Amrik Singh Muktsar

Amrik Singh Muktsar, in the text of Reduced to Ashes, was vice-chairman of the human rights wing of the Shiromani Akali Dal. The book says that Jaswant Singh Khalra, who had joined the wing, worked there with Jaspal Singh Dhillon, its chairman, and Amrik Singh Muktsar, its vice-chairman, trying to make the Akali Dal take up justice and the rule of law as serious parts of its political programme, and that Khalra was the wing's general secretary (pp. 53 to 54).

Key moments

• 16 January 1995: the wing holds a press conference at Chandigarh about the secret police cremations that Khalra had uncovered in Amritsar district; the press release was signed by Khalra and Dhillon (p. 54).
• August 1995: with Khalra under pressure from threats by SSP Ajit Singh Sandhu and visits by Intelligence Bureau officers, Khalra discusses his fears with Dhillon and Amrik Singh Muktsar, with the retired judge Ajit Singh Bains and with three Chandigarh lawyers. All of them advise him to ask the High Court for bodyguards and to leave Amritsar for a time; he answers that asking for bodyguards would go against his principles (p. 59).
• 7 April 1996: he gives a statement to the CBI in the Khalra case, as do Dhillon and, on other dates, the SGPC president Gurcharan Singh Tohra and Justice Bains (p. 59, notes).
• May 2003: the title page of Reduced to Ashes names Ram Narayan Kumar "with Amrik Singh, Ashok Agrwaal and Jaskaran Kaur", and the copyright is held by Kumar and Amrik Singh. The book does not say in so many words that its co-author and the wing's vice-chairman are one man (see the analysis).

What he is remembered for. The book names him among the Akali Dal figures who tried to put human rights on the party's agenda, and as one of the friends Khalra turned to when the threats against him grew. A review of the book in The Tribune lists an Amrik Singh among its four authors, researchers of the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab, and says that they documented 672 cases of police cremation in Amritsar district by interviewing relatives and going through police records.