On In­ter­na­tional Hu­man Rights day, Dal Khalsa raises the ban­ner of hu­man rights vi­o­la­tions in Pun­jab, Kash­mir and Cen­tral In­dia.

March­ing through the streets of up­com­ing town Bathinda on the Pun­jab-Ra­jasthan bor­der on the oc­ca­sion of the 70th In­ter­na­tional Hu­man Rights Day, ac­tivists of the Dal Khalsa, Malwa Youth Fed­er­a­tion, Sikh Youth of Pun­jab, lawyers from Bathinda Bar As­so­ci­a­tion and so­cial ac­tivists sought jus­tice in Pun­jab and Kash­mir for those who ex­tra­ju­di­cially killed and who dis­ap­peared in­vol­un­tar­ily dur­ing the last decades of the last cen­tury.

While the Bar­gari In­saaf Mor­cha talked about jus­tice hav­ing been done in the case of the Be­hbal killings, the Dal Khalsa marchers de­manded ar­rest of the guilty po­lice for those killings as well as those re­spon­si­ble for the killing of youth in Gur­daspur in 2009.

Ac­tivists car­ry­ing plac­ards and pho­tographs of vic­tims of state re­pres­sion marched in uni­son with war cries for jus­tice. A ban­ner held by an age­ing mother pleaded, “If my son is dead tell me where you cre­mated him, if he’s alive, show me his face”. 

On the day of hu­man rights, it was hard to ig­nore the in­creas­ing cases of mob lynch­ing in the Hindi heart­lands of In­dia. Dal Khalsa mocked the gov­ern­ment shout­ing, “In Mod­i’s In­dia cows have rights, hu­mans don’t.”

“For the op­pressed peo­ple who were strug­gling for their rights, all de­c­la­ra­tions of the United Na­tions are hol­low and mean­ing­less as there is no at­tempt by the in­ter­na­tional fo­rum to en­sure their im­ple­men­ta­tion in this part of the world,” said Dal Khalsa pres­i­dent Harpal Singh Cheema.

“We are al­ways told that In­dia is not at fault. If that is true then why is there hes­i­ta­tion in al­low­ing the UNHRC, Hu­man Rights Watch and Amnesty In­ter­na­tional to of­fi­cially ex­am­ine the cases of rights abuses in Pun­jab, Kash­mir and else­where,” he added.

Dal Khalsa spokesper­son sought the re­lease of po­lit­i­cal ac­tivists Mas­rat Alam, Jaggi Jo­hal, Vara Vara Rao and oth­ers de­tained in the Bhima Ko­re­gaon case. He ex­pressed deep re­gret that the Nag­pur bench of the Mum­bai High Court has passed the in­hu­mane or­der of not al­low­ing med­ical aid to se­ri­ously ail­ing Prof. Saibaba lodged in the Pune prison. He said that none of the main­stream par­ties -Shi­ro­mani Akali Dal, Con­gress, Bharatiya Janata Party or Aam Aadmi Party had any hu­man rights agenda.

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So­cial ac­tivist Lakhwinder Singh, pop­u­larly known as Lakha Sid­hana ad­dressed the gath­er­ing at Dr Ambed­kar park. He chided the Pun­jab CM Amarinder Singh for toe­ing the Hin­dutva school of thought. Ad­vo­cates Ran­jit Singh Jalal, Harpal Singh Khara and oth­ers also whole­heart­edly par­tic­i­pated in the rally. 

Bathinda, 13 De­cem­ber 2018, WSN News Bu­reau