SP Khubi Ram

Khubi Ram was the superintendent of police (operations) at Tarn Taran in the early 1990s, alongside SSP Ajit Singh Sandhu. Reduced to Ashes (2003), the report of the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab (CCDP), names him 29 times on 21 pages. Its accounts come from the CCDP's case files and from families. They are allegations, not court findings, and the sources opened report no charge or verdict against him. The book also records an encounter he led that, it says, appears to have been genuine.

Key moments, as the book gives them:

• October 1990: after DSP Paramjit Singh took Ram Singh and other men from his village to the CIA Staff interrogation centre at Tarn Taran, the book says "SSP Ajit Singh Sandhu and SP (Operations) Khubi Ram brutally tortured" Ram Singh. He was then charged under the Arms Act and TADA, and was reported killed in an encounter on 28 December 1992 (pp. 182, 201).
• 3 November 1990: he led Tarn Taran police in an encounter near Bhullar village in which five men were killed; the book says it "appears to be a genuine encounter" (p. 249).
• April 1991: the book says his convoy saw two men, Nirvail Singh and Ram Dev, on a scooter on the Tarn Taran to Jhabal road and that he opened fire "without issuing any warning", killing both. The police reported it as an encounter in which three unidentified "militants" were killed (p. 259).
• 8 June 1992: with Sandhu he led the mixed force of police, Army and paramilitary units that surrounded an abandoned house at Behla; the book says six villagers were used as a human shield (pp. 194, 260, 294).
• 6 to 7 November 1992: the family of a young man held at Patti first asked the Communist leader Satpal Dang to intervene, and Dang telephoned Khubi Ram. The man's brother and the village sarpanch then met him, and he told them to return the next day to take the boys home. On 7 November he was not available, and that evening the family learnt that police had staged an encounter near Sabhra in which Tarlok Singh and two others were declared killed (pp. 503, 596 to 597).
• 14 August 1993: a police force he led, which included DSP Dilbagh Singh, raided the house of Harmesh Kumar and Badri Nath in Tarn Taran. The book says both brothers were tortured at the CIA staff centre, and that Harmesh Kumar disappeared (pp. 367 to 368).

Families also went to him for news; one father was told that his son had already been killed in an encounter (p. 316). The family of a man named Baldev Singh says, in the book's words, that Khubi Ram "personally supervised the physical torture" of Baldev's brother and old mother, "administering electric shocks" (p. 287).

His part in this history: with Sandhu, he is the name the CCDP's accounts return to for police operations in the Tarn Taran district between 1990 and 1993.