Human Rights Wing (Shiromani Akali Dal)

The Human Rights Wing of the Shiromani Akali Dal was the party wing through which Jaswant Singh Khalra and Jaspal Singh Dhillon looked into the police cremations of Amritsar district and, on 16 January 1995, made them public. Reduced to Ashes, the 2003 report prepared for the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab, says Khalra was the wing's general secretary, Jaspal Singh Dhillon its chairman and Amrik Singh Muktsar its vice-chairman, and that they had been trying to make the Akali Dal adopt justice and the rule of law as part of its programme.

How the work began: The book says that in the middle of 1994 police arrested Dara Singh, a cooperative bank director and a friend of Khalra, and later killed him in a fake encounter as an "unidentified militant". Khalra then found that his body had been cremated at the Durgiana Mandir ground in Amritsar, labelled "unidentified and unclaimed".

Key moments

• 16 January 1995: the wing held a press conference at Chandigarh and released a press note signed by Khalra and Dhillon. The press note said that the wing's two-person team had examined the records of only three cremation grounds, at Durgiana Mandir in Amritsar, Tarn Taran and Patti. As the book prints it, the note put the bodies cremated as unclaimed at about 2,000 at Durgiana Mandir from 1 June 1984 to the end of 1994, 700 at Tarn Taran and 400 at Patti, and asked for an inquiry by the CBI under the High Court's scrutiny.
• 18 January 1995: K.P.S. Gill, then Punjab's director general of police, held a press conference in Amritsar to rebut the allegations. The book says he told reporters that thousands of Sikh youths who had gone abroad under false names were claiming to be missing persons killed by security forces. Human Rights Watch quotes Khalra's April 1995 recollection of Gill calling the wing's people ISI agents.
• January 1995: the wing filed a writ petition in the Punjab and Haryana High Court. The Court dismissed it as "vague" and said the wing lacked standing to bring it, the book says.
• 6 September 1995: Khalra, the wing's general secretary, was abducted from outside his house by armed commandos of the Tarn Taran police, according to the book.
• 12 December 1996: in its order sending the matter to the National Human Rights Commission, the Supreme Court said it could not "close its eyes" to the contents of the wing's press note of 16 January 1995.

Where it stands: The sources found do not say what became of the wing after Khalra's abduction. The book treats its press note as the start of what it calls the matter of police abductions leading to illegal cremations. Khalra's widow, Bibi Paramjit Kaur Khalra, later formed the Khalra Mission Organisation, according to The Wire.