“Dalit brothers were seen as threat to rural elite”

The Aam Admi Party (AAP) has demanded a CBI investigation into the fake encounter killing of two youth of Jamalpur village in Ludhiana district.

The party has also urged the State Government to follow the guidelines regarding “encounter killings” formulated by the Supreme Court of India in the recently decided PUCL v. Union of India while investigating the matter.

The controversial issue has rocked the State in the last few days and the government has already suspended the district Senior Superintendent of Police Harsh Bansal and dismissed two other policemen.

The incident which took place on September 27 was initially described by the police as an encounter but later it was forced to admit that the killings were murder. The Dalit brothers Harinder and Jatinder Singh were shot dead allegedly by an Akali leader in the presence of a police party.

A four-member fact-finding team of the AAP, that visited the village, addressed a press conference here on Saturday where they claimed that the brothers lost their lives because they were seen as a threat to the political domination of the rural elite connected with the ruling Akali Dal.

A member of the AAP team Professor Manjit Singh said that the two boys, who were kabaddi players, had also campaigned for the AAP in the Lok Sabha elections. The AAP claims that the two boys were asking a local landlord, who was allegedly cultivating their half-acre land for many years without paying rent, to return their land so that they could make use of it.

The landlord refused to follow suit and because of the duo’s insistence, two false cases were filed against them and their mother too was repeatedly harassed by the police.

The AAP team says that the police and other persons entered the house belonging to a poor Dalit family at 9 a.m. and shot dead the two brothers. Prof. Singh said: “On talking to neighbours we learnt that the concocted stories about the character of the boys were incorrect.”