Majitha

Majitha is a town in Amritsar district, about 18 km north-east of the city of Amritsar, in the Majha region of Punjab. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, which calls it a village, says the Majithia surname comes from the place. Sardar Bahadur Sir Sundar Singh Majithia, the Chief Khalsa Diwan leader elected the first president of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee on 16 November 1920, was born at Majitha on 17 February 1872.

The police district. In the 1980s and 1990s Majitha also gave its name to one of the three police districts of Amritsar district, with Amritsar and Tarn Taran. The CBI listed 2,097 bodies that Punjab Police had cremated as unclaimed or unidentified between June 1984 and December 1994, and the lists are sorted by these three districts; the National Human Rights Commission's public notice of 2004 names them: Amritsar, Majitha and Tarn Taran. Reduced to Ashes, the 2003 report of the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab, gives the year-by-year counts for each district.

• Identified list, Majitha: the first cremation is dated 3 October 1987, with 13 in 1989, 38 in 1991 and 98 in 1992 (p. 162).
• Partly identified list: the first two are dated 8 October 1987, and 42 are listed for 1992 (p. 162).
• Unidentified list: four in 1984, the first by Jandiala police station on 5 June 1984, then 81 in 1991 and 70 in 1992 (p. 163).

Cases in the record. The book's case summaries place several families in this district.

• It says Sawinder Singh, a member of the Sikh Students Federation, was arrested in 1988 and held for weeks of illegal interrogation under torture at the CIA staff centre at Majitha before he was charged under TADA and the Arms Act (p. 448).
• It says Majitha police held Mohinder Singh, whose son Gurjit Singh had gone underground, illegally for three weeks and tortured him, then forced his family out of their house and used it as a police post until the middle of 1994 (p. 198).
• After police surrounded Gurdwara Ber Sahib on 2 December 1992, the book says the senior superintendent of police of Majitha allowed Baba Sewa Singh's body to be cremated under police supervision (p. 587).

What it means today. On 13 January 1999 the NHRC confined its inquiry to the 2,097 cremations at three crematoria in Amritsar district. Human Rights Watch and Ensaaf wrote in 2007 that it had not allowed a single victim family to testify. Jaswant Singh Khalra said at a press conference on 27 February 1995 that the matter concerned 25,000 unclaimed bodies in Punjab as a whole, so the Majitha lists are one district's share of a much larger question.