COLUMN ONE : Punjab’s Lawless Police : Officers were given enormous leeway to quell the Sikh separatist uprising in northwest India. But even after the government gained the upper hand, citizens still face official acts of terror.

On a country road lined with bougainvillea in flaming bloom, Sukhwinder Singh Bhatti’s abductors, perspiring in the heat of a Punjab summer, laid their trap.

It was 4:30 p.m. when the bus carrying their quarry home from work moved into view. Two men in civilian clothes clutching light machine guns motioned it to stop and made five men get off.

Identifying the portly, bushy-bearded Sikh attorney among them, the gunmen roared away with their prey in a white van whose driver wore a mask.

That was May 12. Bhatti, 43, hasn’t been heard from since. His wife, Harcharanjit Kaur, 30, the mother of their three children, is so sick with worry that her face has turned a cadaverous gray and her eyes have sunk into their orbits.

In all likelihood, the Sangrur District Bar Assn. member has been murdered. Fellow attorneys say the same fate befell three other defense lawyers before him, and one even vanished with his wife and 18-month-old son.

More examples of terrorism in violence-weary Punjab? It depends how one defines the term. As in other recent incidents, the prime suspects are not armed insurgents battling the Indian government, but the police.

“There is no rule of law in Punjab,” Bhatti’s wife, wringing thin hands whose nails have been gnawed to the flesh, exclaimed as she wept. “We can count only on God.”

Two years after the balance shifted decisively in the authorities’ favor in the war on Sikh separatism, the Punjab populace is reaping a brutal and bloody harvest. Police had been given a virtually free hand to liquidate the militants. Now, like a machine that has escaped from its inventors, they continue to commit acts of illegal detention, torture, intimidation, murder and extortion. Elected officials and the courts seem powerless to stop them.

“They’ve created a monster, and now they are finding it difficult to control,” a local journalist says.

For more than a decade, a rebellion launched by often vicious extremists from the Sikh religious and ethnic minority raged in this flat, canal-laced land of rice, wheat and sunflower fields on India’s northwest border. As recently as 1991, the struggle for a separate Sikh state was claiming nearly 5,000 lives a year.

To liquidate the separatist danger in India’s breadbasket, the government embarked on a ruthless counterinsurgency campaign. Police began to kill any militant they caught, rather than turning suspects over to courts cowed by the extremists.

Now “the black period is over,” Punjab’s chief minister, Beant Singh, said earlier this year, proclaiming victory over the rebels.

In one sense, he is undeniably right. In industrialized Ludhiana, the Indian state’s largest city, alcohol-lubricated engagement parties and blue jeans for girls are back in vogue as people ignore the fundamentalists’ ascetic fiats of the past.

After sundown, traffic again roars along roads, and farmers drive teams of oxen through fields they once fled at dusk. In 1992, when militants ordered an election boycott, only 20% of voters turned out. In partial elections in May, three times that percentage voted.

By Singh’s estimate, only 12 to 13 “hard-core militants” remain at large, and most of them have fled Punjab. But police conduct continues to vary from the grisly to the outrageous, according to press accounts and interviews with dozens of victims and witnesses.

Last December, four village women who went to Amritsar, seat of the holiest Sikh shrine, were illegally taken into custody, and the word jebkatri --pickpocket--was tattooed on their foreheads.

The women were obviously simple country folk who had nothing to do with either politics or crime, their lawyer says. Police so clearly exceeded the bounds of permissible behavior that the Punjab High Court ordered the women awarded 50,000 rupees ($1,620) in compensation, and New Delhi authorities launched a criminal investigation.

It was an all-too-rare instance of errant police officers here being held accountable for their deeds.

“In Punjab, there is rule of law on the statute books only,” lawyeS. Gill, chairman of the Ludhiana-based International Human Rights Organization, a non-governmental monitoring group, charges. “Police have instructions to eliminate people who were directly or indirectly involved in the (separatist) movement: militants, relatives and sympathizers, religious figures.”

Also at risk, he says, are people who try to monitor human rights abuses and attorneys who represent accused terrorists.

Even being married to the wrong person may be dangerous. In June, 1993, police dragged 40-year-old Gurnam Kaur by the hair from her Ludhiana home, clubbing her with rifle butts.

It later became clear that they were really seeking her husband, who is accused of being the brains behind the militant Babbar Khalsa International group.

The husband was arrested later in Delhi, police announced. But his wife never resurfaced, although the Indian Supreme Court’s registrar ordered Punjab police to hold an inquiry and report “immediately.” Her sister-in-law fears that Kaur was tortured to death by police in the town of Tarn Taran and her body dumped in the Beas River.

The case of Bhatti, a member of a separatist political party who served as legal counsel to Sikhs accused of terrorism, depicts in miniature how Punjab’s police seem to be able to act at will. He was abducted 100 yards from a police checkpoint west of Sangrur, one reason many people believe police were responsible.

Another is the criminal complaint that Bhatti had filed on behalf of an old man tortured in police custody.

The plaintiff, Baldev Singh, is 74. In July, 1993, he says, he was picked up by police, stripped naked, trussed up with a rope and hung upside down from the ceiling of a police station. He was beaten with bamboo poles on the soles of his feet until he blacked out.

Next, Singh says, police crushed his thighs beneath a heavy wooden roller. They asked him if he had been providing shelter to Sikh militants. No, he maintained. Again he lost consciousness.

The torture was repeated for a second day. On the third day, he was freed. He had to be driven home because he couldn’t walk. On orders from the Sangrur magistrate, three doctors examined Singh and corroborated that he had been tortured. Bhatti filed a legal complaint on his behalf.

“Police officials were threatening Mr. Bhatti and me to withdraw the case,” Singh now says. “They said we’d be eliminated.”

Outraged by the mysterious disappearance of yet another lawyer, Punjab High Court Judge V. K. Bali gave police until June 3 to produce Bhatti. But police showed up in court empty-handed, saying they had searched extensively and had no idea where he was.

Indian officialdom routinely rejects allegations of human rights violations in Punjab and other troubled areas of the country. The charismatic chief of the Punjab police, K. P .S. Gill, who is universally credited with crushing the insurgency, has categorically denied accusations of police brutality and killings.

During his visit to Washington in May, Indian Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao assured a joint session of Congress that his government was “taking scrupulous care” to protect human rights, and he invited members of the Senate to go see the situation in Punjab for themselves.

Crisscrossing the dusty, sunbaked farmlands watered by tributaries of the Indus, one hears stories that are at odds with the reassuring statements of officials. Such testimony portrays police and paramilitary forces subject to no real judicial or governmental oversight. It seems to make a farce of the slogan painted on red-and-blue police checkpoints that promises the Punjab populace “protection with affection.”

“I’ve come across no case where a prosecution against the guilty official was won,” R. S. Maha, a Sangrur lawyer, says. “And the victim remains the victim.”

In a study of alleged shootouts between militants and police in Punjab, the international human rights organization Amnesty International noted that in 169 such “encounters” reported in the state’s press, 266 purported Sikh separatists were killed, but not a single police officer.

In a report released during Rao’s U.S. visit, Human Rights Watch/Asia and Physicians for Human Rights put the death toll in Punjab’s decade-long insurgency at more than 10,000, charging that most of the victims were summarily executed in police custody.

The case of Harpal Singh, 40, seems all too typical. Acquitted on terrorism charges last July, the agricultural worker was arrested the next day. Police, however, denied detaining him. A few days later, they announced that a militant armed with an AK-47 had been slain in an “encounter” near the village of Maheru.

The doctor who performed the autopsy confirmed to Singh’s father that the dead man was his son. But it was a strange gunfight. The post-mortem showed he had been shot point-blank in the forehead twice with a pistol. Supposedly armed with a fast-firing assault rifle, he hurt no one.

“Nobody has ever been killed in a fake ambush,” Punjab Chief Minister Singh has asserted. As for accusations of official brutality, he claims that during his more than two years in office, about 200 police officers have been punished for one offense or another.

However, a recent occurrence in Chandigarh, Punjab’s capital, casts doubt on the official version of events. In March, police chief Gill summoned the press to witness the “surrender” of a celebrated ideologue of the separatist movement, Kanwar Singh Dhami.

The news conference rapidly deviated from its organizers’ plans when the badly limping speaker announced that he had been held illegally and incommunicado by police for 10 months, along with his pregnant wife and 6-year-old son. Dhami told reporters that he had been severely tortured and warned while in custody that his family would be wiped out if he didn’t “surrender” to Gill before the press.

After the uncooperative speaker was bundled off by police, Gill said he was obviously deranged.

A particularly gruesome “encounter slaying” in the town of Patti also has bared official misdeeds. Police in October left a body at the Civil Hospital, asking that an autopsy be performed. Sarabjit Singh’s head was bathed in blood, witnesses remember; he had been shot in the back of the skull with a small-caliber gun.

When the corpse began to talk, the hospital staff was flabbergasted. Singh, it turned out, wasn’t dead but was severely wounded.

The entry hole left by the bullet was dressed, and he was given injections and intravenous glucose. Then, Sita Ram, a police officer, returned. He grabbed Singh by the arms and legs and tossed him into a patrol vehicle, witnesses said.

An hour later, the police were back. Again, they wanted a post-mortem performed. This time, Singh was truly dead.

The case appears to be one of the very few in Punjab where a police officer may be punished for the use of excessive force, leading some to hope that officials of the government and courts are trying harder to rein in police. Ram is in jail pending trial. But at the hospital, the doctor who treated Singh is afraid to discuss the case for fear that Ram’s fellow officers may take revenge. Securing a murder conviction may be impossible.

Under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, a terrorism suspect in India can be held for up to two years without trial.

Ludhiana human rights activist and lawyer Gill estimates that some Sikhs have been in jail for up to four years without having been convicted of any crime or even having gone to court.

His organization, which has undisguised sympathy for the separatist struggle, has estimated that 7,000 to 8,000 activists, relatives and sympathizers are languishing in Indian jails, often in custody illegally. When quizzed earlier this year, Chief Minister Singh maintained that only 800 to 900 “terrorists” were in jail.

Events in Punjab have much wider implications because police techniques pioneered there are being extended to other troubled areas of India, including the state of Jammu and Kashmir.

It was announced in May, for instance, that the new post of superintendent of police for operations would be created in districts of Kashmir where Muslim insurgents are particularly active. According to some Punjab human rights activists, the holder of this job is in charge of faking the deaths of detainees in “encounters.”

Police chief Gill has also admitted that police hit teams have been created in Punjab to “trace, identify and kill top militants” instead of arresting them. In May, 1993, one squad went all the way to Calcutta to shoot dead an alleged militant and his wife.

Two weeks ago, nine police assassins went to West Bengal to kill another alleged terrorist. Local authorities were so infuriated that they disarmed the Punjab officers and barred them from leaving until an investigation is complete.

Punjab police showed their colors again this month at a New Delhi press conference called after their chief was chosen head of India’s field hockey federation. When a pair of journalists cast doubt on Gill’s qualifications for the job, they were hustled out by five high-ranking Punjab officers and given a thrashing.

Indian authorities’ biggest break in their fight against armed Sikh militancy came in February, 1993, when Gurbachan Singh Manochahal, chief of the underground committee that had been spearheading the Sikh separatist struggle, was gunned down after emerging from a bunker hidden beneath a cowshed.

In a poor farming village near Tarn Taran, the dead militant’s sister-in-law is struggling to get by. “We have no peace,” Kashmir Kaur complains. Police seized the sprawling farmhouse occupied by the family, she says.

How many members of her family are still alive? Kaur pauses to think. Gurbachan’s mother and father disappeared following their detention by police, she says. The same thing happened to two of his four brothers. In all, she concludes, 10 family members have vanished or been killed while in the custody of Punjab police.

“The peace they talk about has been built on the bones of my relatives,” Kaur says.