A crackdown saw a generation of young men go missing at the hands of Indian security forces. The January night was dark and dull. Sitting on a charpoy bed, 21-year-old Harjinder Singh Rana was playing his one-string tumbi, a traditional instrument, and singing, “Nanak dukhiya sab sansar.” Lord, the whole world is ridden with sorrow. At about 1 am, his music was interrupted when two police officials came knocking at the door. Rana, who worked as a special police officer, went with the men, thinking he was headed off on a mission. Eight days later, he was dead: His colleagues had killed him, saying he’d been a “militant.”
That was 1994, and Rana’s octogenarian father, Sohan Singh, is still awaiting justice. “I want to see the guilty punished,” says Singh, a resident of Kahnuwan at Gurdaspur in India’s northern state of Punjab, bordering Pakistan. “I want the court to tell the world that my son was not a militant,” he says. | 