Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab

The Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab (CCDP) came into existence on 9 November 1997. Its aim was to gather and cross-check information on people who had disappeared across Punjab, and to see that the matter of police abductions leading to illegal cremations reached a just and satisfactory final order. Its report, Reduced to Ashes, says the CCDP and its agenda have their origin in the work of Jaswant Singh Khalra, general secretary of the Akali Dal's human rights wing, who disappeared after Punjab Police commandos abducted him on 6 September 1995. It names three further aims: state accountability backed by public opinion, lobbying for Indian law to follow UN instruments on torture and enforced disappearance, and a debate on state power.

People: Ram Narayan Kumar was its convenor, and Justice Kuldip Singh, a former Supreme Court judge, was a patron member. Reduced to Ashes (May 2003) is credited to Kumar with Amrik Singh, Ashok Agrwaal and Jaskaran Kaur. Its acknowledgments thank Indira Jaising, who represented victims before the people's commission and fought the petition to ban it.

What it did

• 10 December 1997: its first convention, at Chandigarh, asked the Punjab government to set up the truth commission promised in the Akali Dal's February 1997 manifesto, and resolved to form a people's commission of three retired high court judges if it did not.
• 26 April 1998: it announced the Punjab People's Commission, headed by D. S. Tewatia, a former Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court. It received 524 complaints, 422 of them admissible.
• May 1998: it investigated the disappearance of Gurdev Singh Kaunke, former acting head priest of the Akal Takht, arrested on 25 December 1992. It says it obtained conclusive evidence that he was tortured and killed under torture.
• August 1999: its interim report analysed 838 incident reports. The CCDP says its disappointment with the NHRC, whose order of 13 January 1999 confined its inquiry to Amritsar district, made it all the more necessary to keep documenting.
• 20 December 1999: after petitions by Sudershan Goel and others, the Punjab and Haryana High Court restrained the people's commission from public sittings and from summoning government officers.
• October 1997 to October 2002: a team of mainly three volunteers collected 1,703 incident report forms, each checked in a second round of interviews. The CCDP estimates that only about 10 per cent of the families of the disappeared have come forward.

Its partners: The Delhi-based Committee for Information and Initiative on Punjab argued the cremation case before the NHRC and the Supreme Court; the report calls that committee's application to the Supreme Court "our application". The South Asia Forum for Human Rights published the report and coordinated its follow-up. Amnesty International's April 1998 report on the Khalra case described the CCDP as formed by lawyers and human rights activists to document violations. The report says a second volume was to follow; the sources found do not say what the CCDP has done since 2003.