Jalandhar: With the controversy over the release of the movie ‘Satluj’ and its quick takedown from an OTT platform, a debate is raging on the number of deaths, especially of Hindus, in militant violence in Punjab in the 1980s-90s.Earlier, senior politicians would vaguely mention 25,000 to 35,000 deaths, and the implication was that they included Sikhs and Hindus alike. However, in the war of narratives around ‘Satluj’ – a biopic on slain rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, which highlights fake encounters and forced disappearances of the time — these figures are now being projected as specific numbers for ‘Hindus killed’ in the state.Although every single death in militant violence was meticulously registered, such figures are still being randomly thrown around.Union minister of state Ravneet Singh Bittu at a news conference in Jalandhar on July 8 claimed that 25,000 Hindus were killed and asked the Hindu community to take a stand. “I specifically want to ask Hindu families, when will you stand up and speak up, or will you get those humiliated who gave their lives for you? You lost 25,000 families,” he said.Quite a few others are claiming that at least 35,000 or even more Hindus were killed, even as earlier these figures were cited for all the civilian fatalities, including Sikhs, in the violence by the militants. These numbers are being widely mentioned on social media.After Bittu challenged the makers of ‘Satluj’ to prove with documentary evidence that 25,000 persons were made to disappear or were cremated as unidentified by Punjab Police, Shiromani Akali Dal (Punar Surjit) and Dal Khalsa challenged him to prove that 35,000 Hindus were killed.Bittu in fact only reiterated what several political leaders of the state have been saying in the last over three decades. Former chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh, while filing his nomination papers for Amritsar Lok Sabha seat in April 2014 and while paying tributes to former DGP K P S Gill then in June 2017, said that 35,000 people were killed in Punjab.This vagueness grew in the vacuum of information as for years, neither the Centre nor state govt publicly put out data on deaths in Punjab on either side.It was in response to an RTI query that ministry of home affairs gave out the total numbers in Dec 2013. This reply stated that 11,694 civilians and 1,784 security personnel were killed in terrorist violence in Punjab in the 1980s and 1990s. Religion-wise segregation was not available with the Central Public Information Officer concerned, it said.Senior journalist and author Jagtar Singh in his book ‘Rivers on Fire: Khalistan Struggle’ reproduced a reply of Punjab govt to an unstarred question asked by Congress MLA Tarlochan Singh in the assembly on Oct 14, 2005, which gave out yearly and district-wise data from 1982 to 1995. This reply put the total number of killings by militants in Punjab at 11,336.According to the year-wise data compiled by South Asia Terrorism Portal, 11,613 civilians and 1,746 security personnel were killed till 1993, by which time militancy was controlled.Paul Wallace’s essay ‘Political Violence and Terrorism in India: The Crisis of Identity’, in the book ‘Terrorism in Context’, edited by Martha Crenshaw, reproduced data reported in The Times of India in Feb 1992, from MHA. According to this, 3,871 Hindus and 6,177 Sikhs were killed by militants from 1981 to 1991.V N Narayanan in his book ‘Tryst With Terror Punjab’s Turbulent Decade’ provided the same number of Hindu killings but put the number of Sikhs at 6,207 between 1981 and 1991. He mentioned that 1,519 civilians were killed in 1992 and 46 in 1993, taking the total number to 11,613. But there is no religion-wise segregation for these two years.
