Saturday 14 February 2009

Sukhman Dhami

Sukhman Dhami, pictured with Jaskaran Kaur, is the co-founder and co-Director of Ensaaf. He was the recipient of the 2004 Unity Award from the San Francisco Coalition of Minority Bars and South Asian Bar Association for his outstanding service to the legal community. Dhami is a 2006 Echoing Green fellow. Sukhman also received a two-year fellowship through the Ford Foundation to address issues of accountability and impunity for human rights abuses in India. He serves on the Advisory Board to the Public International Law and Policy Group, which provides pro bono legal services to States in conflict and transition on issues of peace and conflict resolution and human rights abuses. Dhami earned his M.A. and J.D. from the American University.

Jaskaran Kaur

Jaskaran Kaur is the co-Founder and co-Director of Ensaaf, an international human rights organisation that works to bring justice to the people of Punjab by documenting and exposing human rights violations, bringing perpetrators to justice, and organizing survivors to advocate for their rights. Jaskaran has authored reports on human rights abuses in India, including Twenty Years of Impunity: The November 1984 Pogroms of Sikhs in India, and, as a contributing author, Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab, analyzing over 600 cases of extrajudicial execution and disappearance by India’s security forces. She is a 2006 Echoing Green fellow. She currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Discrimination & National Security Initiative of the Pluralism Project at Harvard University. From 2003 to 2005 she was the recipient of the Irving R. Kaufman Fellowship from Harvard Law School. In 2001, she went to Punjab on a Harvard Human Rights Program Summer Fellowship to study the role of the judiciary in handling habeas corpus petitions filed before the Punjab and Haryana High Court by families of the disappeared; her study was published in the Harvard Human Rights Journal. Jaskaran graduated with distinction from Yale College and Harvard Law School. SikhTruth reccommends you visit Ensaaf's website and if possible help them by making a donation.

Manjit Singh

Manjit Singh was born and raised in Bombay, India. He completed his Bachelor of Engineering, from the University of Bombay in 1989. After completing his Bachelor’s, Manjit worked as a Systems Engineer for sometime with International Data Machines (IDM) in Bombay. Then in late 1990, Manjit came to the United States for further education. He received his Master’s Degree in Computer Science in 1992 from the State University of New York (SUNY) in Albany, New York. Manjit is a Computer Scientist by training and profession. While working at IBM, Manjit was one of the key persons responsible for designing a software program called “Key Ring Organizer (KRO)--a client software application for digital certificate management. Multiple private keys and digital certificates are securely stored and managed in disk files, Smart Cards and PC Cards. The KRO can generate, store and select keys for use in signing of digital information or authenticating the end-user to a host of secure client/server applications. Manjit currently holds the patent for this KRO software.

In 1996 Manjit co-founded SMART, which later became SALDEF, the Sikh American Legal Defence and Education Fund, and has been active in the Washington D.C. metro area Sikh community since early 1993. He serves on the Victim Services Advisory Board of the Montgomery County, Maryland. He is a member of the Community Advisory Board for the Washington DC region of the International Channel He served on the Advisory Board of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. He also served for two years as Member-at-Large on the Board of the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington.

Ajit Singh

Ajit Singh is an Indian economist who graduated from the Punjab University and obtained his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been teaching economics at Cambridge University since 1965. He is currently a Professor of Economics at the University and Senior Fellow at Queens' College Cambridge. He has been a senior economic adviser to the governments of Mexico and Tanzania and a consultant to various UN developmental organisations, including the World Bank, the ILO, UNCTAD and UNIDO. He has also done a lot of research in economics, in areas such as take-overs, corporate organisation and markets. He has authored several books including, Takeovers: Their Relevance to the Stock market and the Theory of the Firm and co-author of Growth, Profitability and Valuation, both published by Cambridge University Press. He has also published extensively in academic economic journals. His books include his co-edited volume with C. Howes Competitiveness Matters: Industry and Economic Performance in the U.S., published in 2000 by the University of Michigan Press; the edited volume, (with A. Dutt and K. Kim).