FATEHGARH SAHIB, Punjab—In the past 5 years, thousands of dead bodies have been recovered from the Bhakra Canal at the Khanauri barrage. The Punjab police has yet to determine the cause of death for these individuals. Video footage from March 2015 shows several of the bodies being recovered from the barrage in a single day.
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT!
“Since only a very short portion of the Bhakra canal is in Sangrur district and the maximum length is in the districts of Ropar, Fatehgarh Sahib and Patiala, it can safely be asserted that the overwhelming majority of the bodies in the canal would have come from Patiala, Fatehgarh Sahib and Ropar,” said Inderjit Singh Jaijee, a well-respected author from Punjab.
Jaijee has been at the forefront of the Movement Against State Repression (MASR), which seeks government action to address this issue.
The Movement Against State Repression is a non-profit organization started in 1987 with the objective of documenting human rights abuses in Punjab. Between 1987 and 1997 MASR maintained files on hundreds of cases of human rights violations, sought redressal for victims of illegal acts and spoke out through all available media to raise awareness of the provisions of the law and instances of the laws abrogation.
Jaijee said that despite the fact that this issue is of grave importance, no concrete steps have been taken to curb the number of deaths. According to Jaijee, at least 400 bodies have been found in the canal in a single year, which means that over the years, at least 2000 bodies have been found. Jaijee estimates that three-fourths of the bodies, at least 1500, are of suicides.
This matter was first brought to the attention of the Punjab & Haryana High Court in 2011. The High Court ordered that lights were to be installed at the barrage, however no cameras or lights have been installed. So far, the police post at Khanauri has been making a daily record of how many dead bodies are recovered each day. However, to this date, no action has been taken to identify these bodies.
The MASR filed a case before the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) in November 2015. The Commission asked the Punjab Government to submit a report detailing what actions they have taken to recover and identify these bodies. To this day, the NHRC is still awaiting a response.
Full video is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il4P9k2DEmw