Violent Deaths and Enforced Disappearances During the Counterinsurgency in Punjab, India
ENSAAF and HRDAG
2009, ENSAAF and Benetech:
The report by Ensaaf and HRDAG, "Violent Deaths and Enforced Disappearances During the Counterinsurgency in Punjab, India" presents empirical findings suggesting that the intensification of counterinsurgency operations in Punjab in the early 1990s was accompanied by a shift in state violence from targeted lethal human rights violations to systematic enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions, accompanied by mass "illegal cremations". Indian security officials have dismissed claims of human rights violations as unavoidable "aberrations" during the counterinsurgency against alleged terrorists in Punjab from 1984 to 1995.
Table of contents:
1 Executive Summary
2 Introduction
3 Background
3.1 Historical Context
3.2 The Body Count: A Scoring System
4 Motivation for this Quantitative Analysis
4.1 Enforced Disappearances, Extrajudicial Executions, and “Illegal Cremations”: Modalities of State Violence in Punjab
4.1.1 Enforced Disappearances
4.1.2 Fake Encounters
4.1.3 “Illegal Cremations”
4.2 The Data
4.2.1 Official Administrative Records of Mass Cremations
4.2.2 Information Collected by the National Human Rights Commission of India
4.2.3 Information Collected by the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab
4.2.4 Information Collected by the People’s Commission on Human Rights Violations in Punjab
4.2.5 Newspaper Articles from the Tribune
4.3 Limitations of the Available Data
5 Observed Patterns in Reported Lethal Violence in Punjab
5.1 Patterns of Reported Lethal Violence Over Time
5.1.1 The Nature of Lethal Violence Reported in the Tribune Across Time
5.1.2 Patterns of Reported Enforced Disappearances, Extrajudicial Executions, and “Illegal Cremations” Across Time and Space
6 The Nature of Reported Lethal Violence in Punjab
6.1 Encounter Killings: Deaths of Security Forces vs. Deaths of Alleged Militants
6.2 Individual vs. Multiple Victims
6.3 Lethal Human Rights Violations Reported to the CCDP
7 The Demographic Profile of Victims of Lethal Violence and “Illegal Cremations”
8 Conclusions
9 Future Research Directions
10 About the Authors
11 Acknowledgments
A Methods Appendix
A.1 Data Standardization
A.1.1 Standardization of Date Information
A.1.2 Standardization of Place Information
A.2 Spatial Representation of Data using Maps
A.3 Deduplication of Data Sources
B Corrections to the Printed Version of this Report
Source(s):
| Language | Format | Source |
|---|---|---|
| English | PDF document | view/download |