If every baseless propaganda video that appears on youtube is collected and postted on this forum with the clear intention of mudslinging and part misinformation campaign,then let me tell u, such attempts wont pay any real dividend but certainly going to raise moderators work load here.
This is no place or occasion for issuings threats,mine are just gentle reminds.
If you do not like this post, keep your eyes shut or just ignore. And again you are trying to threaten using Kautilyan diplomacy in the name of the moderators. I repeat, I never get threatened. Look I am not afraid of getting banned for no reason. But I know the mods here are not that you are expecting. I know what should be posted and i know it better than you. Why? Please do not ask.
Punjab
The 1947 partition of Punjab between India and Pakistan resulted in intercommunal violence that was the worst, and most indiscriminate, that the Indian subcontinent had experienced for centuries. Widespread massacres occurred between Muslims and Sikhs (the latter occupying the western portion of Punjab, the latter the eastern regions). As many as half a million people died, and two million more were left homeless and destitute. Eventually, western Punjab was incorporated into the new Pakistani state, while eastern Punjab became part of India.
Growing alienation from, and claims of exploitation by, Indian authorities spawned a powerful militant movement in the early 1980s, calling for the creation of an independent Sikh state of Khalistan. As in many such conflict situations worldwide, the economic and societal plight of younger males figured prominently the uprising. "Central to the present Sikh unrest is the excess numbers of young male Sikhs over the amount of honorable employment available," wrote Conor Cruise O'Brien in 1988. "To own even a tiny farm is honorable, but the subdivision of the farmland appears to have reached its limit. ... What career is open to a young male Sikh who doesn't have a farm of his own and hasn't been able to get a place in the defense forces or any other branch of government service? That question remains unresolved, and in the meantime there are too many young [male] Sikhs who find no suitable outlet within the law for their abundant energies." (O'Brien, "Holy War Against India", The Atlantic Monthly, August 1988.)
As in Kashmir, "disappearances" have been central to the Indian state's counterinsurgency strategy in Punjab:
The scenario for a disappearance case is familiar. Plain-clothed police officers or members of the paramilitary forces stop a man in the street (disappearance victims are almost always young men who are suspected of being members or having support for one of India's many armed militant groups), or they may pick him up from his place of work or his home. Often the abduction is done at night, but the disregard for the law and the lack of political will to eradicate these practices means the security forces are equally protected if the abduction takes place in broad daylight. ... Many cases of disappearances result in death, disfigured bodies found in canals, by railway tracks and roadsides are testimony to the cover-up of state murder that is so much a part of everyday life in some parts of India. If suspicion of the killing is successfully laid at the feet of the police, it is often denied or invalidated by one of two improbable excuses; that whilst trying to escape he was shot or that he died in an encounter. (Khalsa Human Rights, "'Disappearances' in Punjab".)
According to Joyce Pettigrew, "many young people killed have not been engaged in armed combat. They have been ordinary boys who have disappeared on an errand for their parents, visiting relatives, or while working in their fields, or who have been picked up from their own or their in-laws' home. ... Disappearances occurred primarily in the under-thirty age group. Some villages had lost more than forty young men. Sursinghwala in Amritsar district had lost seventy young men. Buttar Kalan, in Gurdaspur district, lost twenty. Each village has not kept a separate account of its losses. Erring on the conservative side ... it is highly probable that most villages in the Amritsar district would have lost on average ten young men." (Pettigrew, "Parents and Their Children in Situations of Terror: Disappearances and Special Police Activity in Punjab," in Jeffrey A. Sluka, ed., Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000], p. 211.)
Patricia Gossman cites the comments of an Indian police officer who claimed that when armed conflict broke out between Sikh militants and Indian security forces in the early 1980s, "a profile was developed of who was considered to be antigovernment and pro-Khalistan. Based on that profile, young Sikh men between the ages of 18 and 40, who have long beards and wear turbans, are considered to be pro-Khalistan. Whenever the police receive a report from an informant or any other individual that Sikh militants have visited the home of a Sikh family, the police are dispatched to raid the home of that family. Pursuant to that raid, any Sikh male who fits the profile described above is arrested." (Gossman, "India's Secret Armies," in in Bruce B. Campbell and Arthur D. Brenner, Death Squads in Global Perspective: Murder with Deniability [St. Martin's Press, 2000], pp. 266-67.)
The failure to turn up a sufficient quantity of young men for persecution and execution sometimes leads to the detention of female relatives. Though they are rarely killed, rape is common. "When mothers and sisters have been held in custody by the police, their ultimate fate unknown, not all fathers and brothers have been able to cope with the threat of what might happen to them and to remain underground to fight. As one old lady from Sabrawan village, Amritsar district, told me, referring to the many abductions of young girls by the police, 'In every village and each house there is sadness.' Hence, to protect their sisters or indeed some other family member, some young militants and their sympathizers have compromised and become informers." (Pettigrew, "Parents and Their Children," pp. 211, 219.)
In the December attack, "Hardeep Singh was playing cards in his railway compartment when the killers, all wearing distinctive khaki-coloured turbans, burst in. 'While all the Sikhs, women and children were ordered off the train, the others began pleading for mercy. The militants assured us that they would only be taking us somewhere and then letting us go. ... But then they bolted the doors and opened fire.'" Fifty-one people died in the attack. (Tim McGirk, "India Train Massacre Caps Year of Violence," The Independent (UK), December 29, 1991.)
Such tactics turned most of the Punjabi population against the militants, whose struggle has now subsided within the state itself. "The last few years of the Punjab conflict largely consisted of an inter-gang war of unprincipled thugs who had no legitimacy whatsoever in the community," notes Canadian scholar Hamish Telford. "In fact, most citizens in Punjab seem to accept the actions of the police and army because the insurgents became so unscrupulous in the end. The Khalistan option is now only advocated by fundamentalist Sikhs in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K."
The Delhi Massacre, 1984
On June 3-6 1984, in Operation Bluestar, Indian forces laid siege to the Golden Temple, Sikhism's holiest shrine, in the Punjabi city of Amritsar. The temple had been occupied by heavily-armed Sikh militants under the leadership of Sant Bhindranwale. In the massacre, and in dozens of other mass killings that took place simultaneously at religious sites throughout Punjab, thousands of Sikhs were murdered by Indian security personnel. At the Golden Temple, according to Human Rights Watch, "Indian government forces were guilty of outrageous violations of fundamental human rights -- deliberately attacking the temple at a time they knew thousands of religious pilgrims were inside, not offering an opportunity for surrender, and summarily executing those it captured." ("India: Arms and Abuses in Indian Punjab and Kashmir", September 1994.) Many children and women were killed in the assault, along with a preponderance of Sikh men. "Civil liberties organisations, such as the Movement Against State Repression, have claimed that the total number killed in Operation Bluestar exceeded ten thousand. Thousands of young men also went missing in the period after Bluestar." (Joyce Pettigrew, The Sikhs of the Punjab: Unheard Voices of State and Guerrilla Violence, p. 24 [n. 10].)
On October 31, 1984, the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, who had ordered Operation Bluestar, was assassinated in a revenge attack by her two Sikh bodyguards. Over the following five days, one of the worst gendercidal massacres of modern times took place in the Indian capital, Delhi. The victims were Sikh males of all ages. At 10 p.m. on the evening following the Prime Minister's assassination, widespread killings broke out across Delhi, apparently organized by the Hindu extremist parties that have become prominent players in Indian politics. Hindu men roamed the streets, declaring an open season on Sikh males (those who were religiously observant were easily identified by their long hair and turbans). The gendercidal character of the killings was indeed almost total. According to the Indian feminist Madhu Kishwar,
The nature of the attacks confirm
that there was a deliberately plan to kill as many Sikh men as possible, hence nothing was left to chance. That also explains why in almost all cases, after hitting or stabbing, the victims were doused with kerosene or petrol and burnt, so as to leave no possibility of their surviving. Between October 31 and November 4, more than 2,500 men were murdered in different parts of Delhi, according to several careful unofficial estimates. There have been very few cases of women being killed except when they got trapped in houses which were set on fire. Almost all the women interviewed described how men and young boys were special targets. They were dragged out of the houses, attacked with stones and rods, and set on fire. ... When women tried to protect the men of their families, they were given a few blows and forcibly separated from the men. Even when they clung to the men, trying to save them, they were hardly ever attacked the way men were. I have not yet heard of a case of a woman being assaulted and then burnt to death by the mob. (Kishwar, "Delhi: Gangster Rule," in Patwant Singh and Harji Malik, eds., Punjab: The Fatal Miscalculation [New Delhi, 1985], pp. 171-78.)
A typical account of the atrocities was provided by a female witness whose "husband and three sons ... were all killed on 1 November." As investigators summarized her testimony:
When a mob first came the Sikhs came out and repulsed them. Three such waves were repulsed, but each time the police came and told them to go home and stay there. The fourth time the mob came in increased strength and started attacking individual homes, driving people out, beating and burning them and setting fire to their homes. The method of killing was invariably the same: a man was hit on the head, sometimes his skull broken, kerosene poured over him and set on fire. Before being burnt, some had their eyes gouged out. Sometimes, when a burning man asked for water, a man urinated on his mouth. Several individuals, including her sister's son, tried to escape by cutting their hair. Most of them were also killed. Some had their hair forcibly cut but were nevertheless killed thereafter. (Quoted in Khalsa Human Rights, "Cases of Victims".)
The estimate of 2,500 dead offered by Kishwar (above) is almost certainly too low. The New York Times in 1996 cited the research of Sikh activist Gurucharan Singh Babbar, who "has piles of affidavits from victims' families that prove, he says, that 5,015 Sikhs were killed, more than double the official figure ..." Whatever the exact death toll, it was "one of the darkest chapters in [India's] half-century of independence." (John F. Burns, "The Sikhs Get Justice Long After A Massacre," The New York Times, September 16, 1996). Throughout the massacre, Indian police and security forces stood by or assisted in disarming Sikhs, rendering them defenceless. An Indian Supreme Court Justice, V.M. Tarkunde, stated in the aftermath of the slaughter that "Two lessons can be drawn from the experience of the Delhi riots. One is about the extent of criminalisation of our politics and the other about the utter unreliability of our police force in a critical situation." (Quoted in Khalsa Human Rights, "The Delhi Massacre: An Example of Malicious Government".)
It is important to note that while few if any Sikh women were intentionally killed, hundreds, if not thousands, were raped -- sometimes repeatedly -- by rampaging Hindu men. Many of the female survivors of the massacre today live in Tilak Vihar, a quarter of Delhi that has become known as the "Widows' Colony." Since 1984, they have pressed for justice in the killings, and finally achieved some success in 1996, when "a magistrate ... imposed a death sentence on a butcher found guilty of two Sikh murders in the riots. Evidence presented in court indicated he was also involved in at least 150 other killings." The justice in question, Shiv Narain Dinghra, has led a "personal crusade" of his own, sentencing dozens of rioters to five years' "harsh imprisonment." Nonetheless, official Indian attitudes toward the slaughter reflect a belief that "the massacre was necessary to teach a lesson" to the Sikhs, according to Dinghra. (Burns, "The Sikhs Get Justice.")
Gendercide Watch - case studies: Kashmir/Punjab/The Delhi Massacre
