Helpful. Committed. Those are the words that come up as people try to describe Jaswant Singh Khalra. They also explain why he would one day embark on a mission to trace those who disappeared during Punjab’s years of militancy, only to himself disappear in September 1995.
Now, all these years later, with Satluj, a biopic on Khalra, abruptly pulled off streaming service Zee5, the man has reappeared — as a reminder of what Punjab once went through as it endured militancy and the might of the State, and, as his daughter Navkiran Kaur Khalra described in an interview to The Indian Express, as someone who “haunted the system” even in his death.
“When he was abducted, fake encounters and disappearances were happening across Punjab. Few questioned the police. His case changed that. For the first time, the Punjab Police found itself defending its actions before courts, the media and the international community. They probably never imagined that after so many killings, ikk laash inni bhaari pai jungi (one corpse would become their undoing),” said Navkiran Khalra, now an engineer in the United States.
The withdrawal of the film has reignited a decades-old debate over how, or whether, Punjab should remember the insurgency years. For some, revisiting that period risks reopening open old wounds. For others, silence is the greater danger.
Chief Minister Beant Singh was killed in a blast as he entered his car in the porch of the Punjab secretariat on August 31, 1995. (Express Archive Photo by Swadesh Talwar)
No name sits closer to that history than Khalra’s. The Amritsar-based activist spent the early 1990s doing what the State would not: counting the unclaimed dead at a time when militancy fuelled by the Khalistan movement and the establishment’s fightback meant thousands of people were killed or disappeared without a trace.
Then, on September 6, 1995, Khalra was abducted from outside his home in Amritsar while washing his car. He was never seen again. All these decades later, his work shapes every conversation on human rights in Punjab and courts continue to hold those responsible to account, purely on the strength of the evidence he gathered.
Long before he became a symbol, he was simply “Jas” to those who knew him. Growing up with four older siblings and four younger ones in Khalra village, in Punjab’s border district of Tarn Taran, he was the one everyone turned to for errands and difficult tasks.
Born in 1952 into a family steeped in the freedom movement, public service came almost as an inheritance. His grandfather had been associated with the Ghadar movement, the early 20th-century revolutionary campaign launched by Indian expatriates to overthrow British rule, and died in Shanghai, while his father spent months in prison during the Quit India Movement. After Independence, the family established a school in the village, later taken over by the government. Though born a Sandhu, a Jat Sikh surname, Jaswant chose to call himself ‘Khalra’, after his village, partly as a quiet rejection of Punjab’s rigid caste hierarchies.
His nephew, Hamandeep Singh, who was 16 when Khalra disappeared and now heads the Khalra Mission Organisation in Amritsar, laughs as he recalls that his uncle simply could not refuse anyone seeking help. “I remember he once went on a fast in support of a palledar (labourers’) union, demanding better wages. It did not matter who asked for help. If he believed the cause was just, he was there.”
Militants in the Golden Temple during Operation Black Thunder. (Express Archive Photograph by Swadesh Talwar)
Growing up on revolutionary literature, Sahir Ludhianvi’s songs and Satyajit Ray’s films, Khalra was fresh out of college when he revived the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, the organisation founded by Bhagat Singh in 1926. By then, he had already spent time in jail for leading the “bus kiraya” agitation, demanding concessional travel for students, a campaign that eventually prompted the government to introduce student bus passes.
The late 1960s were turbulent in Punjab. The Naxalite movement had begun attracting idealistic youngsters while student politics had acquired a distinctly Leftward tilt. Khalra painstakingly documented the names of young men killed in alleged encounters, producing what friends describe as his first major human rights report in 1973.
It was activism that brought him his life partner. Rajiv Singh Randhawa, then a young activist who would go on to become one of the key witnesses in Khalra’s abduction case, recalls how Khalra met Paramjit Kaur through her brother Gurbhajan Singh, then a student leader at Khalsa College.
Paramjit knew exactly the kind of man she was marrying. A librarian at Guru Nanak Dev University, she had heard enough about Khalra’s activism to know that public life would always come before personal comfort. They married in 1981 and settled in Amritsar, first in Chheharta and later, in 1994, in a modest house in Kabir Park, opposite the university so that she could simply walk to work.
All along, Khalra stuck to his causes. When fencing along the Indo-Pak border left many farmers cut off from their land in 1986, he travelled to New Delhi seeking compensation. Randhawa, then a recent graduate drawn to Khalra’s work, accompanied him to meetings with senior officials. The Centre expressed its inability to compensate only Punjab farmers but promised to ask the state government to do so.
That ability to move effortlessly between villages, protest sites and government offices was what made Khalra unusual.
Operation Blue Star in June 1984 changed many things for many people. For Khalra, it would prove to define his activism. He was at his in-laws’ home when the Army entered the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Curfew had paralysed Punjab, but he found a motorcycle and headed for his village. “There were rumours that Pakistan would attack, and he was worried about his parents,” Paramjit said in an earlier interview.
The violence that followed transformed Punjab, with the state becoming a war zone. As civil liberties groups and fact-finding teams descended on the state, Khalra became their go-to guide. Justice V M Tarkunde, founding president of People’s Union for Civil Liberties who conducted a fact-finding mission on state excesses, took him through villages around Amritsar to document testimonies. Khalra also began writing extensively for the Kolkata-based Frontier on the lives of ordinary people caught between militants and the police.
Villagers watch Ramleela at a village in the district of Gurudaspur in Punjab. (Express Photo by Swadesh Talwar)
The militancy strengthened Khalra’s belief that violence could never be justified. When Hindu passengers were pulled off a bus and killed by militants in 1986, Khalra went on a hunger strike in protest. “He believed militants had no right to take innocent lives,” recalls Randhawa.
Veteran Punjabi journalist Mota Singh remembers him arriving at newspaper offices, carrying press releases. “Almost every journalist knew him,” he recalls. “With his trademark dark blue turban and that smile, he made friends wherever he went.”
By 1994, his life appeared settled. His brothers had established themselves abroad. His sisters were doing well. He had been elected a director of the Amritsar Central Cooperative Bank. His new home in Amritsar’s Kabir Park overlooked Guru Nanak Dev University, where Paramjit continued working as a librarian.
It should have been the beginning of a quieter life. Instead, it would mark the beginning of a mission.
By the early 1990s, under Director General of Police KPS Gill, whose “bullet for bullet” strategy was widely credited with breaking the back of militancy, Punjab had all but quashed the insurgency. But the victory was accompanied by mounting allegations.
Randhawa talks about a woman named Kanso, who would stand outside the police station at Chabal near Amritsar every day, hurling abuses at policemen. Her husband and three sons had all been killed in fake encounters. “We visited her house,” Randhawa recalls. “It was in ruins. Bhaaji (brother, as he called Khalra) came back saying, ‘We have to do something.’”
Then, tragedy struck closer home. Piara Singh, a fellow director of the Amritsar Central Cooperative Bank, disappeared without a trace in 1992. “He belonged to a prosperous family,” says Randhawa. Khalra kept going to the local police station and asking the officer, “Ki assi bhog pa daiye (Should the family perform his last rites)?” There was no response. Soon, Khalra would begin searching for those answers himself. He began counting the dead.
It was around this time that Khalra met Jaspal Singh Dhillon, chairman of the Punjab Human Rights Organisation, in Chandigarh. Human rights activists were themselves under siege —Justice Ajit Singh Bains and Col Partap Singh were arrested in 1992.
A barefoot J F Rebeiro, DGP Punjab, accompanied by foreign and Indian journalists, walking in the Golden Temple during peak militancy in Punjab. (Express Archive Photo by Swadesh Talwar)
A small group took shape: Khalra, Dhillon, Amrik Singh Muktsar, a social activist, lawyers Navkiran Singh and Baljinder Sodhi, and a rights activist from Andhra Pradesh, Ram Narayan Kumar. They were united by a single question. “Hun ki kariye (What do we do now)?”
To give themselves some political cover, they persuaded the Shiromani Akali Dal, then the main Opposition party, to set up a Human Rights Wing. Dhillon became its chairman and Khalra its general secretary. The title mattered less than the space it created to investigate what few dared even whisper about.
The breakthrough came almost by accident. One morning in November 1994, Dhillon dropped by at Khalra’s house after returning from Nepal, where he had served as an election observer. “We were discussing how meticulously the Nepalis maintained public records,” Dhillon recalls. “Suddenly, Khalra said, ‘Let’s see what records our own institutions keep.’” The two drove to the Durgiana Mandir cremation ground in Amritsar. Posing as officials, they struck up a conversation with the caretaker. While he stepped away for a glass of water, one of their companions photocopied the cremation register. What they found was chilling. Page after page recorded the cremation of “unclaimed” bodies brought in by the Punjab Police.
A month later, they visited the cremation ground at Patti. This time, they were accompanied by rights activist Ram Narayan Kumar. “The caretaker told us there were days when three bodies would be cremated together because there wasn’t enough firewood,” Dhillon recalls.
Khalra cross-checked the registers with municipal records that documented the supply of firewood for unclaimed bodies. Together, they revealed not just the number of bodies but also the police officials who had brought them for cremation.
On January 1995, Khalra released a press note that named people, cited dates, and produced the paper trail of firewood purchase registers, municipal logbooks and cremation-ground records. His central claim: that between 1984 and 1994, Punjab Police had secretly cremated over 2,000 bodies as “unidentified” or “unclaimed” across just three Amritsar district crematoriums of Durgiana Mandir, Tarn Taran and Patti. The Central Bureau of Investigation would later confirm his findings.
DGP Punjab KPS Gill with his force where Gurjant Singh Budhsinghwala, chief of the Khalistan Liberation Force, was killed in an encounter with security forces near Ludhiana on July 30, 1992. (Express Archive Photo)
When Khalra first called the press conference, policemen allegedly barged in and seized his notes. Undeterred, the group travelled to Chandigarh and addressed the media there instead.
Their first public interest petition before the Punjab and Haryana High Court failed. The court questioned their locus standi. They regrouped. A fresh petition reached the Supreme Court through lawyer couple Ashok Aggarwal and Nithya Ramakrishnan, along with Ram Narayan Kumar and filmmaker Tapan Bose of the Committee for Information and Initiative on Punjab. This time, the court agreed to hear them.
As Khalra’s work gained attention, so did the hostility towards him. Ajit Singh Sandhu, then Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) of Tarn Taran, frequently slammed him and his allegations in public. Khalra replied with equal force.
On the morning of September 6, 1995, soon after his daughter Navkiran and son Janmeet had left for school, Khalra was outside his Kabir Park home, washing his white Tata Mobile. Inside, Randhawa was waiting for The Indian Express’s reporter Mandeep Singh to turn up for an interview. A blue Maruti van pulled up and men in plain clothes jumped out. “I ran outside when I heard the commotion,” Randhawa recalls. “By then, they had bundled Bhaaji into the van.”
He and Paramjit rushed from one police station to another. No one admitted having him. Two days later, the police filed an FIR that said militants dressed in civilian clothes had abducted him. “I knew then that he was in grave danger,” Randhawa says.
When Dhillon heard the news, he drove straight to Amritsar, where DIG, Border Range, D R Bhatti told him to speak to SSP Sandhu. Dhillon tracked Sandhu down to his Chandigarh residence. “There, I told him, ‘If you’re angry with us, we can resolve it. Just return our man’.” Sandhu, he says, denied any knowledge. When Dhillon persisted, Sandhu lost his temper. “Oh hatda hi nahin si (He simply wouldn’t stop).” I left, saying, “I will extract him from your bones.”
Dhillon then turned to SGPC president Gurcharan Singh Tohra, who secured him a meeting with Chief Minister Harcharan Singh Brar. According to Dhillon, when Tohra asked about Khalra, the Chief Minister quietly replied, “Pradhan ji, you are too late. The damage has been done.”
For Paramjit Kaur, the days that followed blurred into a desperate search as she knocked on the doors of several politicians.
Months later came the breakthrough. One evening in May 1996, The Indian Express’s correspondent, Satinder Bains, answered a knock on his door. A policeman, Kuldeep Singh, had come with a Punjabi journalist. He said he could no longer live with what he had witnessed. Kuldeep claimed he had seen Khalra being tortured and killed and had driven the vehicle used to dispose of his body near Harike, about 40 km southwest of Amritsar. He later repeated those allegations before the CBI court. The Indian Express reported the story on May 6.
The Indian Express carried the news of Khalra on May 6, 1998. (Express Archive)
The case had changed forever. It was no longer only about an abduction. It had become a murder investigation. Kuldeep Singh was later found dead near his village. His murder was never solved.
Years of legal battles followed. The Supreme Court ordered a CBI investigation following telegrams by Paramjit and SGPC president Tohra in September 1995. The probe concluded that Khalra had been abducted by personnel of the Punjab Police, murdered, and his body disposed of. Though his remains were never recovered, the investigation led to the prosecution of several police officers. In 1997, SSP Sandhu committed suicide while out on parole. In 2011, the Supreme Court upheld life imprisonment for five policemen.
His wife Paramjit Kaur and their children live in the quiet knowledge that the registers Khalra unearthed continue to stir the nation’s conscience, ensuring that the thousands who disappeared anonymously did not vanish from history.
(Visual design by Navya Roshan, an intern at indianexpress.com.)