What name comes to your mind when you read the nomen­cla­ture ‘The Butcher of Pun­jab’? From time im­memo­r­ial, through its che­quered his­tory of re­bel­lion and self-rule, the Pun­jab has seen many op­pres­sive killers but very few were given the moniker “the butcher of Pun­jab”. This one is from con­tem­po­rary Pun­jab, who was con­victed for out­rag­ing the mod­esty of a col­league and who granted full im­punity to his po­lice of­fi­cers and to his re­cruits –the Spe­cial po­lice of­fi­cers to rape, maim, tor­ture and kill Sikh in­sur­gents in the eight­ies and nineties of the last cen­tury.

The Butcher of Pun­jab is K. P. S. Gill. The early nine­teenth cen­tury saw Gen­eral Dyer as the Butcher of Pun­jab who car­ried out the Jal­lian­wala Bagh tragedy, whereas K P S Gill con­verted every dis­trict of the Pun­jab into a Jal­lian­wala Bagh.

Young Dal Khalsa leader Sarab­jit Singh Ghu­man, who has been chron­i­cling in de­tail the deeds of Pun­jab po­lice of­fi­cers who killed Sikh youth with im­punity in the decades gone by, has in a 352 page Pun­jabi book pro­filed the life and ex­tra­or­di­nary mis­deeds of KPS Gill in his new book -The Butcher of Pun­jab.

Gi­ani Jag­tar Singh -the Head Granthi –the chief priest of the prime seat of Sikh re­li­gion –Dar­bar Sahib, pop­u­larly known as The Golden Tem­ple re­leased the book –The Butcher of Pun­jab by pre­sent­ing a copy to Paramjit Kaur Khalra – wife of hu­man rights de­fender Jaswant Singh Khalra who dis­ap­peared in­vol­un­tar­ily on or­ders of the butcher of Pun­jab through the then Se­nior Su­per­in­ten­dent of Po­lice of Tarn Taran, S S Sandhu.  The sec­ond copy was given as a mark of re­spect to Beant Singh, the brother of Gen­eral Sub­heg Singh, who with Sant Jar­nail Singh Bhin­dran­wale de­fended and at­tained mar­tyr­dom dur­ing the army as­sault on Dar­bar Sahib in June 1984.

Pre­sent at the re­lease cer­e­mony at Akal Takht Sahib, Dal Khalsa leader Sat­nam Singh Paonta Sahib com­mented that “Gill was a sym­bol of state ter­ror­ism. He en­joyed full im­punity from the po­lit­i­cal es­tab­lish­ment from Delhi to Chandi­garh.”

“He may be the dar­ling of the In­dian lead­ers and the ma­jor­ity com­mu­nity of the coun­try, he is un­doubt­edly the Butcher of Pun­jab for the Sikhs and his ter­ror will al­ways be re­mem­bered and chron­i­cled in even more de­tail in fu­ture, said Dal Khalsa spokesper­son Kan­warpal Singh.

Sig­nif­i­cantly, the book has the “List of Small Butch­ers’ –the po­lice of­fi­cers re­spon­si­ble for gross hu­man rights vi­o­la­tions that were re­verted from their high ranks and some who are in prison and many still on bail or un­der pro­tec­tion of the state.

The chap­ters on the in­vol­un­tary en­forced dis­ap­pear­ance of hu­man rights de­fender Jaswant Singh Khalra, for­mer Jathedar of Akal Takht –Bhai Gur­dev Singh Kaonke would make dif­fi­cult and painful read­ing, but read we must to know how bla­tantly these stal­warts of the Sikh world were killed with no trace of them, even till to­day.

In­dia has been fed with lies and half-truths to eu­lo­gize and ex­tol Gill’s in­hu­man killings and tor­ture as “nec­es­sary” to crush in­sur­gency in the Pun­jab. He was called the ‘su­per-cop’ by In­dian colum­nists, who went ham­mer and tongs to build him as the sav­iour of Pun­jab. Gill him­self, never re­gret­ted any of his mis­deeds and al­ways com­mended the il­le­gal and un­law­ful ex­tra­ju­di­cial meth­ods of ‘the Gill boys.’ He started the per­ni­cious trend of killing not only the in­sur­gents but the whole­sale ha­rass­ment and tor­ture of fam­ily mem­bers and those who ex­pressed pub­lic sym­pa­thy with the move­ment.

Speak­ing to World Sikh News, the young ac­tivist, who has gone through the works of the Pun­jab po­lice, said that “his was a hum­ble at­tempt to put the truth of Gill’s con­tri­bu­tion in the right per­spec­tive and as this per­son had spilled the blood of so many young Sikhs, it was ap­pro­pri­ate to call him, The Butcher of Pun­jab.”

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Will this book serve as a cau­tion to the new breed of po­lice per­son­nel in Pun­jab and In­dia? Will the po­lit­i­cal god­fa­thers stop build­ing and pa­tro­n­is­ing such butch­ers?  Too early to say!