[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 137 (Saturday, September 28, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1778-E1779]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




   INDIA FINALLY PUNISHES MURDERER INVOLVED IN 1984 MASSACRE OF SIKHS

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. DAN BURTON

                               of indiana

                    in the house of representatives

                       Friday, September 27, 1996

  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, the September 16 issue of the New 
York Times reported that, thanks to a personal crusade by a magistrate 
named Shiv Narain Dhingra, some of the people responsible for the 1984 
Delhi massacre of Sikhs are being punished. Over 20,000 Sikhs died in 
those massacres following the assassination of Indira Ghandi. All the 
while, state radio and television called for more bloodshed and the 
Home Minister locked Sikh policemen in their barracks.
  The New York Times called this ``one of the darkest chapters in the 
country's half-century of independence.''
  According to the Times, ``despite evidence implicating politicians, 
police officers, and officials in the anti-Sikh rioting, not a single 
person had been convicted for the killings that followed the 
assassination,'' until this year. This year, a butcher who was involved 
in at least 150 of those murders, Kishori Lal, was sentence to death by 
Judge Dhingra. This crusading magistrate has also sentenced 89 people 
involved in the massacres to 5 years of ``rigorous imprisonment,'' the 
harshest punishment

[[Page E1779]]

in the Indian prison system. These moves constitute a first step toward 
justice, but they are not nearly enough.
  Gurcharan Singh Babbar, a Sikh activist whose campaign on behalf of 
the victims of this government-inspired massacre caused him to be 
labeled a ``terrorist'' by the regime, reports that he has affidavits 
from the families of at least 5,000 victims. Clearly, the sentences 
imposed by Mr. Dhingra are just the tip of the iceburg. A Sikh woman 
named Satnami Bai, finally succeeded in getting a criminal indictment 
against former government minister H.K.L. Bhagat, who was involved in 
the murder of her husband, Mohan. It seems that Mohan Bai was pulled 
from his home, beaten with iron bars, and burned to death by a 
government-inspired mob. Unfortunately, Mohan Bai is just one of many. 
Despite the indictment against Mr. Bhagat, he has been allowed to stay 
in a government bungalow with the protection of the elite and brutal 
Black Cats security forces. After he was thrown out under pressure this 
past spring, the Government wrote off thousands of dollars in back rent 
that Mr. Bhagat owed.

  The judge said the Government's belated effort to investigate the 
massacre is clearly a farce designed to cover up its own 
responsibility. As Mr. Dhingra points out, the government felt that 
``the massacre was necessary to teach (the Sikhs) a lesson.'' This is 
further proof that the rights of Sikhs and other minorities have never 
been respected in ``the world's largest democracy.'' That is why we 
must raise our voices to force the Indian government to stop the 
atrocities in Punjab and Kashmir, and punish the criminals who are 
guilty of committing these crimes in the past. We must also do 
everything in our power to compel the Indian government to respect the 
rights of the Sikhs in Punjab and the Muslims in Kashmir to freedom 
from abuses, democracy, and self-determination.
  I ask to enter the New York Times article on the massacres into the 
Record.

               [From the New York Times, Sept. 16, 1996]

            A Decade After Massacre, Some Sikhs Find Justice

                           (By John F. Burns)

       New Delhi, September 15.--A dismal air pervades the dank 
     residential blocks of Tilak Vihar, a gloom that goes beyond 
     the unpaved lanes turned to swamps by monsoons and the stench 
     of human waste. In this quarter of New Delhi, the degration 
     common in Indian slums is compounded by a blankness on the 
     faces, a lack of the optimism and vitality that, against all 
     odds, inspirits so many of India's poor.
       The quarter's popular name is Widows' Colony. In these 
     walk-up blocks live hundreds of women and children who lost 
     their husbands, fathers, sons and brothers in the massacre of 
     thousands of Sikhs that followed the assassination of Prime 
     Minister Indira Gandhi in October 1984. Mrs. Gandhi was shot 
     in the garden of her New Delhi home by Sikhns in her security 
     detail, who acted to avenge hundreds of Sikhs killed in a 
     crackdown by Mrs. Gandhi's Government on insurgents holed up 
     in the holiest Sikh temple in India.
       For many Indians, the massacre, and India's failure until 
     recently to punish any of those responsible, has been one of 
     the darkest chapters in the country's half-century of 
     independence. Two men found guilty of Mrs. Gandhi's murder 
     was hanged in 1988.
       But despite evidence implicating politicians, police 
     officers and officials in the anti-Sikh rioting, not a single 
     person had been convicted for the killings that followed the 
     assassination until a magistrate imposed a death sentence 
     this week on a butcher found guilty of two of the Skih 
     murders. Evidence presented in court indicated he was 
     involved in at least 150 other killings.
       The death sentence on the butcher, Kishori Lai, was the 
     latest move in personal crusade by the magistrate, Shiv 
     Narain Dinghra. Two weeks ago, Mr. Dinghra drew headlines 
     across India by sentencing 89 of the 1984 rioters to jail 
     terms of five years, to be served under the ``rigorous 
     imprisonment'' regime that is the harshest imposed in Indian 
     jails.
       They were sentenced for crimes like arson, illegal use of 
     exposives, rioting, looting and curfew-breaking. Last fall, 
     Mr. Dinghra, a hitherto obscure figure, sentenced 44 others 
     for their roles in the rioting, the first such action since 
     1984.
       Although the Sikh insurgency in the Punjab was effectively 
     crushed in the early 1990's, the legacy of 1984 has 
     embittered many of India's 18 million Sikhs, whose culture 
     and religion are closely linked to India's predominant faith, 
     Hinduism, from which Sikhism, emerged in an 18th century 
     schism.
       India's failure until now to make any reckoning for the 
     1984 killings has also troubled many secular Indians who have 
     taken the Government's inaction as a token of a growing 
     tendency among Hindu politicians who dominate the major 
     parties to pander to sectarian impulses.
       Even Mr. Dinghra's efforts are discounted as tokenism by 
     many Sikhs like Gurucharan Singh Babbar.
       Mr. Babbar, a Sikh activist, has campaigned on behalf of 
     the riot victims, causing him to be branded a ``terrorist'' 
     by the Government of Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded his mother 
     as Prime Minister, and was assassinated himself in 1991. At 
     his home in New Delhi, Mr. Babbar has piles of affidavits 
     from victims' families that prove, he says, that 5,015 Sikhs 
     were killed, more than double the official figure of 2,300.
       But Mr. Dinghra is part of what many people see as a wider 
     awakening of conscience among India's judiciary that many 
     Indians believe could be the spur to wider changes in the way 
     the country is governed.
       The new judicial assertiveness first surfaced in rulings by 
     the Supreme Court that swept aside efforts by the Government 
     of Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao to shield Mr. Rao and 
     others from corruption investigations.The judges have 
     accompanied many of their rulings with wider conclusions 
     about the need to rein in the arrogance and criminality that, 
     the judges have said, has become a trademark of Indian 
     politics.
       Mr. Dinghra picked up these themes last month in sentencing 
     the 1984 rioters to jail terms. Calling the Government's show 
     of investigating the killings over the years ``a farce,'' Mr. 
     Dinghra said the attitude among top officials at the time was 
     that ``the massacre was necessary to teach a lesson'' to 
     India's Sikhs.
       But the larger lesson of Government inaction in the case, 
     he said, was that justice was available only to those with 
     power.
       ``Cases against the rich and influential either do not 
     reach the courts, or, if they do, they are seldom finalized, 
     while the cries of the victims go unheard,'' he said.
       A similar conclusion was reached long ago by Satnami Bai, a 
     36-year-old grandmother, who has waited years to get justice 
     for her husband, Mohan, a 30-year-old driver of a motorized 
     rickshaw who was among the Sikh men pulled from their homes 
     in New Delhi by Hindu mobs, beaten, with staves and iron 
     bars, then burned alive.
       Earlier this year, Mrs, Bai successfully petitioned for a 
     criminal indictment in her husband's killing to be drawn up 
     against a former minister in Mrs. Gandhi's government, H.K.L. 
     Bhagat.
       Mr. Bhagat, 75, who has pleaded not guilty, was Mrs. 
     Gandhi's Information Minister. He was named by several 
     unofficial inquiries conducted immediately after the killings 
     as being one of several powerful Congress Party politicians 
     who instigated and led the 1984 killings.
       Under Rajiv Gandhi's prime ministership, Mr. Bhagat 
     prospered, holding four ministerial posts and heading the 
     Congress Party in New Delhi. After Mr. Gandhi's Government 
     fell in 1989, Mr. Bhagat stayed on in a luxurious Government 
     bungalow, protected by an elite security force, the Black 
     Cats. Only this spring, when Mrs. Bai's pressures prompted 
     his indictment, was he forced out of the bungalow, and then 
     only after Mr. Rao, the Congress Party leader and then Prime 
     Minister, ordered housing officials to write off tens of 
     thousands of dollars Mr. Bhagat owed in back rent.
       The Congress Party has been in an accelerating decline, and 
     its humiliation in a general election earlier this year has 
     emboldened those who have long wanted a reckoning. For these 
     people, Mrs. Bai is just as much a hero as Mr. Dinghra.
       Now working as a $50-a-month cleaner in a Government-run 
     dispensary, a job given to her under a program to compensate 
     widows of the 1984 massacre, Mrs. Bai said powerful figures 
     apparently still believed that people like her could be 
     stopped in their efforts to secure justice.
       After Mr. Bhagat was hauled into court for the first time, 
     Mrs. Bai said, a woman who identified herself as a relative 
     of Mr. Bhagat called Mrs. Bai at work and offered her 500,000 
     rupees, equivalent to $14,300, if she dropped the case 
     against him. ``I said, `Fine, we'll do a deal, but forget 
     about the 500,000 rupees,' '' Mrs. Bai recalled. ``Instead, I 
     said, `Just give me my husband back, and I'll drop the case.' 
     ''

                          ____________________