[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 139 (Wednesday, October 8, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E1964]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[[Page E1964]]
    CONGRATULATIONS TO THE SIKHS OF KHALISTAN ON THEIR INDEPENDENCE 
                              ANNIVERSARY

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. LANE EVANS

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                       Wednesday, October 8, 1997

  Mr. EVANS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to salute the Sikhs of Khalistan 
on the 10th anniversary of their declaration of independence. Khalistan 
declared its independence from India on October 7, 1987. A decade later 
things have not changed in Punjab, Khalistan. India continues to 
enforce a brutal tyranny that the Indian Supreme Court described as 
``worse than a genocide.''
  When India had its 50th anniversary in August, we heard a lot about 
Indian democracy and we heard about the elections in Punjab. India is a 
democracy only for the elites. For the Sikhs of Khalistan, the Muslims 
of Kashmir, the Christians of Nagaland, and so many other living under 
Indian occupation, it is not a democracy at all. Let me share with my 
colleagues the statement of Narinder Singh, a spokesman for the Golden 
Temple in Amritsar, the holiest of Sikh shrines, which was attacked by 
the Indian regime in June.
  On August 11, Narinder Singh was interviewed on National Public 
Radio. Here is what he said:
  ``The Indian Government all the time they boast that they're 
democratic, they're secular, but they have nothing to do with 
democracy, they have nothing to do with secularism. They try to crush 
Sikhs just to please the majority.'' In view of the fact that a quarter 
of a million Sikhs have been murdered by the regime since 1984, I 
believe that Narinder Singh is exactly right.
  Despite the elections in Punjab and throughout India, the repression 
is still going on. Ram Narayan Kumar, a Hindu human-rights activist who 
has exposed disappearances and mass cremations in Punjab, was 
threatened with death if he does not drop his work. Justice Ajit Singh 
Bains, chairman of the Punjab Human Rights Organization, had to go to 
the Supreme Court to get permission to visit his terminally ill brother 
in Canada. By the time the papers were issued, his brother had died. 
Hundreds of political opponents of the Punjab government have been 
arrested, and the government conducted a warrantless search of an 
opposition newspaper editor's home. Sikh activist Simranjit Singh Mann 
faces new charges under the repressive TADA law, although this brutal 
law expired in May 1995. Human-rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra is 
still missing over 2 years after he was kidnapped by the Punjab police. 
On September 4, a Sikh church, known as a Gurdwara, in Chandigarh, was 
raided on the pretense of looking for a terrorist. No terrorist was 
found, so the police contented themselves with beating and torturing 
six of the clergy, known as Granthis. On June 29, the elected mayor of 
the village of Khiala Khurd, Gurdial Singh, was stripped naked, held 
upside down, beaten, and tortured in front of the townspeople. His 
crime? He is a baptized Sikh. Mr. Speaker, these are not the acts of a 
democratic government.
  When police in Los Angeles beat Rodney King, they were eventually 
punished. The New York policemen who violated a Haitian immigrant with 
a plunger are in the process of begin punished for this terrible act. 
In India, police officers murder innocent Sikhs like 3-year-old 
Arvinder Singh and collect cash bounties for it. According to the PHRO 
and other human rights organizations, more than 60,000 of these 
bounties have been paid out by the Indian regime. How can a moral 
country like America stand by and allow these events to pass by 
unnoticed?
  Mr. Speaker, it is time to take action against this brutal tyranny. 
India has initiated unconditional talks with the Christian nation of 
Nagaland. We must demand that it undertake similar talks with the Sikhs 
of occupied Khalistan. We should declare our support for a free and 
fair plebiscite on independence in Khalistan, end our aid to India, and 
declare it a country that practices religious persecution. We should 
place an embargo on India similar to the one we had on South Africa and 
the one we still maintain against Cuba, ending only when these 
conditions are met and freedom is allowed to flourish in South Asia. 
Then and only then can India legitimately claim that it is a democracy. 
I look forward to the day when we can welcome India into the fold.

                          ____________________