People's Democracy

THE Haryana state CITU has complained to National Human Rights Commission against the inhuman atrocities being perpetrated by the police and the district administration on the stone quarry workers and villagers in the Khanak-Tosham area of Bhiwani district in Haryana.

In a letter to the chariman of NHRC on February 25, the state CITU president S N Solanki listed various instances of such atrocities along with a backgrounder note on the entire issue. He sought the intervention of the Commission in this matter.

The quarry workers and villagers have been opposing the illegal extortion regime being perpetrated by the armed musclemen of the contractors with the active support of the local administration. The opposition of the workers and the villagers was sought to be silenced by the district administration and police by unleashing repression on the villagers and their family members.

Tosham town and its sorrounding rural villages were virtually turned into a police cantonment with heavy police contingents deployed to foil the satyagraha of the workers union on February 1. The next day, a peaceful procession of the workers was brutally lathi-charged leaving hundreds of workers injured. Section 144 was clamped in these areas and continues even today.

From that day onwards ruthless repression was unleashed causing suffering to the people. Every house was ransacked, belongings were destroyed, public transport was stopped, water and power supply disconnected, ration and kerosene supply withheld, schools and colleges were closed. All kinds of meetings were banned and the office of the workers union was forcibly taken over by contractor’s henchmen with the support of police. Several hundreds, including women and children were indiscriminately arrested, beaten up and kept in illegal custody as part of a strategy to create a terror atmosphere by the police force.

The activities in the entire stone-mining areas of the district - the only source of living for ten thousand families - came to a grinding halt owing to brutalities and desperate lawlessness being indulged by the custodian of law and order in the state at the behest of the contractors.

The Haryana state CITU has sought the intervention of the Commission against this organized barbarism by the contractors-administration combine.

(see People's Democracy issue dated February  17, 2002 for more details.)