Justice Kuldip Singh

Justice Kuldip Singh was a judge of the Supreme Court of India from 14 December 1988 to 21 December 1996. For the Panth he is the judge before whom the case of Bhai Jaswant Singh Khalra's abduction came in 1995, and whose orders opened the Supreme Court's inquiry into Punjab's secret cremations. After retiring he worked with the human rights committee that documented those cases. This page follows Reduced to Ashes, the final report of that committee.

Key moments

• 11 September 1995, five days after Khalra was abducted: Bibi Paramjit Kaur Khalra went to the SGPC, whose president, Gurcharan Singh Tohra, sent a telegram to Justice Kuldip Singh. He treated it as a habeas corpus petition and told Punjab's officials to produce Khalra or account for him within a week (p. 7).
• 15 November 1995: on the Punjab advocate-general's request the Court directed the CBI to investigate. Justice Kuldip Singh wrote that if the facts in Khalra's press note were correct, even partially, it would be "a gory-tale of human rights violations", and that it was horrifying to visualize so many bodies cremated by the police as unidentified. The book says the order set no limit on the inquiry by territory, numbers or the way bodies were disposed of (p. 8).
• 7 August 1996: the Court ordered Punjab to pay Rs 10 lakh as interim compensation to Khalra's widow, and called the kidnapping of a person whose family does not know if he is alive "the worst crime against humanity" (p. 10).
• 12 December 1996: a bench of Justices Kuldip Singh and S. Saghir Ahmad asked the National Human Rights Commission to examine the matter, told the Registry to send the earlier orders and the CBI's sealed-cover reports within a week, and said any compensation the Commission awarded would be binding and payable (pp. 615 to 618).
• 10 December 1997: the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab (CCDP) held its first convention at Chandigarh. It asked Punjab's government to set up a truth commission, as the Akali Dal had promised in its manifesto, and resolved that a people's commission of three retired high court judges would take up the complaints if the government broke that pledge. Justice Kuldip Singh, then a former Supreme Court judge and a patron member of the CCDP, was put in charge of that initiative (p. 75).
• 5 June 1998: he was in the CCDP delegation that met Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal to present its findings (p. 107).

The book says that six years after the Supreme Court referred the cremations to the Commission, the Commission had made no meaningful progress (p. 10). In 2002 he became chairperson of the Delimitation Commission of India, which redrew constituency boundaries after the 2001 census, according to the Wikipedia article on him and DeshGujarat.

Remembered for: a telegram turned into a petition within days of Khalra's abduction, and an order that put no limit on how far the CBI could look.