Why is the film Punjab 95/Satluj’s truth-telling of illegal abductions, enforced disappearances and secret cremations so disturbingly unsettling today? Why is the methodology of the human rights investigation it references so significant in the annals of human rights work, globally? The first reason is that the story of impunity and systematic institutional brutality against a category of people deemed the “enemy,” stripped of all humanity and positioned beyond the ambit of law, is not merely Punjab’s story. It is also the ground truth of human rights advocates unearthing Kashmir’s multiple mass war graves, of Manipur’s counting the dead of extra-judicial executions and of Chhattisgarh’s enforced disappearances. Necropolitics scars South Asia. Sri Lanka’s three-decades-long Eelam warscape is dotted with the continuous turning up of mass graves in the north and makes for the island nation’s consistent ranking second globally for the highest number of enforced or involuntary disappearances. A region scarred by impunityCommon, too, is the complex denial that the struggle for justice faced then and now. The demand for amnesties, voiced by defiant law and order institutions and backed by the political class, silences the claims for accountability and exhausts the struggle of suffering families to reclaim the dignity of their shattered lives. Spirited human rights defenders push back against the orchestrated assault on the integrity of their fact-finding and threats to their own safety, but are defeated by procedural indifference, as was the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab (CCDP).Activist Paramjit Kaur, Jaswant Singh Khalra’s widow, watches stoically the spin of justice. Nine policemen were convicted in her husband’s illegal abduction, torture and murder and the tossing of his dismembered body in the Harike canal. Exactly one policeman remains in custody. Satnam Singh and Jasbir Singh, both serving life sentences, are out on parole or bail. The former Deputy Superintendent of Police Jaspal Singh, out on bail May 26, 2023, has since absconded. The controversy surrounding Khalra’s politics, the righteous clamour for balance against what is criticised as one-sided propaganda and the backlash of the impunity defenders against human rights wallahs accused of fronting for foreign agencies, has obscured the second rationale for foregrounding this human rights case – that is, the monumental methodology behind the building of the “secret cremations” case. Piecing together the evidenceIt begins with the remarkable evidentiary insight of Khalra’s linking the bureaucratic notation for requisitioning wood for cremation with illegal abductions and the painstaking putting together of stray fragments of evidence into a solid case exposing the institutional crime of enforced disappearances and secret cremations. Khalra was then a member of the Akali Dal’s human rights wing. There were routine announcements of deaths in police encounters. Whispers swirled of mass secret cremations by police of unidentified and unclaimed bodies. In 1993, the police released figures of 2,119 militants killed that year. The trail of a friend – the director of a cooperative bank, illegally abducted by the police – led to his secret cremation as an unclaimed body in the municipal crematorium of Durgiana Mandir. From there emerged the beginning of the numbers evidence: receipts recorded of police requisitioning 300 kgs of wood necessary to burn a body, with registers also recording identified name/village, partially identified and unidentified bodies.Also read: ‘Satluj’s’ Ban Shows India Still Treats Punjab’s Dead as a Security Problem, Not a Historical OneIn January 1995, Khalra revealed to the press that in three cremation grounds at the epicentre of the insurgency, 400 bodies in Patti, 700 in Tarn Taran and 2,000 in Durgiana Mandir, had been secretly cremated as unidentified between 1984 and 1994 (a Central Bureau of Investigation field inquiry confirmed 2,097 bodies cremated: 582 identified, 279 partially identified and 1,239 unidentified). The real challenge was to establish a connection between the complaints of abduction and the reports of secret cremation. The illegal abduction was witnessed and then the person disappeared. That connection was established in Baldev Singh’s affidavit relating to his son’s illegal abduction from a cinema hall, the news report of his killing in a police encounter, the father’s dash to the General Hospital, the evidence of the body taken for post-mortem and his arrival at Durgiana Mandir to see police light the funeral pyre on an unclaimed body.The architecture of ‘Reduced to Ashes’The unravelling begins with the Supreme Court ordering the CBI inquiry. The painstaking piecing together of foolproof evidence should be a rebuke to the many who cast aspersions on the intent of human rights activists. Controversy over Khalra’s “liberation” politics needs to be balanced alongside his condemnation of violence against civilians by state and non-state actors. He went on a five-day hunger strike against the killing of Hindus by unidentified militants. Khalra’s story is but one piece of the monumental architecture of the secret cremations case. Its painstaking methodology is a subject of study in human rights programmes at elite universities. It is important to remember that Khalra did not work alone. A key actor in the tedious, unglamorous pursuit of justice was the indomitable and brilliant human rights activist Ram Narayan Kumar, as well as other members of the Delhi-based Committee for Information and Initiative in Punjab (CIIP). Eventually it was the CCDP, founded in 1997, which took forward Khalra’s work in Punjab. The gargantuan investigative project undertaken by the CCDP is recorded in the massive report Reduced to Ashes by Ram Narayan Kumar with Amrik Singh, Ashok Agarwal and Jaskaran Kaur (2003). Initially, a large number of well-known individuals and organisations were associated with the coalition. But the formidable task of assembling the mass of painstakingly transcribed and translated testimonies of suffering families and officials involved in remote villages and the shifting of tens of thousands of documents assembled to build an evidentiary case in the face of the administration’s indifference, saw most withdraw. In the end, it was left to Kumar and three volunteers, who tenaciously persisted to amass the evidence.Alluding to the scepticism over intent that haunts human rights investigations, Peter Rosenblum, Clinical Director of Human Rights Programme, Harvard Law School, wrote in the preface to Reduced to Ashes: “In this case the reader needn’t trust the good faith of the author or agree with their stated or unstated opinion. The report presents massive evidence gathered from families and officials who participated and suffered in the struggles in Punjab. The story is a rebuke to the NHRC that has advanced so little in the course of the investigation. The sheer mass of testimonies impossible to dismiss at hand…”How the NHRC diluted the caseCIIP pursued the case through the labyrinthine process of the Supreme Court and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), which was directed by the court to pursue the investigation. The Punjab mass cremations case could have been an example of the triumph of the rights to justice over impunity. Many human rights advocates were associated with it, including the Physicians for Human Rights and Bellevue/New York University Program for Survivors of Torture. But NHRC reduced the mandate. Instead of investigating the secret cremations as a systemic and flagrant violation of the right to life, it adopted the narrow issue of whether the victims’ bodies were cremated according to police rules. Refusing to hold any officials accountable for the violations, the commission repeatedly stated in its orders:“[We] are not expressing any opinion about the culpability or otherwise of any police officer or officials… of the state for the unlawful and unceremonious cremations of the deceased, without following the rules, conventions and the humanitarian law.” No family members or officials were called for testimony.After nine years, the NHRC recommended monetary relief awarding Rs 27.94 crore to the families of 1,513 identified victims in the Punjab mass cremations case. Ashok Agarwal, one of the lawyers associated with the case, nonetheless, regards the award as a benchmark achievement.Also read: ‘Satluj’: When History Becomes Inconvenient, the First Casualty Is Not Just Truth But MemoryMeanwhile, the CCDP’s struggle for justice within Punjab continued along multiple paths. The electoral promise of the state setting up a Truth Commission was betrayed, but there was nothing to stop the convening of a People’s Commission on Human Rights violations to raise public awareness and give the suffering families their day of truth in this quasi-judicial process. In August 1997, the three-judge panel of retired Justices Tewatia, Suresh and Jaspal Singh constituted the commission and received 524 complaints (422 found admissible). The hearings were blocked by a court order that deemed them a threat to public order.The struggle against impunity continues, mobilised by human rights defenders like Khalra and platforms like CIIP/CCDP in Punjab, the Association of Parents of Disappeared in Kashmir and Extra Judicial Execution Victim Families Association and Human Rights Alert in Manipur. Rita Manchanda is co-chair of PIPFPD, a scholar and activist.