INDIA

World Report 2001 Entry

World Report Entry 2000

World Report Entry 1999

World Report Entry 1998

Politics by other Means Attacks Against Christians in India
October 1999 (C1106)
The Indian government has failed to prevent increasing violence against Christians and is exploiting communal tensions for
political ends, Human Rights Watch charged in a report released today. This 37-page report details violence against Christians in the months ahead of the country's national parliamentary elections in September and October 1999, and in the
months following electoral victory by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party, known as the BJP) in the state of Gujarat. Attacks against Christians throughout the country have increased significantly since the BJP began its rule at the center in March 1998. They include the killings of priests, the raping of nuns, and the physical destruction of Christian institutions, schools, churches, colleges, and cemeteries. Thousands of Christians have also been forced to convert to Hinduism. The report concludes that as with attacks against Muslims in 1992 and 1993, attacks against Christians are part of a concerted campaign of right-wing Hindu organizations, collectively called the sangh parivar, to promote and exploit communal clashes to increase their political power-base. The movement is supported at the local level by militant groups who operate with impunity.
(C1106), 10/99, 37pp., $5.00
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Behind the Kashmir Conflict: Abuses by Indian Security Forces and Militant Groups Continue
In this report, Human Rights Watch charges that human rights violations by all parties  in Kashmir have been a critical factor behind the current conflict.  The report says that  if those violations had been seriously addressed at any time over thelast ten years, the  risk of amilitary confrontation between India and Pakistan might have been reduced.  The escalation in fighting has made it urgent that the international community put  pressure on India to end widespread human rights violations by its security forces in  Kashmir, and on Pakistan to end its support for abusive militant groups.  The 44-page  report, Behind the Conflict in Kashmir, focuses on the border areas in southern  Kashmir where militant forces have been crossing over from Pakistan. The report  documents several of the massacres of Hindu civilians carried out by these groups and  their local counterparts, in which more than 300 civilians were killed between 1997  and mid-1999.
(C1104), 7/99, 44pp. $5.00
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Broken People:Caste Violence Against India’s “Untouchables”
Some 160 million people in India live a precarious existence, shunned by much of society becauseof their rank as "untouchables" or Dalits—literally meaning "broken" people—at the bottom ofIndia's caste system. Dalits are discriminated against, denied access to land, forced to work indegrading conditions, and routinely abused, even killed, at the hands of the police and ofhigher-caste groups that enjoy the state's protection. Dalit women are frequent victims of sexualabuse. In what has been called India's "hidden apartheid," entire villages in many Indian statesremain completely segregated by caste. National legislation and constitutional protections serveonly to mask the social realities of discrimination and violence. Caste clashes, particularly in thestates of Bihar and Tamil Nadu, but also in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Gujarat, reflect patterns which are common to many parts of the country: a loss of faith in thestate machinery and increasing intolerance of their abusive treatment have led many Dalitcommunities into movements to claim their rights. In response, state and private actors haveengaged in a pattern of repression to preserve the status quo. The report also documents thegovernment's attempts to criminalize peaceful social activism through the arbitrary arrest anddetention of Dalit activists, and its failure to abolish exploitative labor practices and implementrelevant legislation.
(2289) 3/99, 310pp. ISBN 1-56432-228-9, $20.00
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The Enron Corporation: Corporate Complicity in Human Rights Violations
This report focuses on a subsidiary of the Enron Development Corporation in India: the DabholPower Corporation (DPC). It details the development of the Dabhol Power project from itsinception in 1992 through 1998 in order to illustrate an unbroken continuum: the immenseinfluence that Enron exercised over the central and Maharashtra governments; to describe thecompany's interaction with villagers,whose legitimate concerns for their livelihood andenvironment were ignored or dismissed,leading them eventually to oppose the project; to makeclear that various avenues to address their concerns about the project,judicial proceedings anddirect dialogue with the company,had been exhausted in ways that raised questions rather thananswering them. The local opposition that formed to protest the project's lack of transparency, itshuman impact, its threat to villagers' livelihoods, and its potential to do environmental damagewas the affected population's last recourse. Except in one case of stone-throwing and anotherincident where a water pipeline was broken, the opposition did not resort toviolence; villagers'groups did not endorse sabotage, and their methods were peaceful. Yet they were met withserious, sometimes brutal human rights violations carried out on behalf of the state's and thecompany's interests. The relationship between the controversies surrounding implementation ofthe project, the efforts to challenge its development, and violations of human rights are alldescribed in detail here because each is an integral part of a complex, disturbing situation.
(1975) 1/99, 176 pp.,  ISBN 1-56432-197-5, $15.00
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POLICE ABUSE AND KILLINGS OF STREET CHILDREN IN INDIA
At least eighteen million children live or work on the streets of India, laboring as porters in railway stations or bus terminals, as ragpickers, and as vendors of food, tea, or handmade articles. These street children are routinely subjected to arbitrary and illegal detention, torture, and extortion, and on occasion, murder at the hands of police who engage in these violations of international and Indian law with impunity. Based on interviews with more than one hundred children during a one-month investigation in India, this report details police abuse and killings of street children in Bangalore, Bombay, Madras, New Delhi, and the state of Andhra Pradesh. Human Rights Watch calls on the Indian government to put an immediate end to police violence against street children, to prosecute the police concerned, to implement the recommendations of the National Police Commission, to ratify the United Nations Convention against Torture, and to invite the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to India to investigate police mistreatment of street children.
(205X) 11/96, 200 pp., ISBN 1-56432-205-X, $15.00/£12.95
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THE SMALL HANDS OF SLAVERY
Bonded Child Labor in India
At least fifteen million children work as bonded laborers in India. Whether chained to carpet looms, sweating in silver smithies, or working in the field from dawn until dusk, these children endure miserable lives. They earn little and are beaten often. They do not go to school. From the age of four or five, many work for years in appalling conditions in often futile attempts to pay off family debts. Based on interviews with over one hundred children during a two-month investigation in India, this report details their plight in the silk, beedi (hand-rolled cigarettes), synthetic gems, silver, leather, agricultural, and carpet industries.
Bonded child labor is outlawed by international and Indian law, but the Indian government has failed utterly to end it. Human Rights Watch calls on the government of India to end bonded child labor by establishing independent bodies to inspect work sites and identify bonded child laborers, prosecuting and suspending licenses for employers using bonded child labor, and implementing a comprehensive rehabilitation program to ensure that bonded child laborers are sent to school. Human Rights Watch also calls on the international community to pressure the Indian government to release and rehabilitate these children.
View the summary and recommendations of this report.
(172X) 9/96, 190 pp., ISBN 1-56432-172-X, $15.00/£12.95
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INDIA’S SECRET ARMY IN KASHMIR
New Patterns of Abuse Emerge in the Conflict
In 1996, the conflict in Kashmir entered it seventh year, with little indication that parliamentary elections in May would either lead to peace or end the widespread human rights abuses that characterized the war. In the months preceding the elections, Indian security forces intensified their efforts against militant groups, stepping up cordon-and-search operations and summarily executing captured militant leaders. Alongside them, operating as a secret, illegal army, were state-sponsored paramilitary groups, composed of captured or surrendered former militants described as “renegades” by the Indian government. Many of these groups were responsible for grave human rights abuses, including summary executions, torture, and illegal detention as well as election-related intimidation of voters.
(C804) 5/96, 49 pp., $5.00/£2.95
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Communal Violence and the Denial of Justice
Three years after the deaths of more than 1,000 people in Bombay’s worst incident of communal violence since independence, the government of the Indian state of Maharashtra unexpectedly terminated the commission of inquiry that had been set up to investigate the riots. The focus of the Srikrishna Commission’s investigation was the violence that broke out in January 1993 and that was directed primarily against Bombay’s Muslims. The riots followed weeks of attacks on Muslims in north India in the aftermath of the destruction of a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya. Labeled as “communal” because the violence involved communities identified by religious differences, the riots were in fact orchestrated events which depended on the connivance or outright participation of police and other officials and political leaders.
(C802) 4/96, 28 pp., $5.00/£2.95
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RAPE FOR PROFIT
Trafficking of Nepali Girls and Women to India’s Brothels
Hundreds of thousands of women and children are employed in Indian brothels—many of them lured or kidnapped from Nepal and sold into conditions of virtual slavery. The victims of this international trafficking network routinely suffer serious physical abuse, including rape, beatings, arbitrary imprisonment and exposure to AIDS. Held in debt bondage for years at a time, these women and girls work under constant surveillance. Escape is virtually impossible. Both the Indian and Nepali governments are complicit in the abuses suffered by trafficking victims. These abuses are not only violations of internationally recognized human rights but are specifically prohibited under the domestic laws of both countries. The willingness of Indian and Nepali government officials to tolerate, and, in some cases, participate in the burgeoning flesh trade exacerbates abuse. Even when traffickers have been identified, there have been few arrests and fewer prosecutions. Rape for Profit focuses on the trafficking of girls and women from Nepal to brothels in Bombay, where they compose up to half of the city’s estimated 100,000 brothel workers.
(155X) 6/95, 96 pp., ISBN 1-56432-155-X, $7.00/£5.95
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Arms and Abuses in Indian Punjab and Kashmir
The massive proliferation of small arms and light weapons in South Asia is directly linked to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and the subsequent creation by the United States of a system, commonly known as the Afghan pipeline, to funnel weapons covertly to the Afghan resistance. The Afghan pipeline, set up by the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI, enabled the transfer of tens of thousands of tons of weaponry to the mujahidin, and then later, to the Sikh and Kashmiri militants. The human rights situations in Punjab and Kashmir have been acutely affected by the militants’ acquisition of weapons of all types, leading to numerous types of abuses against civilians.
(C610) 9/94, 59 pp., $7.00/£5.95
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DEAD SILENCE
The Legacy of Abuses in Punjab
The bloody conflict in the Indian state of Punjab drew to a close in 1993, but the restoration of an elected government has not meant the restoration of the rule of law. To the contrary, the Punjab police continue to torture, kill or cause their victims to disappear with impunity. The price of the government’s apparent success against the separatists is the legacy of these abuses: a corrupt and brutal police force whose recourse to murder and torture has been sanctioned by the state as an acceptable means of combatting political violence.
   Dead Silence documents incidents of torture, extrajudicial executions and disappearances by the police, which took place between 1991 and 1993. There is no indication that the government at the state or federal level has made any effort to investigate these abuses or prosecute the perpetrators, even though the identity of the latter is well-documented. In the course of the conflict, many civilians were also murdered in militant attacks. The report also documents abuses by militant Sikh organizations. In late 1993, India established a national human rights commission empowered to investigate reports of abuses and recommend prosecution or other punitive measures. Human Rights Watch/Asia and Physicians for Human Rights urge the commission to conduct a thorough investigation into the cases documented in these pages and call for the criminal prosecution and punishment of police responsible.
(1304) 5/94, 112 pp., ISBN 1-56432-130-4, $10.00/£8.95
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CONTINUING REPRESSION IN KASHMIR
Abuses Rise as International Pressure on India Eases
As the conflict in Kashmir continues into its fifth year, the government of India appears to have stepped up its catch-and-kill campaign against Muslim insurgents, resulting in an escalation of human rights abuses since early 1994. Civilians continue to bear the brunt of the casualties, falling victim both to government forces and to the various factions, collectively known as “militants.”
(C608) 8/94, 23 pp., $3.00/£1.95
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THE HUMAN RIGHTS CRISIS IN KASHMIR
A Pattern of Impunity
With the bloody conflict in Indian-controlled Kashmir now in its fourth year, Indian troops have embarked on a “catch and kill” campaign against Muslim militants, resulting in a sharp escalation of human rights abuses, including summary executions of hundreds of detainees in the custody of security forces. Troops have also engaged in reprisal attacks against civilians, assaults on medical workers, rape, torture and arson. Masroof Sultan (pictured on the cover), was detained by security forces in April 1993, beaten, tortured with electric shock, then shot and left for dead. His testimony follows: “They stood me up against a tree and told me, ‘Now we will release you forever.’ I heard them cock their guns. Someone said, ‘One, two, three,’ then they fired. I was shot in both legs. I heard someone say, ‘Make sure he’s dead.’ One of them kicked me in the head and said, ‘he’s still alive.’ The officer said, ‘Shoot him in the heart.’ Then the soldier shot me in the chest and arm. Someone kicked me again and said, ‘He’s still alive.’ Then a voice said, ‘Shoot him in the head.’ A bullet grazed the back of my neck. I held my breath. Someone kicked me again, then shouted, ‘He’s dead.’”
   The Human Rights Crisis in Kashmir provides comprehensive documentation of the consequences of India’s abusive policy in Kashmir. It also documents violations by armed militants, including killings, rape and indiscriminate attacks in populated areas, and concludes that these abuses and India’s policy of impunity toward its own security forces has helped fuel the conflict and create a human rights disaster in Kashmir.
(1045) 7/93, 240 pp., ISBN 1-56432-104-5, $15.00/£12.95
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RAPE IN KASHMIR
A Crime of War
Since January 1990, the north Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir has been the site of a brutal conflict between Indian security forces and armed Muslim insurgents demanding independence or accession to Pakistan. This report documents the use of rape as a means of targeting women whom the security forces accuse of being militant sympathizers, and in raping them, how the forces attempt to punish and humiliate an entire community.
(C509) 5/93, 19 pp., $3.00/£1.95
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NO END IN SIGHT
Human Rights Violations in Assam
The Indian army has conducted massive search-and-arrest operations in thousands of villages in Assam, located south of Bhutan, and the site of separatist movements and violent insurgencies since India’s independence. Many victims of abuses committed during these operations are civilians, often relatives or neighbors of young men suspected of militant sympathies. Villagers have been threatened, harassed, raped, assaulted and killed by soldiers attempting to frighten them into identifying suspected militants.
(C507) 4/93, 22 pp., $3.00/£1.95
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CRACKDOWN IN KASHMIR
Torture and Obstruction of Health Care
The vicious conflict in Kashmir, now in its fourth year, is characterized by the Indian army’s and other security forces’ blatant disregard for international norms of medical neutrality. Security forces frequently detain and assault health professionals; beat and shoot ambulance drivers, preventing them from transporting injured people; and raid hospitals, forcing doctors at gunpoint to identify injured patients who are then arrested, in some cases after being disconnected from life-sustaining equipment. The security forces have also opened fire on hospital grounds, entered operating theaters and destroyed medical supplies. Virtually everyone taken into custody by the security forces in Kashmir is tortured by electric shock and severe beatings. Despite the fact that many health services have been curtailed, and hospitals are short-staffed and overcrowded, India refuses to permit international humanitarian organizations to assist with medical relief in Kashmir.
(7136) 1/93, 40 pp., ISBN 1-879707-13-6, $7.00/£5.95
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HUMAN RIGHTS IN INDIA
Police Killings in Andhra Pradesh
In Andhra Pradesh, one of India’s poorest and least developed states, conflict between government forces and an armed insurgent group known as the Peoples’ War Group, has resulted in massive human rights violations. In its campaign to crush the insurgency, the state government has condoned the torture and murder of suspected militants and ordinary civilians in staged “encounters” with the police. Journalists or human rights activists who have investigated these killings and other abuses have also been murdered by the police, and militants in the state have attacked and killed civilians.
(0715) 6/92, 66 pp., ISBN 1-56432-071-5, $7.00/£5.95
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Punjab in Crisis
Violence between separatist Sikh militants and government forces in Punjab has escalated to unprecedented levels, claiming thousands of civilian lives. Since 1984, the security forces have adopted increasingly brutal methods to stem the militant movement, resulting in widespread human rights violations. Countless civilians and suspected militants have been summarily executed in staged “encounter” killings or have “disappeared” while in police custody; thousands have been detained without trial and subjected to torture. The evidence Asia Watch gathered indicates that these abuses are not random but have been carried out as a matter of state policy. At the same time, Sikh militants have pursued their campaign for a separate state through acts of violence against Hindu and Sikh civilians. The killings include assassinations of civil servants, political candidates, and journalists. Militant groups have also engaged in indiscriminate attacks designed to cause extensive civilian casualties and some operate as criminal gangs, profiting by extortion and arms smuggling.
(0324) 8/91, 224 pp., ISBN 1-56432-032-4, $15.00/£12.95
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Kashmir Under Siege
Since the partition of India in 1947, Kashmir, with a predominantly Muslim population, has been the site of militant unrest and a cause for war with Pakistan. Despite numerous UN proclamations calling for a plebiscite, the Kashmiri people have never been given a direct opportunity to voice their preference on the question of accession, and many within the state claim the central government of India has retreated from its original support for autonomy and democracy. The only up-to-date human rights reporting available on this conflicted region, Human Rights in India examines the past year of civil war and abuses committed by both sides. Government security forces have massacred large numbers of unarmed civilians, conducted warrantless house-to-house searches, seized youths, beat protestors, and destroyed whole neighborhoods. The militants have flagrantly violated international rules of war by summarily executing numerous civil servants and suspected government informers, throwing explosive devices at buses and government buildings, sowing terror through death threats and assassinating members of the minority Hindu community and Muslims thought to be insufficiently supportive of the insurgency.
(0103) 5/91, 176 pp., ISBN 1-56432-010-3, $15.00/£12.95
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Prison Conditions in India
Despite the checks and balances inherent in India’s democratic structure designed to curb government lawlessness, the institutional basis for the prison system has become grossly unfair. In some major cities anyone unlucky enough to be arrested faces a far greater likelihood of tortureÄÄor worseÄÄat the hands of the police than in many countries entirely lacking in the protections for civil liberties available in India. Prisons are supposed to be levelling institutions in which the variables that affect the conditions of confinement are expected to be the criminal records of their inmates and their behavior. In Indian prisons, however, there exists a rigid class system that is explicitly mandated by law, where special privileges are accorded to the minority of prisoners who come from the upper or middle classes, irrespective of the crimes they may have committed or the way that they comport themselves in prison. As this report shows, it is a system filled with contradictions not unlike those permeating Indian society as a whole. (926) 4/91, 44 pp., ISBN 0-929692-92-6, $5.00/£2.95
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