Epilogue: India At The Millennium: A Comment And Warning

We believe that the evidence of mass disappearances and state impunity in Punjab as described in this report warrants international attention. Despite public proclamations as to the democratic nature of the Indian state and its commitments to protect human rights, the Indian government's treatment not only of the Sikh population of Punjab but of human rights workers attempting to investigate abuses undermines its credibility. A human tragedy on the probable scale of many of the great tragedies of history has occurred in Punjab, and we do a severe disservice to those who have suffered and to those who yet may suffer when we ignore evidence to the effect that all is not well in India.

The Sikhs, though they have served India with nobility in the past, are today a scorned community there. A spate of politically orchestrated propaganda against Sikhs has resulted in the stereotype of all Sikhs as traitors and terrorists, though only a tiny fraction of them actually participated in the recent separatist insurgency. Hatred of Sikhs has become acceptable in the realm of public discourse across nearly all circles of life in India. Both of us have experienced the censure of our colleagues for our involvement in documenting human rights abuses perpetrated against Sikhs; we recall that "nigger lover" was a common accusation hurled at early civil rights workers in the United States and find the social isolation of those expressing solidarity with Sikh victims in India hauntingly reminiscent. More frighteningly, we note that the virulent anti-semitism that led to the Nazi holocaust was in the 1930's itself a widely accepted discourse from which few academics, clerics or activists dissented. We deeply fear an eliminationist undercurrent of feeling in India, directed at all the non-Hindu minorities, which provides the ground against which illegal executions not only take place but are purposefully ignored by the bulk of the population which in fact acquiesces in the idea that the Sikhs need to be taught a lesson.

Noting the disdain for world opinion expressed in the Indian government's recent nuclear tests, and noting a continuing pattern of abuse in Kashmir and the north-eastern states, we call on concerned people everywhere to attend to developments in India that are not consonant with human welfare and human life. We ask that India be urged to live up to its founding ideals by allowing and indeed supporting a full-scale accounting of atrocities in Punjab as a first step toward accountability, healing, and the restoration of democracy. We believe that respect for human rights and accountability for abuses thereof will be the only long-term guarantee of stability and peace in this important and volatile - and now nuclear - region of the world.