At the
civil hospital in Ludhiana, the entrance to the emergency burns ward
has been blocked to the public. Policemen keep watch outside the
building. Visitors to the hospital are not permitted to walk
through the corridor to the adjoining wing. The emergency room has
been vacated of four beds and turned into a prison. All this has been
done to confine an 83-year-old man.
Surat Singh – whose
name is prefixed by “Bapu” (father) denoting respect for his
age – began a fast-unto-death on January 16. At first, the
Parkash Singh Badal-led government ignored him. Three weeks later, on
February 8, over a hundred policemen arrived at his house in village
Hussanpura outside Ludhiana with an ambulance forcibly lifting Singh
from his courtyard on to a stretcher, before shifting him to the
civil hospital.
Inside the sparse hospital room, where he has
been placed under preventive arrest, Singh lies on the bed, only
his grey eyes and flowing white beard visible over a blanket. A navy
blue turban is loosely tied on his head. A tube has been stuck to his
forehead with surgical tape and inserted into a nostril to feed
him.
Despite the tube, and his feeble health, Singh spoke with
force about the cause that has led him to a hunger strike.
“After
the Indian government’s military attack on Darbar Sahib [Golden
Temple], Sikhs who had been living peacefully with their families
could not control their religious sentiments and left their homes and
got armed," he said. "They continue to be the state's
political prisoners. The state must release those who have completed
their full jail terms now, in some instances of 15 to 20
years."
There are at least 43 such prisoners in jails
across the country, beyond their terms, in their old age, he said.
“The least the state government can do is work to bring them back
to Punjab, making it easier for their families to visit them,"
Singh said. "Arrogant rulers may not listen, but people do.”
Ghosts
of the past
The state government does indeed appear to be
worried about the possible fallout of Surat Singh’s fast. The
ghosts of the past still linger in Punjab. Several of those who
reached adulthood witnessing the insurgency in Punjab in the
mid-'80s, when Sikh nationalists took on the Union government to
pursue their demands for independence, still speak of those years
with anguish. It is undeniable that the Union government had used
questionable methods to suppress the Khalistan movement.
“Thousands
disappeared and perished and we do not know what happened to them,”
said Ranjeet Singh Gill, who spent 19 years in prison convicted for
allegedly killing Congress Member of Parliament Lalit Maken in
retaliation for the 1984 riots. "No one has been held
responsible."
During those turbulent years, Singh, a
school teacher, left his job and joined active politics. In 1987, he
became the general secretary of the United Akali Dal under Baba
Joginder Singh, and its de-facto in-charge. The second of his
five daughters, Sarvinder Kaur, joined student politics. Her husband
was also a student leader.
“We were organising protests at
the university in coordination with our leaders,” Kaur recalled.
“We were responding to a wrong done to us by the Indian government.
We are Sikhs, if anyone hits at us, we will hit back. We will not
accept what is wrong and move on.”
But in the following
decade, like many other families keen to avoid state persecution,
Singh’s family migrated abroad. His children became American
citizens. Sarvinder Kaur is now a businesswoman in Chicago. “My
husband has been unable to return because of restrictions by the
Indian government,” she said, while waiting outside the police
commissioner's office with an application asking for bail for her
father. She was dressed in a white and orange salwaar kameez, her
head covered with a dupatta. A thick black band revealed a kirpan
slung across her shoulder.
In January, Kaur arrived with nine
other members of Surat Singh's family to support him as he began his
fast. As his situation worsened, and he was placed under arrest by
the police, apart from Kaur, Singh's son Ravinderjit Singh, who
owns a transport business in California, stayed on. On February 26,
while he was attending to his father in the hospital, the police
picked him up, along with three other visitors. Hours later, Surat
Singh was forcibly anaesthetised and a feeding tube was pushed down
his nose. Ravinderjit was placed under preventive arrest on charges
of instigating his father to start the fast. He has been in Ludhiana
jail since then.
“There is no order, or justice here,"
Singh said. "In 2011, I was on fast unto death 10 hours longer
than Anna Hazare for a strong Lokpal bill. Was it even then my son
and others had provoked me to kill myself? I am a terrorist now. Was
I not a terrorist then?” As Singh spoke, five policemen kept watch
inside the ward. “This government which would steal even from the
stomachs of those who are hungry, if it could, is insisting on
force-feeding me. A good government governs for the people, their
well-being. Is it so in Punjab?”
Who
are the prisoners?
A day after Surat Singh's arrest, on
February 27, Sumedh Singh Saini, the Director General of Police, the
state's highest police official, held a press conference citing legal
grounds for refusing his petition, and described his demands as
illogical.
He pointed out that a list discussed by Surat Singh
contained 82 names, some of whom have been arrested as recently as
2014, and that several were undertrials. The Supreme Court had stayed
the release of life convicts across the country with an order in July
2014, Saini pointed out, and in some cases, the prisoners were jailed
in other states.
Sarvinder Kaur, however, says that Surat
Singh had not submitted any list of 82 prisoners, and that Singh's
plea was that the state government make a more concerted effort to
secure release of several Sikh prisoners identified by legal and
civil society groups as eligible for consideration of
release.
Multiple lists of such Sikh prisoners have been
prepared by Punjab's religious and political groups. Though the
ruling Shiromani Akali Dal and the Shiromani Gurudwara Parbandhak
Committee, a body responsible for management of gurudwaras, have
refrained from publicly commenting on Surat Singh's fast and his
subsequent detention, in 2014, they too had released lists of 13 and
120 prisoners, respectively.
“The list that the DGP
presented to the press, which included names of a few undertrials is
a list I have maintained and updated since 2004, when I was a law
student and part of the Sikh Students' Federation,” explained
Ludhiana-based lawyer Jaspal Singh Manjhpur, who is aiding Surat
Singh. “At that time, there were more than 200 Sikh prisoners on
the list. Over the years, we have advocated successfully for the
release of several. I estimate now there are 70 to 75 prisoners who
have served 15 to 20 year jail terms after being jailed during the
1980s-'90s.”
Arjun Sheoran, a lawyer associated with
People's Union for Civil Liberties, Punjab-Haryana, said that the
Punjab government's claim that the state was unable to act because of
a Supreme Court stay on release of life prisoners in 2014 was
inaccurate. “The state can persuade its coalition-partner BJP to
file an interim application,” he pointed out. Further, a section of
lawyers and activists has pruned and prepared a list of 23 prisoners
for whom they argued the state could appeal to the union government
in the interests of justice for those caught in Punjab's turbulent
decades.
Old and infirm
In his list, Manjpur lists
eight of the 23 prisoners under the category “Senior Citizens”,
all of whom are in Jalandhar jail in Punjab. All eight were
convicted of robbing Rs 5.7 crore from a bank in 1987 and sentenced
to 10 years in jail after a 15-year long trial that completed in
2012. The police claimed these funds were used to finance the wave of
militancy in the 1980s in Punjab, following the Indian security
forces' despoiling of the Golden Temple during Operation Bluestar and
the retaliation for killing of Sikhs during the 1984 riots.
Among
these eight is “Bapu” Harbhajan Mann, who is now 85 years old,
and 70-year old “Bapu” Mann Singh who underwent a heart bypass in
prison a few years ago.
The list includes those convicted of
killing Congress Chief Minister Beant Singh in a car-bombing in 1995.
Singh was targeted for the alleged killings and disappearances of
Sikhs during anti-insurgency operations. Several of those convicted
in the case will complete 20 years of imprisonment this August.
Also
on the list is Devinderpal Singh Bhullar, a lifer in Delhi's Tihar
Jail convicted in the 1993 Delhi bomb blast case that targeted a
Youth Congress politician. Bhullar, in prison for 20 years, often in
solitary confinement, has been admitted to the Institute of Human
Behaviour and Allied Sciences in Delhi since 2010 for psychiatric
treatment.
Divided opinion among Sikhs
Through the last
90 days of Surat Singh's fast, Sikh diaspora and social media groups
have been active in depicting his fast and pledge as part of the
struggle for the Sikh cause. But the local media has been largely
silent.
“The Badal-government has a chokehold over the
media," said a senior journalist. "Print media fear loss of
revenue from government advertisements, and the Badal family sets the
tone of broadcast news with its own channel PTC, and its links with
Fastway, the sole digital cable TV service provider. There have been
instances when reporters have been threatened, and channels' telecast
is routinely interfered with if they do not comply with what the
government wants.”
But there is scepticism too regarding
Surat Singh's fast. Ranjeet Singh Gill, who was set to begin his
PhD in biotechnology when the events after Operation Bluestar turned
him towards militancy, said those like Surat
Singh, then active in Punjab politics, could have
intervened to save Sikh youths from what followed. “Surat
Singh was then a close associate of Jarnail Singh
Bhindranwale," he said. "Why did they not negotiate with
the government?”
Some people also point to a similar series
of fasts undertaken by Gurbaksh Singh Khalsa, a Sikh activist who was
in jail on terror charges and has been out on bail since 2010.
While
Gurbaksh Singh's first fast in Mohali in Punjab led to parole for
three people convicted in a case related to former Punjab Chief
Minister Beant Singh's assassination, his second fast ended without
any results. He abandoned his fast on January 15, 2015, having spent
58 days at a gurudwara in Ambala in Haryana and five days in
hospital. The next morning, on January 16, Surat Singh began his
fast, keeping a pledge taken in November 2013 that he would continue
Gurbaksh's efforts. “Since Gurbaksh has left the struggle, I will
keep his ardas[pledge] and fast till my death,” he
stated.
Cynical politics
Besides the sense of dishonour
some associate with Gurbaksh Singh Khalsa's breaking of
an ardas before achieving his stated purpose, his second
attempt at a hunger strike is viewed as part of the political
one-upmanship between the ruling party Shiromani Akali Dal and its
coalition partner BJP in the period preceding the assembly elections
in Delhi.
Two weeks after Gurbaksh Singh had begun his second
fast on November 14, 2014, images surfaced on social media of him
attending an organised in Delhi by the Rashtriya Sikh Sangat, the
Sikh arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh. Radical Sikh groups that
had thus far backed Khalsa suddenly turned against him, calling him a
turncoat. In his defence, Khalsa stated that the photographs were
from November 9 when he had been called to Delhi by Home Minister
Rajnath Singh to discuss the issue of Sikh political prisoners. It
was five days after this meeting that Khalsa had started his second
fast from Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled Haryana.
During the
fast, leaders of the party's BJP Kisan Morcha and the party's
spokesperson in the state visited Khalsa. However, by January, BJP
Punjab had categorically stated that it did not support Khalsa's
demands for release of Sikhs political prisoners citing party
president Amit Shah's statement.
Chief Minister Parkash Singh
Badal understands the emotive appeal of the question of Sikh
prisoners in the state. In 2012, he had claimed credit for obtaining
clemency for Balwant Singh Rajaona, convicted in the Beant Singh
assassination case, by meeting the then President Pratibha
Patil.
Despite the Shiromani Akali Dal's avowed support to the
cause of these prisoners, the party along with the Shiromani
Gurudwara Parbandhak Committee seems to have reduced the issue
to political capital to be exploited when it suits it the most.
For
this, the party seem intent on not allowing Surat Singh to either
die, or live on his terms.
