DSP Rattan Lal Monga

Rattan Lal Monga (the report also spells it Ratan Lal) was a Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) in the Punjab Police. He is named in Reduced to Ashes, the report of the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab (CCDP), as the officer who ordered the shooting of two students outside the Golden Temple complex at Amritsar on 22 May 1992. What follows is the report's account, drawn from the incident report form of one student's family and from local witnesses. It is not a finding of a court, and the report gives no statement from DSP Monga.

The account: At about 1:30 p.m. on 22 May 1992 Harvinderjit Singh Gill, a 20-year-old student of Khalsa College, and his friend Mandeep Singh left the Golden Temple complex after meeting SGPC functionaries. In the report's account DSP Monga, in plain clothes, caught Harvinderjit by the arm and told him to be frisked. Harvinderjit, who did not know the man was a police officer, protested, and a scuffle followed. The report says DSP Monga then ordered his subordinates to shoot him, and Harvinderjit was shot dead on the road. Mandeep Singh ran into a tea shop; the report says DSP Monga came after him, had him dragged out and shot. The Sadar police station of Amritsar registered FIR No. 36 to present the killings as an encounter.

Afterwards: The police cremated both young men after recording them as "unidentified militants". The CBI's list of illegal cremations records them as partially identified, with names and fathers' names but no addresses. Harvinderjit's father went to the place of the shooting, where witnesses, mostly shopkeepers, told him how DSP Monga had killed both young men but refused to be quoted, for fear of antagonising the police. Petitions to the authorities went unacknowledged.

Key moments

• 22 May 1992: the two students are shot; FIR No. 36 is registered as an encounter.
• 23 May 1992: the Sadar Amritsar police cremate them, as the CBI's list records.
• 17 June 1992: the two fathers petition the Prime Minister for an impartial investigation and for action against the guilty officials.
• 2 January 1998: the Punjab and Haryana High Court, on a petition of 1997, says they may file a complaint in the lower court and that it will not investigate disputed facts of a case of 1992.

What he is remembered for: for being the officer whom the CCDP's report ties to the killing of Harvinderjit Singh Gill and Mandeep Singh, one of the cases it lists among those the police recorded as encounters. The report records no inquiry into the killings.