Changing Lifestyles : Endless War and Disarray: The Plight of the Punjab : Even the police are outside the law in what was once India’s most prosperous state.

AMRITSAR, India — Police in the war-ravaged Indian border state of Punjab insist they were merely trying to prove a point when they assembled five captured bank robbers before the local press at a recent news conference here: Law and order finally returning to the strategic state after a decade of civil war that thrust Punjab to the top of the list of the world’s bloodiest and most intractable armed conflicts.

A bank had been robbed in this holy city of the Sikh religious sect. The criminals were caught, and, the police told the press that day, the 45,000 rupees (about $2,300) in cash and three pounds of gold jewelry that the robbers had taken from the bank’s safe-deposit vault had been recovered.

Just one problem: The numbers were wrong. The jewelry owners and bank managers had put the value of the loot at nearly double that figure. Using war as their cover, it appeared, the Punjab police had pocketed half the loot.

Few here were surprised a few weeks later when, on the day the robbers were scheduled to appear in court for the first time, they were killed at a remote spot along Ram Tirath Road.

Acting as judge, jury and executioner, the police put the five young men in chains, forced them to lie face-down near a sewage canal and, one by one, shot them to death. Their justification: They were concerned that the robbers would get out on bail and kill key prosecution witnesses.

“They were shot, OK. There’s no denying it,” Senior Police Superintendent Sanjiv Gupta told a handful of Western journalists gathered in his office the other day. But “that is a different issue,” he said, betraying the moral damage war has wrought on this once-robust and fertile land. “The question in this case is whether the police took the money or the owners got the money--not whether the police shot these men. And I can assure you, the owners got everything back.”

After 10 years of numbing violence that has left a death toll some experts calculate at 50,000 or more, including 2,000 this year, the case of the Amritsar bank robbers indicates how a state that once was India’s wealthiest has become something of a laboratory for the corrosive social consequences of a war without end--a war waged ostensibly to transform fertile Punjab into an independent Sikh nation called Khalistan, or “land of the pure.”

From police corruption, torture and summary execution by officials to brutal weekly massacres, extortion and theft by the Sikh insurgents, the war has made Punjab a virtually lawless state where India’s vaunted democracy is a fading memory.

The war has even altered crop patterns in a state where agriculture is so productive that it has supplied India with more than 80% of its grain in recent years. Police have banned sugar planting in many regions because insurgents used the tall cane to launch ambushes.

Movie theaters, the staple of India’s rural family entertainment, have all but closed after a rash of terrorist bombings scared viewers away. And even nature has suffered. Scientists say the bird population of a nature sanctuary at the confluence of Punjab’s two most important rivers has fallen from half a million to below 100,000, with the rest frightened off by nightly gunfire and bomb blasts.

So pervasive is death and destruction in Punjab that national elections scheduled for the rest of India late this month cannot be held here until next month--if then--because thousands of extra paramilitary troops are needed to guard the polls.

Among the candidates for office are prominent insurgents, terrorists, extortionists, kidnapers and secessionists--a rogues’ gallery of criminals that is testimony to how a once-idealistic crusade for Sikh autonomy has been transformed into little more than a cynical cover for crime by both lawbreakers and lawmakers.

“The line dividing politician, criminal and terrorist is very thin now,” said Police Superintendent Gupta. “Many of the terrorists are very ambitious. Power, I think, is a great motivator, and everybody wants to gain respectability. . . . But the Khalistan movement has been taken over by common criminals. Khalistan for them is just a public stand now. In private, they say something else.”

For pro-Khalistan politicians and militants, who insist that their movement remains pure--and, indeed, for most of Punjab’s ordinary farmers and businessmen often victimized by the war--the police are no less sullied. Armed with extraordinary powers under India’s Terrorist and Disturbed Areas Act, police concede that there has been rampant corruption and abuse. They also concede, often brazenly, that they have imprisoned suspected terrorists for weeks or months without charges and, like the bank robbers in Amritsar, executed suspects without trial.

In short, the police themselves have become an integral part of the lawlessness and corruption they accuse the rebels of spreading.

Gupta likened the situation in the state to that of the Clint Eastwood film, “Dirty Harry.”

“I’ve seen the film, and it’s true,” the articulate young officer said. “You journalists see things in a very idealistic way. We are the people on the ground fighting terrorism. It’s very easy to sit in judgment of a thing. It is not very easy to do that thing yourself. These terrorists, for example, they go to the village and kill people without a trial, but nobody condemns that.

“And you have seen what is happening here in our courts. They are not functioning at all. There is fear there. The judges are afraid. Ever since the start of terrorism, how many terrorists have been convicted by the courts?”

“Let the entire legal system function normally, and the complaints against police will come down by 80%.”

But many police officers clearly prefer the situation as it is. Take the senior superintendent of a terrorist-prone district close to the Pakistani border, for example. Were the legal system functioning in Punjab, this superintendent never could have put on the show he did for a visiting Times reporter.

He had a young suspect brought into his office in a black hood and chains, requesting only that neither his name nor that of his prisoner be used.

The law permits police to hold a suspect for only 24 hours without formal charges, but this one had been in custody for nearly a month. To get around the law, the police did not charge him, but simply moved him surreptitiously from jail to jail.

The young suspect, a self-confessed “lieutenant general” in the Khalistan Commando Force--one of dozens of Sikh extremist splinter groups--was “helping” police track down his gang. Officers would order him at gunpoint to telephone his rebel followers and issue them orders that police would then use to capture or kill them. In exchange, the superintendent was offering vague hopes that perhaps, if he continued to cooperate, his life might be spared.

But in a two-hour interview as he sat barefoot, cross-legged and in chains on the floor with a police sergeant just a few feet away, the young suspect told a life’s story that spoke volumes about the degeneration of the Sikhs’ struggle for autonomy.

It was in 1981 that a Sikh religious zealot named Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale launched a holy war for independence on behalf of the 500-year-old sect.

The suspect was then just 16 years old, living in the remote village of Manawa only a few miles from Pakistan, the logistic and arms-supply base for the Sikh insurgents. He knew little of Bhindranwale and even less of the Khalistan crusade.

All he knew was that his elder sister had been raped that year, and, overcome by shame, she had killed herself, jumping headfirst into the village well. The rapist was the son of a powerful local family in an adjacent village.

“From that day until now, it was my burning desire just to get an automatic weapon and take her revenge,” the young suspect recalled. “I was young. Our family was poor and powerless. Without a machine gun, I could never avenge my sister.”

His answer seemed finally to have arrived when a band of Sikh militants passed through his village en route to Pakistan for arms and ammunition. The young man joined their crusade.

He said he made a total of six more smuggling runs into Pakistan, easily skirting the elaborate, security fence and sentry towers the Indians have built along the entire Punjab border.

Ultimately, the young man became a much-feared “lieutenant general” in the rebel movement, and he had an AK-47 assault rifle. But by then, his sister’s rapist, a man who knew well of his vow of revenge, as well as his new stature as a militant leader, had fled his village without a trace.

With a 200,000-rupee ($10,000) reward on his head, the young man was finally tracked down by police. “You see, these terrorists are no longer crusaders,” the superintendent commented. “They are like this, seekers of revenge, criminals, boys without jobs or future.”

And what did the young man think about his future? And about the value of an obsessive quest for revenge never fulfilled?

“Yes, it was worth it,” he said, alternating between English and his native Punjabi language. “Through fear alone, this man who raped my sister has died a thousand deaths as I hunted him.”

He looked down at the thick, steel manacles on his wrists, then looked up again and continued: “My future?” he said, smiling faintly. “There is only death.”