Ram Narayan Kumar

Ram Narayan Kumar was an Indian human rights researcher who spent roughly twenty years documenting enforced disappearances, killings in custody and illegal cremations by the Punjab Police. He belonged to Andhra Pradesh and was not a Sikh. A tribute written by a Sikh after his death called him the staunchest non-Sikh advocate of human rights in Punjab. According to an obituary he began rights work in 1975 and was jailed for 19 months for protesting the Emergency. He was a former Reuters Foundation Fellow at Oxford and was based in Austria, where he directed a project on impunity.

Key moments

• 1991 to 1997: publishes The Sikh Struggle and Confronting the Hindu Sphinx (both 1991) and The Sikh Unrest and the Indian State (1997).
• 6 September 1995: Jaswant Singh Khalra, who first found the record of mass cremations, is abducted from his Amritsar home and disappears. The Supreme Court later directs the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) to investigate 2,097 cases of illegal cremation in Amritsar district.
• June 2003: Kumar and three co-authors, Amrik Singh, Ashok Agrwaal and Jaskaran Kaur, publish Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab, the report of the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab, which he co-founded. Human Rights Watch describes the 634-page first volume as the product of six years of research, documenting 672 disappearance cases pending before the NHRC. Its researcher Smita Narula said ending state impunity for abuses in Punjab must become a priority.
• 2006: the NHRC awards compensation to the families of 1,245 people cremated illegally in Amritsar district, a result an obituary links to his work (SikhNet). That obituary dates the cremations to the mid-1980s. Human Rights Watch says the NHRC's inquiry covered cremations from 1984 to 1994.
• 2008: publishes Terror in Punjab: Narratives, Knowledge and Truth.
• 28 June 2009: dies of a sudden illness in Kathmandu, aged 56 according to one obituary, while documenting rights abuses in India's north east.

What he is remembered for. Kumar turned a grievance that Sikh families knew from their own homes into a body of case files, testimonies and official records. Wikipedia's account of the book says it draws on more than 500 testimonies from victims' families and has a chapter on illegal cremations listed in the files of the Central Bureau of Investigation. A Sikh tribute remembers him as an outsider who stayed with the question for about twenty years before turning to the north east of India.