By Mata Press Service

Gurnam Singh Bandala, a former Khalistani terrorist leader who is linked to the Sikh violence that led to the Air India bombings was supposed to have been gunned down by police 13 years ago.

But Bandala has turned up alive and is living as a preacher outside the Sikh holy city of Amritsar.

Authorities now believe an innocent farmer was deliberately killed by Indian police so that they could present his body as Bandala’s and collect a bounty equal to US$60,000.

“I thought I was so lucky,” Bandala said. But “there was no luck. There was murder,” he was quoted as saying in a AP report.

Bandala is one three terrorists who have returned home recently from their hideouts in other states and also revealed the names of innocent persons killed for them in fake encounters by Punjab police during days of militancy.

Punjab Director General of Police N.P.S.Aulakh has now ordered a high level probe into the fake killings.

“We can now only wonder how Talwinder Singh Parmar was killed..maybe he is still alive and somebody else got killed in his place…who knows ,” said a B.C. Sikh community leader.

Parmar was the alleged mastermind behind the June 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182 – Canada’s worst terrorist attack which claimed 329 people and is now the subject of an inquiry.

Five months later, he was arrested at his Burnaby home on weapons, explosives and conspiracy charges. The RCMP said the arrests (Inderjit Singh Reyat, the only person convicted in the terrorist bombing, was also arrested at the same time) were part of their investigation into the Air India disaster but the charges were dropped due to lack of evidence.

Parmar returned to India in the early 1990s.

On Oct. 15, 1992, Indian police say, Parmar was killed in a gun battle. He had actually been in police custody at the time of the reported gun battle.

All his family received were a pile of ashes.

K. P. S. Gill, former police chief of Punjab who gave his boys a free hand to crush the armed Sikh campaign for an independent Khalistan, accuses the media of hounding ‘patriotic’ policemen when reporting on the “fake encounters”

“There are bound to be some mistakes when you deal with terrorists and organised crime”, said Gill.

Gill who had been the target of Sikh militants both in Canada and India has been critical of Canada’s questioning of Parmar’s death.

“The Canadian government was more worried about what they claimed was a ‘fake encounter’ with Talwinder Singh Parmar, than with this act of terrorism that cost as many as 329 lives,” he says on his website.

Nobody expects Parmar to turn up alive but no one is also sure if he is dead.

“The two shared the same philosophy, had the same followers in India, Germany and Canada and urged violent action against Indian leaders and entities,” said the BC Sikh leader.

Both were involved with the Babbar Khalsa sect, a group committed to the violent establishment of Khalistan, an independent Sikh homeland, in Punjab.

But Bandala’s re-emergence is one of nearly a dozen similar cases that have surfaced recently in India. The faked police shootouts have shaken an already troubled justice system in a country that touts itself as a rights-respecting democracy where the rule of law prevails.

Former police officials and human rights activists say the fake encounters are the brutal result of a system dominated by poorly educated, badly trained and corruptible cops, dirty politicians and stagnated courts where justice, if it ever comes, can be delayed for years.

“Because cases take years to be settled, because witnesses don’t show up, because bribes are paid, criminals get away. So the police resort to shortcuts,” says Sankar Sen, a former policeman who is now a fellow at the Institute for Social Sciences in New Delhi.

The exact number of fake encounters is impossible to determine. Police officials acknowledge only a handful over the past two decades and say they are isolated cases.

But the former and current officers say the problem is more widespread, and rights activists estimated the number must be in the hundreds, if not thousands.

They point to the tens of thousands of people who have disappeared, many after being detained by police during one of the myriad insurgencies in India in the past three decades.

An estimated 3,000 people were lost without explanation during the Sikh uprising in Punjab in the 1980s and early 1990s. About 10,000 are missing in Kashmir, where an Islamic rebellion festers today.

In Punjab, the fight for a separate Sikh state left about 25,000 people dead, including 1,700 police. Bandala is one of three former separatist militants who were said to have been killed in shootouts but who recently turned up alive.

“Somebody was killed in their place,” said Ranjan Lakhanpal, a human rights lawyer. “We believe there are many more.”

One reason few cases are investigated is that most Indians are not interested. Wealthier Indians in particular have long accepted extrajudicial killings disguised as shootouts as the most expedient way to get rid of criminals.

There is even a reverential term for officers with the highest tallies: “encounter specialists,” the AP report said.

“There is pressure from politicians, there is pressure from the public,” says Sen, the former policeman. “They want criminals eliminated, they cheer it.”

Sen spent 35 years with the police, eventually running the National Police Academy before leaving the force to head the government’s National Human Rights Commission.

Police kill not only career criminals, but also stage shootouts to get promotions or rewards. That was the case with Bandala. Bandala already was in hiding for a decade when he read, in July 1994, about his own death in a newspaper. He worried at first, “then I realized the police wouldn’t be chasing me any more,” he said.

At the same time, a woman would start looking for her husband, Sukhpal Singh.

According to court documents filed by Singh’s family, police came to their home in August and picked up the farmer, then 26, for questioning.

“He disappeared like a ghost,” says his widow, Dalbir Kaur.

When Kaur and her mother-in-law went looking for Singh, police said he had been transferred to another station. So they went there only to be told he had been sent back to the first.

It went on and on. Months stretched into years. Singh’s mother died and his family sold their small farm to pay for lawyers who are seeking 500,000 rupees in a wrongful death suit.

Authorities have never told them what happened to Singh. But a senior Punjab police officer said they believe Singh was killed in Bandala’s place.

And the two officers who were first credited with the killing - and claimed the reward? He said one, Jaspal Singh, a former deputy superintendent of police, is in jail, convicted of torturing and murdering a human rights activist. The other, Paramraj Singh Umrananagal, is now a senior Punjab police officer.

Punjab Human Rights Organizations (PHRO) said that their claim that over 300 persons had been killed during terrorism in Punjab had been vindicated with Bandala case.