Sikh community observes death anniversary of prominent rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra
Islamabad: The Sikh community observed the death anniversary of prominent human rights activist, Jaswant Singh Khalra, in India and across the world.
According to Kashmir Media Service, Jaswant Singh Khalra was abducted by Indian police in Punjab on 6th September 1995, and tortured to death in late October 1995.
Khalra was investigating extra-judicial killings of Sikhs by the Indian police in Punjab. He was invited abroad to provide evidence of the murders of Sikhs. As per his report, 25,000 Sikhs were illegally cremated; 6,000 from Amritsar district alone. His documentation exposed an ecosystem of impunity and contextualized the individual asylum cases that had created the Sikh diaspora population in the West since 1984.
Dal Khalsa spokesperson Kanwar Pal Singh said the voice of the S Khalra was silenced forever because he became the voice of the voiceless. He said, the contribution and sacrifice of Khalra was unique as he was struggling to get justice for the disappeared persons who were illegally abducted, tortured, eliminated and cremated as unidentified bodies by the Indian police and other forces in Punjab.
Human rights activists continue to work on the cases of those innocents who were disappeared by the police despite the fact that the records of cremation grounds in other districts of Punjab which Khalra had not yet studied have now been sealed and are inaccessible.
In 2011, World Sikh Organization and Human Rights Law Network in Delhi launched ‘Khalra Centre for Human Rights Defenders’ to protect those heroes who like S Khalra risk their lives to speak out against injustice.
Chandigarh-based NGO, Punjab Documentation and Advocacy Project (PDAP), released a report in 2017, claiming to have identified 8,257 persons who disappeared from 1980 to 1995 from all across the state and were also cremated as unidentified and unclaimed bodies.
