Five years after a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) was filed by an NGO seeking a probe by SIT or CBI into approximately 6,733 encounter killings, custodial deaths, and illegal cremations of dead bodies in Punjab during the period of 1984-1995 on the “pattern of Manipur petition pending in the Supreme Court,” the Punjab and Haryana High Court on Wednesday issued notices to the State of Punjab, Union, and the CBI. The HC is hearing the petition filed by PDAP (Punjab Documentation and Advocacy Project) and other petitioners through Senior Advocate RS Bains. The matter came up for hearing before the division bench of Acting Chief Justice GS Sandhawalia and Justice Lapita Banerji, wherein the notice was issued to the respondents for May 9, to file replies.
The petition at HC documents that the Punjab Police and security forces abducted the victims, killed them, burnt their bodies as being “unclaimed and unidentified” in secret and documented cremations and by other means, including throwing the bodies in rivers and canals. The petition alleged that the persons extra judicially executed were cremated without informing their kin and handing over their dead bodies for last religious rites.
As per the petitioner, the present PIL is the outcome of an eight-year investigation into the killings during the period of militancy in the stateby the petitioner’s NGO.
“It is well-documented (and also judicially proven) that innocent citizens of Punjab were abducted and remain missing and unaccounted for in Punjab. Grossly misusing and under the guise of the procedure laid out in the Punjab Police Rules, for the cremation of ‘unknown corpses,’ the Punjab police were regularly taking dead bodies to municipal cremation grounds for cremations. The cost of firewood and cloth of such cremations are maintained by Municipal Committees and Corporations which would claim the costs of such cremations by entering in respective cremation registers that the bodies were unclaimed,” mentioned the petition.
“Until very recently, the identity and fate of many of these victims remained unknown and remain completely unacknowledged by the respondents. The reasons for these systematic and planned secret cremations were to conceal the fact that these victims had been abducted, kept in illegal police custody, and the dead bodies would reveal signs of torture, bullet injuries, and execution marks on the dead bodies,” the petition read.
The petition stated that these cremations also can be pinpointed to specific encounter FIRs and other official records which prove that thesevictims can be identified as their identities are well-known to the Respondents.
The petitioner’s counsel, Bains, also prayed for directing the setting up of an appropriate committee headed by a retired Supreme Court or high court Judge to conduct the inquiry into “all enforced disappearance and extra-judicial killings in Punjab. Directions were also sought forcompensating the victims’ families by “payment of amounts reflecting the seriousness and gravity of these heinous crimes”. It was added that the victims of mass killings and cremations in Punjab under the guise of encounters and security operations had suffered in silence.
“In many cases, the Municipal Corporations have refused to issue death certificates to the families as they have not been able to prove the deaths of their kin in the absence of the dead body. The absence of death certificates means that widows are denied government widow pension schemes. The children of the disappeared are not given subsidies in education otherwise available to other orphans. It also means that the victims face considerable hurdles and difficulties in matters of inheritance/succession and employment on compassionate grounds…,” it was added.
It was told in the HC that the present petition was originally filed before the Supreme Court in 2019 and heard on September 2, 2019, whereby it was indicated that the matter be taken up before the Punjab and Haryana High Court, being a Punjab-related matter.