What This Document Is

This is not an investigation into the root causes of repression and insurgency in Punjab nor is it an exhaustive summary of human rights abuses in that region. We are writing this brief report because a fresh effort at documenting one specific form of abuse - extrajudicial execution - is being launched in India today that has the potential to reveal deeply shocking facts about rights violations against the Sikh minority community that have occurred over the past two decades. Although there have been courageous human rights organizations producing reports about Punjab for many years, this is the first time that all the groups have come together to seriously attempt a credible and irrefutable documentation of the Punjab's thousands of disappearance cases and to track the record of India's legislative and judicial response to these cases in an effort to demand accountability.

The violent conflict that has wracked Punjab since the late 1970's, centering on the agitation for a separate Sikh state of Khalistan, seems to have quieted. We believe that this is a threshold moment for the people of that region and particularly for the Sikhs who have borne the brunt of the human rights infringements that took place in the name of counterinsurgency. A serious record of past abuses and steps taken toward government accountability is prerequisite to lasting peace, in our opinion. We therefore deeply regret that the efforts to this end underway have been seriously thwarted by Indian government intervention despite its public claim that it is now attending to human rights.

Here, we explain how and why the movement for compiling a consultable record of disappearance cases began, we describe how its investigations are conducted, and we report on recent attempts by the government of India to thwart efforts toward accountability for abuses. We ask the international human rights community, concerned journalists, and governments committed to the principles of democracy, to help us highlight the tragedy of the extrajudicial execution of Sikhs in Punjab and the failure of the Indian state to come to terms with its role therein. We demand, with many Indians, that the right to life be respected in a nation that proudly claims to have been founded on the principle of non-violence.

Published human rights reports and other selected publications on Punjab are listed in our References section (Appendix D). In this document we choose to focus on recent findings rather than repeat or summarize what has gone before, and though we are both scholars we choose here to avoid academic analysis in favour of simple reporting of events. We believe these events speak for themselves.

A basic chronology of events can be found in Appendix A.