Kash­miri docs sacked for false post-mortem re­ports                                    So, Time for Sikhs to Ask About False DNA Re­ports‘Coz We Want To Know: Who killed 35 Sikhs in Chit­tis­ingh­pora?                                    Mem­ory Runs Deep: Since PM Modi has claimed on Amer­i­can soil that democ­racy runs in In­di­a’s DNA, it is time for a dip-stick check. Af­ter all, Sikhs are only ask­ing who mixed the blood in those DNA sam­ples, so that they can un­der­stand who killed 35 Sikhs hours be­fore In­dian PM was to meet a US Pres­i­dent. A re­call by se­nior jour­nal­ist SP Singh.

Just when Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi tells the world that democ­racy runs in In­di­a’s DNA, it is ab­solutely the right time to ask a ques­tion about DNA adul­ter­ation.

At a time when Modi is vis­it­ing the United States, wow­ing and woo­ing Un­cle Sam with his charisma, and cre­at­ing Biden-Modi-Jill frames to hang in many Di­as­pora bhakats’ homes, the In­dian me­dia on Fri­day car­ried out news re­ports about two J&K doc­tors fal­si­fy­ing post-mortem re­ports of dead Kash­miri women to den­i­grate the In­dian se­cu­rity forces.

An Amer­i­can pres­i­dent & false post-mortem or DNA re­ports in Kash­mir must al­ways re­main a sub­ject of very spe­cial in­ter­est for Kash­miris, Sikhs and peo­ple across the coun­try, par­tic­u­larly when Modi claims democ­racy runs in In­di­a’s DNA.

Main­stream In­dian me­dia news re­ports on Fri­day de­scribed how two J&K doc­tors – Dr Bi­lal Ah­mad Dalal and gy­nae­col­o­gist Dr Nighat Sha­heen Chilloo – al­legedly fab­ri­cated ev­i­dence in the “2009 Shopian ‘rape-mur­der’ case” af­ter dis­cov­ery of the bod­ies of two young Mus­lim women on May 30, 2009 near a stream in Shopian, and en­su­ing protests di­rected against se­cu­rity per­son­nel.A CBI probe later found that the two women were never raped or mur­dered, and that the two doc­tors were “ac­tively work­ing” with Pak­istan and were part of a con­spir­acy to fal­sify the post-mortem re­port of the vic­tims, who had ac­tu­ally died due to drown­ing.

So, ba­si­cally, these doc­tors were try­ing to fo­ment dis­af­fec­tion against the In­dian state by falsely ac­cus­ing the se­cu­rity forces of rape and mur­der, me­dia re­ported.

But why should such a shock­ing piece of news be of acute in­ter­est to us in Pun­jab, more so the Sikh com­mu­nity?

It was an Amer­i­can pres­i­dent, Bill Clin­ton, on the eve of whose visit to In­dia, 35 Sikhs were killed in Chit­tis­ingh­pora, Kash­mir, and the In­dian au­thor­i­ties had even­tu­ally pro­vided DNA sam­ples of the “killers”.

For some rea­son, the com­mu­nity has stopped ask­ing who killed 35 Sikhs in Chit­tis­ingh­pora, Kash­mir, on March 25, 2000. Also, it no more raises ques­tions about the way “killers” were iden­ti­fied, killed in an “en­counter”, their bod­ies buried, then ex­humed, and DNA tests car­ried out.

It seems that by the time the re­ports of the DNA tests came out, the stake­hold­ers in the Sikh com­mu­nity, Pun­jab’s pol­i­tics and self-styled lib­eral sec­u­lars lost all in­ter­est in the story — a story that Kash­miri men and women re­mem­ber in all its finer de­tails and of­ten won­der why the Sikh ac­tivists or their pan­thic bod­ies like the SGPC, the Akal Takht or the en­tire line up of Akali Dals never both­ered to ask: “So, who killed 35 Sikhs just be­fore Bill Clin­ton landed in In­dia?”

Now that two Kash­miri doc­tors have been sacked for fal­si­fy­ing the post-mortem re­ports to tar­nish In­dian se­cu­rity forces, it is high time to ask who was mix­ing blood of a man and a woman, or re­plac­ing a man’s blood with fe­male’s, or a fe­male rel­a­tive’s blood with blood of two dif­fer­ent men, when all we wanted to know was who killed 35 Sikhs just be­fore a US pres­i­dent was to meet the In­dian prime min­is­ter?

Since In­dian se­cu­rity forces, in­ves­tiga­tive agen­cies and law en­force­ment is cur­rently on to how post-mortem re­ports are fal­si­fied, it is time New Delhi an­swers per­ti­nent ques­tions about DNA re­ports scan­dal.

Af­ter all, it in­ter­ests the en­tire Panth, the Sikhs, the Pun­jabis, the Kash­miris, and we hope, even the Amer­i­cans. In any case, since the regime in New Delhi and Nag­pur is now heav­ily in­vested in ped­dling stuff like *The Kash­mir Files,* and talk­ing about killings of mi­nori­ties in Kash­mir, this is the mo­ment to travel back in time and ask for DNA cor­rup­tion re­port.

But let us go back and un­der­stand the story chrono­log­i­cally.

March 20, 2000: Uniden­ti­fied ter­ror­ists don­ning army fa­tigues lined up and gunned down 35 Sikhs in front of two gur­d­waras in the dead of the night in Chit­tis­ingh­pora, Kash­mir, hours be­fore Bill Clin­ton was to touch down in Delhi. The 36th Sikh, a lone man, es­caped with a gun wound to tell the story.

Clearly, some force was try­ing to send a mes­sage to Wash­ing­ton. Pak­istan said In­dian se­cu­rity forces were be­hind the mas­sacre be­cause In­dia wanted to de­fame Pak­istan, while the Va­j­payee gov­ern­ment claimed it was the do­ing of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizbul Mu­jahideen, both groups backed by Pak­istan.

Clin­ton was still in In­dia when the break­through came. A man called Yaqub Wa­gay, a Mus­lim res­i­dent of Chit­tis­ingh­pora, had been caught. He had led the killers to the hap­less Sikhs. By all ac­counts, Clin­ton must have been mighty im­pressed.

If he was­n’t, he would have been a cou­ple of days later. Hours be­fore the then Union Home Min­is­ter L K Ad­vani was to visit the mas­sacre site on March 25, 2000, about 11 miles from Chit­tis­ingh­pora, in the vil­lage of Pan­chalthan, the army and the J&K po­lice gunned down five LeT ter­ror­ists who, it said, were re­spon­si­ble for the Chit­tis­ingh­pora mas­sacre of 35 Sikhs.

Ad­vani and then CM Fa­rooq Ab­dul­lah were given a spe­cial pre­sen­ta­tion with help of site maps about how the op­er­a­tion was car­ried out.

The Five Who “Killed” 35 Sikhs

Mean­while, some­thing else had hap­pened. Five men had gone miss­ing from two neigh­bour­hood vil­lages, Brar­i­ana­gan and Ha­lan, and Anant­nag town. Their kin claimed they were taken away by army men in the mid­dle of the night.

While the gov­ern­ment had claimed that five LeT ter­ror­ists were killed in a five-hour-long gun bat­tle, vil­lagers were not aware of any such shootout.

Sus­pi­cion arose that the five killed in en­counter and de­clared for­eign mil­i­tants could be the same five men ab­ducted from their houses by the army. A vil­lager from Pathribal, who saw the bod­ies of the men killed in the en­counter, recog­nised one of them as Jumma Khan, one of the ab­ducted men.

Anant­nag saw pro­ces­sions by rel­a­tives of the five miss­ing men. It be­came a ma­jor is­sue and the gov­ern­ment was forced to or­der a ju­di­cial en­quiry. There was no ex­pla­na­tion why the five dead ter­ror­ists were buried in grave­yards miles apart from each other.

Who killed the five al­leged ‘killers’ of 35 Sikhs?

Who killed the five men af­ter they had gone miss­ing from Brar­i­ana­gan and Ha­lan, the vil­lages near Chit­tis­ingh­pora, on March 25, 2000?

It is sur­pris­ing that the Sikh com­mu­nity did­n’t ask this ques­tion.

Protests over dis­ap­pear­ance of five, and more killings

An­gered by the dis­ap­pear­ance of five young men, pro­tes­tors marched to­wards the deputy com­mis­sion­er’s of­fice on April 3, 2000, where CRPF and po­lice opened fire, killing nine of them. Some of the dead were close rel­a­tives of the five miss­ing vil­lagers.

As the crescendo of protest rose, the J&K gov­ern­ment sus­pended a cou­ple of po­lice of­fi­cers, in­clud­ing the dis­trict po­lice chief, and or­dered that the bod­ies of the five men killed in the en­counter be ex­humed and DNA sam­ples be ex­am­ined.

The Ex­humed Killers of 35 Sikhs

On April 6-7, 2000, ex­huma­tion of bod­ies was car­ried out in full pub­lic view as rel­a­tives nar­rated what a par­tic­u­lar dead man was wear­ing, or the ring on a de­ceased’s fin­ger or the watch on his wrist. Every sin­gle de­tail they told about those still buried six-feet-un­der turned out to be true.

Among many oth­ers, Muza­mil Jaleel of The In­dian Ex­press, a ster­ling jour­nal­ist known for his coura­geous writ­ings and a stick­ler to the ethics of the pro­fes­sion, was pre­sent at the ex­huma­tion site.

Nov­el­ist, es­say­ist and award win­ning au­thor Pankaj Mishra, who had reached Chit­tis­ingh­pora within a day of the mas­sacre of 35 Sikhs, de­scribes the ex­huma­tion thus:

_”When the bod­ies were fi­nally ex­humed, al­most two weeks af­ter the mur­ders, they were dis­cov­ered to have been badly de­faced. The chopped-off nose and chin of one man—a lo­cal shep­herd—turned up in an­other grave. The body of a lo­cal sheep and buf­falo trader was head­less—the head could­n’t be found—but was iden­ti­fied by the trousers that were in­tact un­der­neath the army fa­tigues it had been dressed in. An­other charred corpse—that of an af­flu­ent cloth-re­tailer from the city of Anant­nag, pre­sum­ably kid­napped and killed be­cause he was, like the other four men, tall and well-built and could be made to re­sem­ble, once dead, a “for­eign mer­ce­nary”—had no bul­let marks at all. Re­mark­ably, for bod­ies so com­pletely burnt, the army fa­tigues that they were dressed in were al­most brand new.”

What hap­pened to the DNA?  

The truth about Patharibal was al­ready out, but ef­forts were made to cor­rupt the ev­i­dence. Muza­mil Jaleel re­ported how, on Feb­ru­ary 26, 2001, “the Hy­der­abad lab­o­ra­tory wrote to J&K Po­lice, say­ing that sam­ples sup­posed to be of a fe­male rel­a­tive of one of the vic­tims ac­tu­ally be­longed to a male.” Sim­i­larly, a sam­ple sup­posed to be of a fe­male rel­a­tive ac­tu­ally turned out to be the blood of two dif­fer­ent men. Ini­tially, the gov­ern­ment kept the scan­dal un­der wraps, but by the March of 2002, CM Fa­rooq Ab­dul­lah told the J&K as­sem­bly that of­fi­cials had in­deed tam­pered with the DNA sam­ples.

The Barak­pora Fir­ing Probe

Jus­tice S. R. Pan­dian Com­mis­sion, set up by the J&K Gov­ern­ment to in­quire into the Barak­pora fir­ing in­ci­dent in which nine peo­ple in­clud­ing rel­a­tives of Patharibal fake en­counter vic­tims were killed, in­dicted the se­cu­rity forces for “mur­der of peace­ful pro­tes­tors” and said these were clearly linked to the “faked en­counter killings in Pathribal”.

The Of­fi­cial Con­fes­sion

The gov­ern­ment, through then Deputy Com­mis­sioner of Anant­nag, fi­nally ac­knowl­edged the Pathribal en­counter to be fake, con­ceded that vic­tims were “in­no­cent” and or­dered grant of Rs 1 lakh as ex gra­tia re­lief to next of their kin.

The DNA Tam­per­ing

On March 15, 2002, an in­quiry into tam­per­ing of DNA ev­i­dence was or­dered, and a se­nior doc­tor and oth­ers in­volved were sus­pended. Fresh sam­ples ex­am­ined by CFSL, Kolkata es­tab­lished the truth be­hind the Pathribal fake en­counter. In­quiry by Kuchai Com­mis­sion found that foren­sic team and po­lice had fudged the DNA sam­ples.

The Milk­man Story

The en­tire po­lice case was built upon a man called Mo­ham­mad Yousuf Wa­gay, who, the po­lice had told Ad­vani and me­dia, had guided the “killers” to the vil­lage. His ar­rest within five days of the killings of 35 Sikhs was an­nounced in New Delhi in full glare of the world’s cam­eras by none less than the Union Home Sec­re­tary Ka­mal Pan­day. It was on the leads pro­vided by this Wa­gay guy that the po­lice had en­gaged five “for­eign ter­ror­ists” in a 5-hour-long gun bat­tle, killing all of them.

Even­tu­ally, the Anant­nag Po­lice ex­on­er­ated Mo­ham­mad Yousuf Wa­gay af­ter months of in­ves­ti­ga­tion and re­duced the charge from Sec­tion 302 for be­ing an ac­com­plice in the mur­der of 35 Sikhs to try­ing to dis­turb breach the peace (CrPC 107/​151).

It was now clear that Wa­gay was framed, that the five men killed at Pathribal and dubbed as for­eign mil­i­tants were in­no­cent lo­cal vil­lagers ab­ducted from their homes.

What hap­pened even­tu­ally?

Seven months af­ter killings of 35 Sikhs, CM Fa­rooq Ab­dul­lah an­nounced a ju­di­cial com­mis­sion headed by Jus­tice Pan­dian. It was to in­quire into Chit­tis­ingh­pora mas­sacre as well as Pathribal fake en­counter. The good judge had com­pleted his probe into Brak­pora fir­ing and linked it to Pathribal fake en­counter, but the CM had a change of heart and de­cided there was no need to probe Chit­tis­ingh­pora. Even­tu­ally, the Pathribal case went to the CBI in 2003 which took three years to fi­nally clinch that it was a fake en­counter and a “cold-blooded” plot by In­dian Army of­fi­cers.

So, what hap­pened in Chit­tis­ingh­pora? 

No one ever probed Chit­tis­ingh­pora mas­sacres. The CBI’s re­mit was lim­ited to Pathribal. The clear con­clu­sion is that no one wants to know the truth about Chit­tis­ingh­pora.

At one stage, se­cu­rity forces claimed to have ar­rested two Lashkar mil­i­tants Mo­ham­mad Suhail Ma­lik and Wasim Ahmed, both Pak­istani na­tion­als, and recorded their dis­clo­sure about in­volve­ment in Chit­tis­ingh­pora mas­sacre. They were ac­quit­ted by the trial court, but the or­der was chal­lenged in the Delhi High Court which again ac­quit­ted them in May 2012.

Even­tu­ally, and silently, they were repa­tri­ated to Pak­istan. No one made any noise.

*  *  *

In 2006, Madeleine Al­bright, the high­est-rank­ing woman in the his­tory of Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment at the time when she was US Sec­re­tary of State (1997-2001), wrote a book called “The Mighty and the Almighty: Re­flec­tions on Amer­ica, God, and World Af­fairs.” In its fore­word, Bill Clin­ton wrote:

Dur­ing my visit to In­dia in 2000, some Hindu mil­i­tants de­cided to vent their out­rage by mur­der­ing thirty-eight Sikhs in cold blood. If I had­n’t made the trip, the vic­tims would prob­a­bly still be alive. If I had­n’t made the trip be­cause I feared what re­li­gious ex­trem­ists might do, I could­n’t have done my job as pres­i­dent of the United States.

When it be­came a mat­ter of con­tro­versy, the pub­lisher, Harper Collins, said the ref­er­ence to “Hindu mil­i­tants” will be re­moved in sub­se­quent print­ings. Clin­ton’s of­fice never com­mented on it.

Clin­ton’s Deputy Sec­re­tary of State, Strobe Tal­bott, who de­scribed his “four­teen meet­ings at ten lo­ca­tions in seven coun­tries on three con­ti­nents” with the then In­dian For­eign Min­is­ter Jaswant Singh in his book, “En­gag­ing In­dia,” also ex­pressed se­ri­ous Amer­i­can mis­giv­ings about the Chit­tis­ingh­pora mas­sacre.

“From the mo­ment he got off the plane, Clin­ton spoke about “shar­ing the out­rage” of the In­dian peo­ple (but) did not en­dorse the ac­cu­sa­tion that Pak­istan was be­hind the vi­o­lence since the US had no in­de­pen­dent con­fir­ma­tion,” Tal­bott writes in his book.

The In­dian gov­ern­ment never picked up a quar­rel with Clin­ton, or Al­bright, or Tal­bott. (You can rest as­sured that Modi will not bring up the sub­ject in his talks with Joe Biden.)

The ap­par­ent er­ror was ag­gran­dized by Clin­ton’s re­fusal to ac­knowl­edge it, an­dex­ac­er­bated by Pankaj Mishra’s book, “Temp­ta­tions of the West: How to be Mod­ern in In­dia, Pak­istan, Ti­bet and Be­yond”, where he re­peated the al­le­ga­tions against “Hindu Mil­i­tants” even af­ter the con­fes­sion of the Lashkar-e-Toiba mil­i­tant.

Pankaj Mishra weighs in on the is­sue of who killed the 35 Sikhs hours be­fore Clin­ton’s visit:

“The In­dian fail­ure to iden­tify or ar­rest even a sin­gle per­son con­nected to the killings or the killers, and the hasti­ness and bru­tal­ity of the In­dian at­tempt to stick the blame on “for­eign mer­ce­nar­ies” while Clin­ton was still in In­dia, only lends weight to the new and grow­ing sus­pi­cion among Sikhs that the mas­sacre in Chi­tis­ingh­pura was or­ga­nized by In­dian in­tel­li­gence agen­cies in or­der to in­flu­ence Clin­ton, and the large con­tin­gent of in­flu­en­tial Amer­i­can jour­nal­ists ac­com­pa­ny­ing him, into tak­ing a much more sym­pa­thetic view of In­dia as a help­less vic­tim of Is­lamic ter­ror­ists in Pak­istan and Afghanistan: a view of In­dia that some very hec­tic In­dian diplo­macy in the West had pre­vi­ously failed to achieve.” {Death in Kash­mir, by Pankaj Mishra, The New York Re­view, Sep­tem­ber 21, 2000 is­sue}  (https://​www.ny­books.com/​ar­ti­cles/​2000/​09/​21/​death-in-kash­mir/?​lp_txn_id=1338630)

We still do not know who killed the 35 Sikhs dur­ing the bas­ant of 2000, but since In­dia is cur­rently rife with news about sacked doc­tors who fal­si­fied post-mortem analy­sis to den­i­grate se­cu­rity forces, we need to ask some old ques­tions. Who killed 35 Sikhs in Chit­tis­ing­pora, and who was mix­ing blood of men and women in DNA sam­ples?

Also, the com­mu­nity needs to ask it­self why is it not in­ter­ested in re­vis­it­ing its own Kash­mir en­counter?

THE DNA OF IN­DI­A’S DEMOC­RACY

>> In No­vem­ber, 2017, Jammu and Kash­mir’s State Hu­man Rights Com­mis­sion (SHRC) had rec­om­mended DNA pro­fil­ing of 2,080 uniden­ti­fied and un­marked graves found in Poonch and Ra­jouri dis­tricts of Jammu and Kash­mir.

>> In Sep­tem­ber 2011, SHRC had or­dered DNA pro­fil­ing to iden­tify 2,156 peo­ple buried in un­marked graves in sev­eral parts of Kash­mir.

>> In Sep­tem­ber, 2020, three “dreaded mil­i­tants” were killed by Army in Shopian in an en­counter. Even­tu­ally, they turned out to be poor labour­ers, a dis­cov­ery made on the ba­sis of their DNA sam­ples which matched with those of their fam­i­lies.

They turned out to be Abrar Ahmed (25), Imtiyaz Ahmed (20) and Mo­hammed Ibrar (16), whose bod­ies were ex­humed and DNA sam­ples taken. Army con­ceded that the sol­diers in­volved had ex­ceeded their pow­ers un­der the Armed Forces Spe­cial Pow­ers Act (AF­SPA).

For­mer J&K Min­is­ter and then Peo­ples Con­fer­ence pres­i­dent Sa­jad Lone had said “there is no hope of jus­tice” for the fam­i­lies. “Had this been the first time, one could have hoped it won’t hap­pen again. It is not the first time and not the last time. There is no de­ter­rence and in Delhi there is a lot of tol­er­ance for HR vi­o­la­tions in Kash­mir. Jus­tice will be or­na­men­tal un­less it is di­vine,” Lone had tweeted.

>> PDAP Re­port 2017 — Pun­jab, cur­rently in the throes of a mass hys­te­ria whipped up by an elec­toral ma­chine called the Aam Aadmi Party, has al­most given up on un­cov­er­ing the truth about ex­tra-ju­di­cial killings and rank im­punity that cops en­joyed dur­ing years of mil­i­tancy.

An ad­vo­cacy group, Pun­jab Doc­u­men­ta­tion and Ad­vo­cacy Pro­ject (PDAP), claimed in 2017 that over 8,000 ex­tra-ju­di­cial ex­e­cu­tions and en­forced dis­ap­pear­ances took place in the state be­tween 1980 and 1995. The PDAP gath­ered records from all the mu­nic­i­pal com­mit­tees of Pun­jab’s dis­tricts, and iden­ti­fed hun­dreds of vic­tims who were cre­mated as un­claimed and were termed “uniden­ti­fied” by the Pun­jab po­lice.

To the ut­ter com­fort of the rul­ing regimes in New Delhi and Pun­jab, the panth no more de­mands a dip-stick check of the regime’s DNA to see how much democ­racy flows through its veins.

_(SP Singh is a Chandi­garh-based se­nior jour­nal­ist and an­chor of a po­lit­i­cal weekly de­bate on tele­vi­sion, ‘Daleel with SP Singh’. His in­ter­ests en­com­pass pol­i­tics, arts, so­ci­ety, acad­e­mia, and yes, even trivia. He hardly plays ball with his co­hort of hacks but has the balls to write stuff like this.)_