There
were other victims of Operation Bluestar little children, some only two years
old, who got rounded up when the army swept through the Punjab countryside
throwing over 18,000 suspected terrorists into jail. Since then, 39 children
have been languishing in two Ludhiana jails.
There
is four-year old Rinku whose father died during the army operation and whose
mother has been missing since then. Like the rest of the ‘infant terrorists’,
Rinku had to go through a gruelling interrogation. When asked where his mother
was. he replied, “I do know”.Asked where his father was, he said, “Killed with
a gun”. Why his stomach was so big; “Because I eat clay”. Then there is the
earnest 12 year old Bablu who calls Bhindranwale his chacha. He insists that he
be included among the terrorists and tried. There is Zaida Khatoon, a
Bangladeshi woman who stopped to get food for her five children at the Golden
Temple and ended in jail.
Their
ordeal began in early June when they were picked up around the Temple and
packed into camps in Amritsar and Jalandhar. Initially the army did not know
what to do with the children. Some of the lucky ones were locked up with their
parents, but they all faced the same charge: breach of peace under section 107
and arrest to prevent commission of cognisable offence under Section 107 and 151
of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC). They were finally sent to Ludhiana.
And
then the nightmare began. Two central agencies, the Central Bureau of
lnvestigation (CBI) and the Intelligence Bureau (IB) began their questioning.
There were long, intimidating sessions. The children cried and begged to be
sent home. But it went on for days. Their little finger prints were taken and
IB sleuths set about verifying their bonafides. One interrogating officer
admitted that not many officials were moved by the children’s cries.
The
children continued to be locked up in a dingy old jail in the sprawling
industrial city. Some were moved to a newer maximum security prison outside the
city. Of the 39 children, 10 were with their parents, mostly their mothers.
Another 15 were students of the Damdami Taksal, an institution founded by Guru
Gobind Singh to train children in music and Gurbani, which was last headed by
the Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. These students, all of them ardent Sikhs,
had been camping in the Golden T cmple complex and some had learnt to use arms.
Three of them have now been classified as ‘dangerous terrorists’.
Sadly
enough, in their interrogations, the CBI and IB have shown little regard to any
civil liberties or laws protecting young children. All the children have been
booked for violating prohibitory orders under Section 144 or Section 107/151.
It is a fact that they were picked up from the Golden Temple or at best are
said to have surrendered. But these offences are bailable and in fact these sections
are merely prohibitory, used by law enforcing agencies to stop processions and
strikes. The authorities have paid no heed to the Children Act 1960 or the East
Punjab Children Act, 1976.
The
long, agonising inquisition apart, the children have been clubbed with known
terrorists, criminals and anti-social elements. Under the law, children younger
than 16 years old in the case of males and 18 in the case of females cannot be
detained either at a police station or in a regular jail, and the lofty laws that
protect and respect the child have all been violated. Children are supposed to
be kept in special institutions or reform schools but the Punjab Government has
hardly been bothered, as the central agencies continued with their gruelling,
and often callous investigations. Confessed a CBI officer: “These are all fine
ideas for newspapers and preachers. We had on our hands suspected terrorists
and would be terrorists”.
Last
fortnight, some relief seemed to be on the way at last. Kamladevi
Chattopadhyay, the well-known social worker, petitioned the Supreme Court to
help the children. A division bench consisting of Chinappa Reddy, A. P. Sen and
E.S. Venkataramiah directed the Ludhiana district judge to remove the children
from the jails and lodge them in a better place, at the cost of the state. The
Punjab Government was also directed to trace their relatives and file
particulars to the court. Ironically enough, the same day these orders were
issued, a Ludhiana magistrate remanded four children arrested from the Temple
on June 6 to judicial custody, till further orders. The youngest of these
children, Jasbir Kaur, is only two years old, her sister Charanjit Kaur is
four, and her brothers, Harinder and Balwinder, are six and twelve. These
children are charged with disobeying the prohibitory order under Section 144 of
the CrPC.
On
August 1, eleven senior opposition leaders had demanded that the detained kids
be either released or at least segregated. But it was only after the Supreme
Court directive that the authorities began acting. Within five days the parents
of six children were located from districts as far away as Paonta Sahib in
Himachal Pradesh, Hissar in Haryana and Nainital in Uttar Pradesh. They had
gone to the Golden Temple to pray when they were caught in the army crossfire.
District Magistrate K.R. Lakhanpal had had earlier sought the governor’s
approval to release the children but had not met with any success. Said he: “We
were alive to the human problem but somehow in this charged atmosphere quick
release could not take place. The children had to be cleared first by the
intelligence agencies”.
