Current Events
Rights & Wrongs:
The Jaswant Singh Khalra Centre For Human Rights
by BINAYAK & ILINA SEN
Former bank employee Jaswant Singh Khalra was last seen washing his car outside his home in 1995 before he joined the ranks of the disappeared.
He was involved in tracing the people who had disappeared in the wake of the anti-Sikh pogrom in India after Indira Gandhi's assassination.
Jaswant Singh's painstaking research led him to files from the municipal corporation of Amritsar which had information like the names, age and addresses of thousands of Sikhs who had been killed and illegally cremated by the Punjab Police.
India's Central Bureau of Investigation later revealed - under pressure - that Jaswant Singh was held and tortured at a
police station in Tarn Taran and subsequently four police officers were
indicted for his kidnapping and murder.
Jaswant Singh's is not an isolated story.
Human rights activists have come under repeated attacks recently.
Right to Information activists have been killed and many have had cases
filed against them. Journalists have been jailed in criminal defamation
cases, attacked, some of them killed and media
houses have had their
offices ransacked. Tribal activists, particularly in conflict areas,
have been hounded by the police and many of them are in jail today.
A recent consultation in Delhi, co-hosted by the Human Rights Law Network, World Sikh Organisation and a few other organisations from across the globe, was organised in memory of Sardar Jaswant Singh Khalra.
It focused on the
situation of human rights defenders in India and provided an opportunity
to listen to first-hand accounts of the alarming human rights situation
in the country.
Rights activists like Parveena Ahangar, chairperson of the Association of Relatives of Disappeared Persons in Kashmir - a title she would any day happily exchange for her missing son and the nine-year-long anguish - were there.
We heard from Parveena about children
under ten who were
taken into custody because they were “hardcore
stone-pelters”.
Activists from Madurai and nuns from Kerala
protesting against human rights violations gave us their testimonies.
From the northeast, there was Rosemary of the Naga Mothers' Association
and Irom Sharmila's brother Irom Sinhajeet, to remind us once again of
the excesses of the AFSPA and one woman's struggle against its
immorality.
Also in attendance were adivasi activists from
Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand like Dayamani Barla, who has been crusading
against displacement and Kopa Kunjam, who was dubbed a Maoist supporter
and jailed when he tried to encourage adivasis forcibly displaced by the
Salwa Judum to return to their villages. We heard the testimony of the
renowned Mallika Sarabhai, who disclosed that despite her family's
widespread connection with social institutions in Gujarat, she was
ignored by the people on the streets once she came out in opposition to
Narendra Modi's regime.
Sanjeev Bhatt, the IPS officer who had taken on the apparatus of fascism in Gujarat, was there as were the lawyers from Maharashtra who recounted the kidnapping of Arun Ferreira by plainclothes policemen from the jail gate in Nagpur after he was acquitted in nine cases.
It became clear in the course of these two days at the conference that attacks on human rights defenders were taking place across the country and that this has been going on for a long time.
Protecting the human rights defenders is the subject of international agreements and is not dependent solely on the bonafides of individual state actors.
The proceedings of the meeting ended with the setting up of the Jaswant Singh Khalra Centre in Delhi aimed at coordination of countrywide efforts for the protection of human rights defenders.
Binayak Sen has himself, in recent months, attracted world-wide attention and support for his struggle against ongoing persecution by Indian governmental authorities because of his activism - shared by his wife and fellow-crusader, Ilina Sen - to help India's oppressed masses.
[Courtesy: The Week. Edited for sikhchic.com]
December 12, 2011
Conversation about this article
1: Gurpal Singh Bhuller (Chester, Virginia, U.S.A.), December 14, 2011, 9:44 AM.
What better way to remember Jaswant Singh Khalra than to associate him with Human Rights - something that the Indian Police tried to silence. Dr. Binayak Sen is to be commended for writing and speaking out. He was put into jail and held in isolation for speaking out against those whose rights were grieviously attacked - the poor, the adivasis and those whom the authorities like to call "inconvenient." We should all be supporting this Center as the protection of minorities in India is inextricably linked to the free exercise of your rights.