website
www.sikhvicharmanch.bravehost.com
Can your honour as a
team change this practice? But no change is
evident in this
practice till date.
No-doubt by ruthless killings of Sikhs in Punjab and else where in
India, your predecessors in power were successful in projecting
dummy leadership for Sikhs in order to ignore their just demands
directly related to their ‘Sovereign Identity and Rights’ but Sikhs
may never forget their past and injustice done to them. Please do
something in this direction in order to bring peace in this
Sub-continent and for justice to Sikhs.
Here is a ‘test case i.e. murder of Bhai Gurdev Singh Kaunke’ for
showing your true/genuine intentions in the direction to give
justice. No further inquiry is required in this case as truth has
already been surfaced regarding the ‘murder Bhai Gurdev Singh Kaunke’.
In support of this, the Manch quotes the reports of Addl. Director
General of Police Mr. BP Tiwari and of NGO whereby true facts,
rather confessions proving the murder of Bhai Gurdev Singh Kaunke
are with government of State of
Punjab.
What else is required, in view of the acquired irrefutable evidence
as three committee members were able to secretly tape record their
conversation with a senior superintendent of police, which disclosed
how Bhai Gurdev Singh Kaunke was actually killed under torture.
In
case of any doubt the activists who recorded the statements and
written the facts in the book, “REDUCED TO ASHES- The Insurgency and
Human Rights in Punjab” can be summoned for verifying the facts with
tapes mentioned therein for providing justice in this case.
The report is available online at:
http://www.ensaaf.org/reducedtoashes.html
The Manch likes to quote the related portion from the book at page
107-108 as under:
“Impunity
by all means: Rights and the dead-ends of law 107
Gurdev Singh Kaunke
An
example of the mindless monstrosity, which K. P. S. Gill’s hard-line
eventually
became, follows:
In
May 1998, the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab
(CCDP) investigated the enforced disappearance of Gurdev Singh
Kaunke, former acting head priest of the Akal Takht, following his 25
December 1992
arrest from his home in Kaunke village under Jagraon subdivision of
Ludhiana district. The police authorities later claimed that Gurdev
Singh Kaunke escaped from their custody on 2
January 1993.
The claim was widely condemned as false. Prakash Singh Badal, then
leader of the Akali Dal who became the chief minister of
Punjab
in early 1997, publicly accused the Congress government of the state
of masterminding Kaunke’s abduction and disappearance, and demanded
a high powered judicial inquiry. Badal was arrested while attempting
to visit the bereaved family of Gurdev Singh Kaunke at their village
on 5 January 1992.
The CCDP was able to acquire conclusive evidence to show that Gurdev
Singh was inhumanly tortured first at the Sadar police station of
Jagraon and then at the Criminal Investigation Agency (CIA)
interrogation center from 25 December 1992 to 1 January 1993. The
Committee also acquired irrefutable evidence to establish that the
former head priest was killed under torture.
On 5
June 1998, a delegation of the committee members met chief minister
Prakash Singh Badal to acquaint him with its findings and to demand
the registration of a case, an independent official investigation
and prosecution of the culprits. The delegation included former
Supreme Court judge Kuldip Singh. The chief minister directed an
official inquiry to be conducted by B. P. Tiwari, additional
director general of police, Punjab.
http://www.financialexpress.com/ie/daily/19980520/14051484.html
Police Quotas for Murders: Interview with an SSP
In
the course of investigating the case of Gurdev Singh Kaunke, three
committee members were able to secretly tape record their
conversation with a senior superintendent of police, which disclosed
how Gurdev Singh was actually killed under torture. The interview
also revealed the banal world of torture and murder that, in the
name of counter-insurgency, had become a routine for a set of police
officers to obtain good, powerful positions. We are not releasing
the full transcript of the discussion out of respect for an honest
officer who risked his career in telling us the truth. The SSP told
us the following about what used to happen in the days before the
SSP’s periodic meetings with DGP K.P.S. Gill: “You can check that
up! Before such a meeting with Gill, 300 to 400 Sikhs used to die in
Punjab. Every SSP had to report: I have killed 14. The other who
said I have killed 28 was appreciated more. The third SSP who had
to outsmart the first two had to report 31. The night before the
meeting with Gill, the Sikhs used to die so that the SSPs could vie
with each other in showing their anti-terrorist achievements.” The
B. P. Tiwari Inquiry Committee submitted its report to the
government in the first week of May 1999. But the government chose
to withhold the report from the public and took no action on its
recommendations. In April 2002, Simranjit Singh Mann moved the High
Court of Punjab and Haryana for directions to the state of Punjab to
make the report public.
The high court issued notice, and the state government demanded two
months’ time to examine the report. In the end, the state government
declined to produce the report and the high court ordered another
investigation, which is still pending. These pending inquiries
belong to the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of denial, diversion and
cover-up, and seem to be stock-in-trade of the politics of impunity
in
India.
Upendra Baxi’s following words sum up the reality: “Management of
organized political violence requires multifarious use of the ‘law’
as a sustained device of cover-up strategies and operations. What
actually happened ought never to be allowed to achieve juridical
verification. Judicial commissions of enquiry must be so constituted
as to serve as weapons of political warfare; if at all these
establish prima facie facts of political violence, they must
do so in ways that make rights, redress and rehabilitation almost
impossible… Investigative agencies should not have autonomous status
that allows them to establish the truth of what happened. If
appellate courts, especially the Supreme Court, were to investigate
matters in ways profoundly subversive of the operative violent
multi-party consensus, all efforts must be made to render futile
these occasional adjudicative leadership feats. Politically
patronized leaders of the Bar, including Advocate Generals, the
Solicitor General, and even the Attorney General of India, should be
effectively mobilized to subserve truth-monopolization.
In
view of the acquired irrefutable evidence as three committee members
were able to secretly tape record their conversation with a senior
superintendent of police, which disclosed how Bhai Gurdev Singh
Kaunke’ was actually killed under torture and report submitted by
Addl. Director General of Police Mr. B P TIWARI, your honorable are
requested to order a registration of a criminal case against the
police personnel involved so that they must face justice.
With anticipation
Sikh Vichar Manch
Through its
Chief & Spokesperson,
Balbir Singh Sooch, Advocate, Ludhiana.
January 1, 2006 |
