[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 135 (Wednesday, October 25, 2000)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1937-E1939]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


         INDIA PRACTICING STATE TERRORISM IN PUNJAB AND KASHMIR

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. DAN BURTON

                               of indiana

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, October 25, 2000

  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, there have been several 
disturbing reports lately coming out of India on its human rights 
violations in Punjab, Kashmir, and elsewhere. These reports demonstrate 
that India is still heavily involved in terrorism.
  On September 16, 2000, Indian author Pankaj Mishra wrote an article 
in the New York Times about how India has lost its way in terms of 
democracy and human rights. He wrote that ``the Hindu nationalists 
remain attached to a stern 19th century idea of nationalism, which 
dilutes traditional social and cultural diversity and replaces it with 
one people, one culture and one language.'' This is a climate of 
intolerance that no government, especially one claiming to be 
``democratic,'' should be promoting. He noted that the Indian 
government ``has used brute force in Punjab, the northeastern states, 
and now Kashmir to suppress disaffected minorities.''
  This ``preference for force over democracy,'' as Mishra calls, it is 
also explained in material published by the Human Rights Network in New 
York. It cites the tens of thousands of Sikhs who are being held as 
political prisoners in ``the world's largest democracy,'' as well as 
the massacre of 35 Sikhs in Chithi Singhpora, Kashmir, during the 
President's visit to India in March. The organization also documents 
the government's arrest of human-rights activist Rajiv Singh Randhawa, 
who was the only eyewitness to the police kidnapping of Jaswant Singh 
Khalra, and other incidents. Khalra, the General Secretary of the Human 
Rights Wing, was subsequently murdered while in police custody. The 
police picked up Mr. Randhawa in June of 2000 when he tried to give 
British Home Minister Jack Straw a petition on human rights.
  The Indian government has murdered over 250,000 Sikhs since 1984, 
according to the Politics of Genocide by Inderjit Sigh Jaijee. More 
than 200,000 Christians in Nagaland, over 70,000 Muslims in Kashmir, 
and tens of thousands of other minority people are also being killed at 
the hands of the Indian government. The U.S. Commission on 
International Religious Freedom has cited India for ``denial of 
religious freedom to her people.''
  It is incumbent upon the United States as the moral and democratic 
leaders of the world to do whatever we can to spread freedom to every 
corner of the world. We must impose penalties on India for its 
violations of religious freedom, as the law demands. We should declare 
India a terrorist state, as 21 Members of this House urged the 
President to do in a letter earlier this year. We should stop most 
foreign aid to India until everyone within its borders enjoys the basic 
human rights that define a democratic country. And we should urge India 
to hold free and fair plebiscites under international monitoring in 
Punjab, in Kashmir, in Nagaland, and wherever there is a freedom 
movement to determine the political future of these states in the 
democratic way. Canada has held periodic votes in Quebec on its 
political status. In America, we have done the same for Puerto Rico. 
When will India follow the lead of the real democracies in the world 
and allow people to decide their own future by the democratic means of 
voting.
  All of this information and more can be found in the report of the 
Human Rights Network, the Mishra article in the New York Times, and an 
open letter to Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee from the National 
Association of Asian Indian Christians in the USA. I submit these 
documents into the Record.

            [From the Human Rights Network, Sept./Oct. 2000]

      India's Brute Force in Punjab, Kashmir & Northeastern States

       Mr. Pankaj Mishra's article in the New York Times (9/16/
     2000) is refreshing in its boldness and articulate in its 
     contents and style. It is also a wake up call for India's 
     ruling regime under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. It 
     underscores the fact that during the last two decades `the 
     central government . . . has used brute force in Punjab, the 
     northeastern states, and now in Kashmir to suppress 
     disaffected minorities.' He warns that ``the preference for 
     force over dialogue

[[Page E1938]]

     could end up undermining India's fragile democracy.'' This is 
     in complete contrast with the Prime Minister's sermons on 
     peace and harmony, both at the United Nations Millennium 
     Summit as well as in Washington, D.C. We would like to remind 
     the Prime Minister that his claim of rosy picture in the so-
     called democratic and secular India masks the painful truth, 
     and draw his attention to the following:
       1. Tens of thousands of Sikh prisoners of conscience--men 
     and women--are languishing in Indian jails without a charge 
     or a fair trial. Many have been in illegal custody since 
     1984.
       2. Most independent observers and human rights 
     organizations have blamed the Government sponsored militant 
     groups for the mass murder of the Sikhs in Kashmir (India) 
     during President Clinton's visit in March, 2000. In the 
     absence of an independent investigation by the UN Human 
     Rights Commission, the Sikh nation holds the Indian 
     Government, under Prime Minister Vajpayee, responsible for 
     this barbarian act of mass murder of the Sikhs.
       3. Indian security forces have murdered over 250,000 Sikhs 
     since 1984, according to figures compiled by the Punjab State 
     Magistracy and human rights organizations. These figures were 
     published in The Politics of Genocide, by Inderjir Jaijee, a 
     highly respected human rights advocate.
       4. The Government of India is silent about the Interim 
     Report on Enforced Disappearances, Arbitrary Executions and 
     Secret Cremations in Punjab (August 1999), prepared under the 
     leadership of an eminent human rights champion, Mr. Ram 
     Narayan Kumar.
       5. The Government is also silent about the kidnapping and 
     murder of Mr. Jaswant Singh Khalra in police custody. Mr. 
     Khalra was reported to have compiled a list of several 
     thousand Sikhs, who were secretly cremated as ``unidentified 
     bodies,'' by Taran Taran (Punjab) police (US Department of 
     State Report, January 1998). In a recent press release (9/7/
     00) Amnesty International has reported the arrest of Mr. R.S. 
     Randhawa, a key eyewitness in the case of Mr. Khalra. The 
     Amnesty has called upon the international community to 
     intervene on behalf of Mr. Randhawa and against suppression 
     of ``evidence in this case.''
       6. In a letter to President Bill Clinton (9/12/00), 
     seventeen Congressmen have pointed out that besides the mass 
     murder of the Sikhs, ``India has also killed more than 
     200,000 Christians in Nagaland since 1947, over 70,000 
     Kashmiri Muslims since 1988, and tens of thousands of Dalits, 
     Assamese, Tamils, and others.'' In an open letter to Prime 
     Minister Vajpayee (NYT 9/8/00), Asian Indian Christians have 
     expressed their ``deep concerns regarding the persecution of 
     Christians in India by extremist groups. Priests, 
     missionaries and church workers have been murdered, nuns and 
     other women assaulted, churches and schools bombed and 
     burned, cemeteries desecrated, Christian institutions 
     harassed and intimidated.'' The US Commission on 
     International Religious Freedom has recommended that India be 
     closely monitored for ``denial of religious freedom to her 
     people.''
       7. Some high profiled and officially blessed emissaries 
     have been negotiating the nature of ``ransom'' for the 
     release of Mr. Raj Kumar, a renowned movie actor, who has 
     been kidnapped by a notorious bandit Mr. Veerappan in South 
     India. The ``ransom'' includes, inter alia, the demand by the 
     bandit to release more than 100 of his associates from Indian 
     jails. The officials agreed to comply with the ``ransom'' 
     demands until the Supreme Court intervened to delay the 
     official duplicity.
       8. In complete contrast with the ``ransom'' negotiations 
     with a bandit, the Government has spent hundreds and 
     thousands of dollars to provide unreliable and tainted 
     evidence against young Sikhs, like Sardars Sukhminder Singh 
     (Sukhi) and Ranjit Singh (Kuki)--who have been advocating the 
     creation of an environment in Punjab where the aspirations of 
     the Sikh nation can find full expression. India's 
     intelligence agencies have hounded Sukhminder and Ranjt 
     around the world and then dragged them to India's torture 
     chambers through a decade-long and expensive extradition 
     proceeding in the U.S.
       9. Instead of offering an apology to the people of Punjab 
     (for state terrorism and crime of genocide committed by 
     India's paramilitary forces over the last two decades), and 
     initiating the process of restitution, the Indian Government 
     continues pouring salt on the wounds of the people of Punjab, 
     through a policy of deception and distortion.
       10. RSS, the parent organization of the ruling BJP, in a 
     secret memorandum to its local units, has recently outlined a 
     master plan for ethnic cleansing in India by wiping out all 
     the minorities--through water and food poisoning, rape, 
     orchestrated conflicts, riots, mass killing and disposal of 
     bodies, etc.--whether they are Christians, Sikhs, Muslims, 
     Dalits, Budhhists, and others. This ``final solution,'' is 
     reminiscent of Nazi genocide of the Jews and other minorities 
     during WW II. It is no wonder that the Indian Government is 
     silent on this very serious issue of national and 
     international concern.
       11. The 1985 agreement regarding the rehabilitation of the 
     Sikh soldiers, who had protested, as a matter of deep faith 
     and conscience, against the Indian Army's brutal attack on 
     the Golden Temple Complex and almost forty other Sikh 
     shrines, has not been honored. Many of these soldiers are 
     living in poverty. The families of those, who have died 
     during the attack are living under appalling conditions.
       12. India's nuclear arsenal hovers over Punjab and 
     escalating conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir 
     endangers the very survival of Punjab.
       13. The water from Punjab's rivers is still being diverted 
     to other states, without the consent of Punjab and without a 
     fair compensation to Punjab. Since the Punjabi farmers are 
     forced to rely more and more on tube-wells (a more expensive 
     alternative), the water level in Punjab is sinking lower and 
     lower, seriously endangering its agricultural economy. 
     Punjab's farmers, who have ushered in the green revolution, 
     are still being robbed of their hard earned income, through 
     the Government's arbitrary procurement policy. Many of them 
     are committing suicide because of increasing bankruptcies--
     the byproduct of official arrogance and discrimination, and
       14. Finally, the Sikh nation is still yearning for 
     ``freedom, justice, and peace,'' as enshrined in the 
     Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and is aspiring for 
     self-determination in accordance with Articles 1 and 55 of 
     the UN Charter. We would like to realize this quest for self-
     determination within the framework of a regional commonwealth 
     of free nations (like the European Union). This South Asian 
     Commonwealth, consisting of India, Pakistan, Punjab, Kashmir, 
     Nagaland, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Tamil Homeland, Nepal, 
     and others, can usher in a new era of freedom, justice and 
     peace for all in the subcontinent. By the same token, it can 
     liberate the entire region from this lethal armament race and 
     constant fear of mutual annihilation through a nuclear 
     holocaust. The resources, worth billions of dollars, saved 
     through the elimination of the weapons of mass murder, can be 
     utilized for meeting the basic needs of the people of South 
     Asia--like education, housing, health, food, drinking water, 
     social welfare, and employment.

                                  ____
                                  

               [From the New York Times, Sept. 16, 2000]

               Yearning To Be Great, India Loses Its Way

                           (By Pankaj Mishra)

       New Delhi--In the last two years, the Indian government, 
     dominated by the Hindu nationalist party, Bharatiya Janata, 
     has tried to establish an exalted position in the world for 
     India. It has conducted nuclear tests, lobbied hard for a 
     permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council and 
     played up the West's high demand for India's skilled 
     information-technology workers. Atal Behari Vajpayee, the 
     Indian prime minister, who met with President Clinton in 
     Washington and addressed the Congress this week, hopes to 
     achieve, among other things, an American endorsement of 
     India's claim to superpower status.
       For all these aspirations to 21st century greatness, 
     however, the Hindu nationalists remain attached to a stern 
     19th-century idea of nationalism, which dilutes traditional 
     social and cultural diversity and replaces it with one 
     people, one culture and one language.
       The intolerant climate can be seen in the growing incidents 
     of violence against minorities, particularly Christian 
     missionaries, the steady takeover of government research 
     institutions by Hindu ideologues and the introduction of 
     Hindu-oriented syllabuses in schools and universities.
       In neighboring Pakistan, which was created as a homeland 
     for Muslims in 1947, a similar attempt at building a 
     monolithic national identity, through Islam, has produced 
     disastrous results.
       Since Islam has failed to bind the country's many ethnic 
     and linguistic minorities, the job of holding the country 
     together has fallen to the Pakistani army. It has tried to 
     pacify the minorities through brutal, and sometimes 
     counterproductive, methods. For instance, in 1971, the 
     terrorized Bengali Muslim population of East Pakistan seceded 
     to form, with India's assistance, the new nation of 
     Bangladesh.
       Despite that loss, the power of the Pakistani army grew and 
     grew. Ruled by a military dictator, Pakistan became the 
     overeager host, in 1979, of the C.I.A's proxy war against the 
     Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The arms received from the 
     United States and Saudi Arabia found their way to the black 
     market. Civil war broke out as competing Islamic outfits 
     fought each other with their deadly new weapons. And a 
     flourishing drug trade led to an estimated five million 
     Pakistanis becoming heroin addicts.
       In the last 20 years, drug smugglers, Islamic 
     fundamentalists and army intelligence officers have come to 
     dominate Pakistan's political life. Jihad, now exported to 
     the disputed territory of Kashmir and the Central Asian 
     republics, is the semi-official creed of many in the ruling 
     elite. Pakistan is now even further away from being a multi-
     ethnic democracy.
       India looks more stable, but its political culture has 
     changed drastically in the last two decades. The central 
     government as distrustful of federal autonomy as Pakistan's 
     ruling elite, has used brute force in Punjab, the 
     northeastern states, and now in Kashmir to suppress 
     disaffected minorities.
       In the process, India's awkward but worthy experiment with 
     secular democracy has been replaced by a vague, but 
     aggressive ideology of a unitary Hindu nationalism.
       The new upper-caste Hindu middle class, created by India's 
     freshly globalized economy, includes this nationalism's most 
     fervent supporters. It greeted India's nuclear tests in 1998 
     euphorically.
       But this middle class is also apolitical and a bit unsure 
     of itself. Its preoccupations are best reflected in the 
     revamped news media,

[[Page E1939]]

     which now focus more on fashion designers and beauty queens 
     than on the dark realities of a poor and violent country.
       Popular patriotism brings temporary clarity to the confused 
     self-image of the new middle class and helps veil some of the 
     government's more questionable actions. For instance, in 
     Kashmir, the government's failure to accommodate the 
     aspirations of the mostly Muslim population led to a popular 
     armed uprising against Indian rule.
       The Hindu nationalists describe the uprising as an attack 
     on the very idea of India and have diverted an enormous 
     amount of national energy and resources--including some 
     400,000 soldiers--toward fighting the insurgents and their 
     Pakistani supporters.
       Since the invisible majority of India's billion-strong 
     population--its destitute masses--couldn't care less about 
     Kashmir, it is the affluent Hindu middle class that enforces 
     the domestic consensus on the subject. It blames Pakistan for 
     everything, ignoring the harshness of Indian rule and the 
     near-total collapse of civil liberties in Kashmir.
       Supporters of Hindu nationalism assume that a country with 
     a strong military can absorb any amount of conflict and 
     anomie within its borders. But the preference for force over 
     dialogue could end up undermining India's fragile democracy 
     and growing economy--just as the excessive reliance on 
     military solutions to political problems has blighted 
     Pakistan.

                                  ____
                                  

                [From the New York Times, Sept. 8, 2000]

  An Open Letter to the Hon. Atal Behari Vajpayee, Prime Minister of 
                                 India

       The President, Officers, the Governing Council and the 
     members of the National Association of Asian Indian 
     Christians in the U.S.A. Inc. (NAAIC USA) are extremely 
     pleased that you are here on an official visit to the U.S. 
     and will be meeting with President Clinton and the high 
     dignitaries of this country. We warmly welcome you and extend 
     our best wishes to you for productive deliberations and 
     consultations which we hope would strengthen the relationship 
     between the people of India and the United States.
       We are also taking this opportunity to express our deep 
     concerns regarding the persecution of Christians in India by 
     extremist groups. Priests, missionaries and church workers 
     have been murdered, nuns and other women assaulted, churches 
     and schools bombed and burned, cemeteries desecrated, and 
     Christian institutions harassed and intimidated. There have 
     been scores of incidents involving extortions, illegal and 
     preventive detention, tortures, custodial deaths, anti-
     conversion laws that would make genuine conversions illegal. 
     All these have created an atmosphere for Christians in many 
     parts of India to live in fear; these are increasing 
     unabated. This situation is antithetical to the declared 
     ideals of the Republic of India and the provisions of its 
     Constitution. Anti-Christian crusade and ``hate campaigns'' 
     being waged through pamphlets, posters, and newspapers, lead 
     to more violence. The pattern and intensity of these attacks 
     and provocative comments by leaders close to the Government 
     and the ruling Coalition show that attacks are organized 
     efforts to intimidate a peace-loving minority community in 
     India.
       It is appalling to note that your Government is still in 
     the denial mode by labeling these attacks as `isolated 
     incidents' and even as the work of some ``foreign hands.''
       These attacks and the inability to control the growing 
     violence of self-proclaimed Hindu nationalists against 
     Christians have simply tarnished India's image as a secular 
     nation. They have created a feeling of absence of rule of law 
     in India and apprehension as to whether the Indian democracy 
     is teetering towards a theocratic state. The U.S. Commission 
     on International Religious Freedom has recommended that India 
     be closely monitored for ``denial of religious Freedom to her 
     people.'' Even the U.S. Congressional Record cites a number 
     of these attacks on Christians and depicts them as indicative 
     of the depth of religious intolerance in India. These acts 
     are atrocious also because of the well-acknowledged loyalty 
     and commitment of Indian Christian community to the welfare 
     of India demonstrated through participation in the 
     independence struggle, in the established of schools and 
     institutions of health care and patriotic sacrifices of 
     thousands of Christians.
       Your visit now provides a fitting opportunity for the 
     Government of India to assure the world and the U.S. that 
     India will continue its constitutional commitment as a 
     secular state to protect the interests of all people, 
     including the religious minorities, and uphold the 
     constitutional freedom to ``profess, practice and propagate'' 
     one's religious faith. We urge you to set forth the steps so 
     far taken by the Government to bring the culprits, both 
     individuals and organizations, to justice. It is imperative 
     that you explain to the international community steps taken 
     by the Government to protect the Christian community of 
     India. We ask that the Government of India make every effort 
     to put an end to the atrocities committed against Christians 
     in the great land of India. May your leadership be 
     strengthened through such decisive actions. We pray to God to 
     help you in such efforts.
           Respectfully,
       The National Association of Asian Indian Christians in the 
     USA, Inc., P.O. Box 279, Martinsville, NJ 08836.

     

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