The Cremation Grounds Investigation

During the administration of Chief Minister Beant Singh (1992-95), the Sikh guerrilla groups were finally decimated by the "war without quarter," or, to use the term made infamous in Latin America, the dirty war. According to police figures reporting on the first year of the Beant Singh government, security forces in Punjab killed 2119 militants in "encounters," an ambiguous term used in India to quash investigation into whether the death occurred in an exchange of fire, during an escape from custody, under torture in jails or police stations, or simply as a murder in cold blood. A large number of people in the border districts, where police suspected that civilians might be sheltering militants who crossed back and forth from neighbouring Pakistan, simply "disappeared" during this all-out effort to end the separatist threat. Evidence that later surfaced showed that these "disappeared" from the border area were killed and their bodies quietly disposed of. Punjab's irrigation canals had become the dumping grounds for bodies of disappeared citizens as well as of executed militants, and the state government of Rajasthan to the south formally complained of dead bodies floating down from Punjab. News reports said that the dead bodies of Sikhs, many with hands and feet tied together, were being fished out when water in-flow channels were dredged for repairs. These reports stood in contradiction to the government claim that the missing Sikhs were all militants who had fled to Pakistan or abroad to continue the separatist insurgency. For a tiny minority this was a possible scenario, but the allegations of executions and disappearances were by that time numbering in the thousands. Interviewing their relatives, human rights workers found it impossible to believe that all were militants escaping into hiding overseas. Most of the relatives affirmed strongly that the victims had no connections with politics or insurgency.

Jaswant Singh Khalra, at that time head of the Human Rights Wing of the Akali Dal, launched a further investigation into another possible end point of the bodies of the disappeared. He collected official records from the public cremation grounds of Amritsar, Patti and Tarn Taran for the year 1992. These records showed that police had burned more than 1400 bodies in these three cremation grounds alone, stating that they were unclaimed or unidentified. Khalra alleged that the cremated were those who had earlier been picked up for interrogation. To corroborate this disturbing claim, Kumar consulted the cremation records from the office of the Registrar of Births and Deaths in Amristar and found that 300 bodies had been listed as cremated during 1992 at a single cremation ground, Durgiana Mandir, although only 112 had been identified with names. Bullet injuries were the listed cause of death in 41 cases.

Pursuing the records further, Kumar found that a firewood purchase register at Patti municipal cremation ground showed that 538 bodies were cremated as unclaimed/unidentified between 1991 and 1994.

After examining these records, Kumar sought out attendants at the cremation grounds, doctors who had conducted post-mortems and also relatives of the disappeared who might be able to provide links between the missing individuals and the pattern of cremations. Two attendants at the cremation ground at Patti told Kumar that the police would often buy firewood for the cremation of one or two persons but in fact would cremate several bodies together on a single pyre. The Chief Medical Officer of the Civil Hospital at Patti confessed that a post-mortem there was typically completed in less than five minutes; it amounted to no more than filling out a paper announcing the cause, time and place of death, with police providing all the information. Kumar also interviewed many serving police officers who, under condition of anonymity, provided detailed narratives of abductions, custodial torture and rape, summary execution and illegal cremation as aspects of an explicit strategy to root out the Sikh separatist militancy.

Based on this and other information, a Cremation Grounds Report was prepared with the aim of urging an independent inquiry into the revelation of mass cremations of identified and unidentified bodies. Judging from the numbers in the official records brought to light for 1992 in Amritsar, Patti, and Tarn Taran, the numbers of cremated for the whole of Punjab over the decade-long course of the counterinsurgency would be at least in the thousands - even independent of bodies found floating in canals or possibly decaying, unclaimed, in fields. Estimates of total casualties in Punjab over the past twenty years have ranged from twenty thousand to over a hundred thousand.