Probe massacre of 2005 again: Kashmir’s Sikhs

An amalgam of Kashmiri Sikhs on Saturday demanded a re-investigation of the March 2000 massacre of 35 members of the minority community in the village of Chattisinghpora, outside the southern town of Anantnag. A local woman had also died of cardiac arrest on seeing piles of bullet-riddled corpses of the victims, raising the toll to 36.

The authorities had blamed the massacre, which took place in the intervening night of March 19 and 20, 2000 when the then US President, Bill Clinton, was on an official visit to India, on separatist militants. Five days after the massacre, the Army and Jammu and Kashmir police had claimed that five of the perpetrators had been killed in a gun battle in Anantnag’s Pathribal area and that all of them were foreign terrorists. But it turned out to be a fake encounter and all five slain men were unarmed civilians picked up by them from different areas of the district earlier.

The CBI had in 2006 charge-sheeted Brigadier Ajay Saxena, Lt. Col. Brajendra Pratap Singh, Major Sourabh Sharma, Major Amit Saxena and subedar Idrees Khan for killing five civilians. However, in January 2014, the Army closed the Pathribal fake encounter case, asserting “the evidence recorded couldn’t establish a prima-facie case against any of the accused”. The Army had taken up the case from the civil court in 2012 following the directions of the Supreme Court of India before which it had earlier challenged the CBI chargesheet that described the incident as a staged encounter and the killing of the civilians as cold-blooded murder.

“Even after a lapse of 16 years the people of Jammu and Kashmir, particularly the Sikhs of the Valley, are still waiting for justice to be delivered. We urge the state and Central governments to identify the real perpetrators, arrest them and then bring them to justice,” said All-Parties Sikh Coordination Committee chairman Jagmohan Singh Raina in a signed statement here. He said, “The truth must come out as to who killed innocent Sikh villagers. That is very important in order to rebuild people’s trust and faith in inquiries ordered by governments from time to time.”

He reiterated the demand that the slain Sikhs and local Muslims killed in the Pathribal “fake encounter” and subsequent police firing on protesters at neighbouring Brakapora be declared “national victims” and their families and other dependants be taken care of accordingly. “In spite of their loved ones falling prey to violence in such gory fashion, the families of these Sikhs not only chose to stay back in the Valley but also worked towards strengthening the feeling of communal harmony,” Mr. Raina said.

The APSCC leader said many questions remain unanswered. “The police had claimed that nearly 20 militants carried out the massacre at Chattisinghpora and later said five of them were killed, which too proved wrong. The question being asked by many in Kashmir even today is whether the security officials really knew who killed the innocent Sikhs of Chattisinghpora,” he said, demanding a fresh probe into the killings. “If they fail to do so we will see in it a huge injustice done to the Sikhs of Kashmir,” Mr Raina said.

He said even Mr Clinton, after terming the killings as most unfortunate, had asked India to investigate the incident and bring the perpetrators to justice. The then CM, Farooq Abdullah, had promised the killers would not be spared. “But they remain at large and justice continues to be denied to the victims’ families,” he said.