Punjab Human Rights Organisation (PHRO)

The Punjab Human Rights Organisation (PHRO) was a registered human rights group in Punjab in the years of the Kharku struggle. Amnesty International gave its head office as House 22, Sector 2, Chandigarh. Its chairman was Ajit Singh Bains, a retired judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court. The sources found do not say when it was founded, how large it was or how long it kept working.

In April 1992 Amnesty International wrote that the Punjab press had carried articles in which Bains alleged that he had received death threats from the Punjab police, warning him to stop his work with the PHRO, which he then chaired.

Key moments

• Early 1992: soon after the Congress government of Beant Singh took office, Ram Singh Biling, a reporter for the Punjabi daily Ajit and the PHRO's secretary for Sangrur, was "picked up and unceremoniously executed", according to Reduced to Ashes.
• 3 April 1992: Amnesty International says Ajit Singh Bains was arrested in Chandigarh. His arrest was apparently denied at first, and he was produced before the Deputy Commissioner of Ropar on 4 April. Reduced to Ashes says it was not acknowledged for two days, that he was shown in public in handcuffs and that he was then booked under TADA over a meeting at Anandpur Sahib on 18 March. It says an inquiry later ordered by the High Court found that his name was not in the original first information report. Chief Minister Beant Singh told the legislative assembly on 6 April that Bains would not be released because the organisation was engaged "in defending terrorists", the book reports.
• August 1992: the PHRO's general secretary, Malwinder Singh Malli, editor of the journal Paigam, was arrested.
• 25 September 1992: the human rights lawyer Jagwinder Singh was picked up from his home in Kapurthala by uniformed policemen and was never seen again, according to the book, which does not say he belonged to the PHRO.
• November 1992: newspapers carried a statement from Bains, described as heading the organisation, demanding the release of Baljinder Singh of Saido Lahil from illegal custody.

What it is remembered for: the authors of Reduced to Ashes write that the killing or disappearance of Biling and Jagwinder Singh and the arrests of Bains and Malli "effectively paralysed the regional human rights groups". They argue that the point of arresting Bains was not to convict him but to paralyse the PHRO and to demoralise other groups. That is the report's reading of events; the report was prepared for the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab.