Harjinder Singh of Khabbe Rajputan

Harjinder Singh of Khabbe Rajputan village, near Mehta in Amritsar district, was a leader of the Sikh Students Federation. He was 36 when he was killed in 1992. His case is told in Reduced to Ashes (2003), the report of the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab (CCDP). The CCDP recorded the case from his brother Kulwinder Singh in its incident report forms. What follows is that account; the case summary reports no court inquiry into his death.

Key moments

• 1982: Harjinder, an Amritdhari Sikh student at Khalsa College, Amritsar, became an active member of the Sikh Students Federation. The book says he began to associate with Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, Amrik Singh, then president of the Federation, and Harminder Singh Sandhu, its general secretary.
• June 1984: he was under arrest when the army attacked Sri Harmandir Sahib, and he took his M.A. examination as a prisoner.
• 1990: the book says he went underground after forming an armed organisation called the "Khalistan National Army". For the next two years his family suffered police harassment, long illegal detention and torture; his wife, a primary-school teacher, was forced to quit her job.
• Last week of March 1992: SHO Surjit Singh of Mehta police station raided the family's village house and took his brother and two maternal uncles into illegal custody. The book says that under torture they gave the Jalandhar address of his wife's parents, and that the police then arrested his wife's father and others and tortured them until they gave the address where Harjinder was living.
• 5 April 1992: according to the CCDP's record, a midnight raid led by SSP Paramjit Singh Gill and SHO Surjit Singh of Mehta police station arrested Harjinder Singh and his wife on 5 April 1992. Their six-month-old daughter was handed to his wife's sister. His father and other relatives were already in illegal custody, some at the Mall Mandi interrogation centre in Amritsar and others at Beas police station.
• 23 June 1992: The CCDP's record says Harjinder and his wife were killed in an encounter staged by the Mehta police on 23 June 1992. The CBI's list of unidentified cremations shows only one cremation under FIR no. 69/92, on 24 June 1992, so one of the two cremations is not accounted for.
• The police released his father, his father-in-law and other relatives 20 days after the arrest, and his brother three days after the "encounter". His parents had to pay the SHO a large sum to save his brother's life.

What he is remembered for: he is named in the book as a prominent Sikh Students Federation man who passed from the Federation of 1982 to an armed organisation of his own, and whose arrest with his wife ended, in the family's account, in a staged "encounter". The SSP who led the midnight raid, Paramjit Singh Gill, is also the officer to whom other families went for news of their relatives.