Marxist, Akali, Khalistan sympathiser: Jaswant Singh Khalra was harder to place than Satluj admits

Punjab 95 – a film based on the life of Jaswant Singh Khalra, the Punjabi human rights activist killed in illegal police custody in 1995 – finally reached audiences on July 3, when it was released on the OTT platform ZEE5 under the title Satluj. It had taken four years to get there. Two days later, it was withdrawn from India “until further orders”, and then internationally. Since then, the debate around the film has only grown louder, in Punjab and beyond.

Directed by Honey Trehan, the film stars Diljit Dosanjh, Arjun Rampal, Kanwaljit Singh, Suvinder Vicky, Jagjit Sandhu and Geetika Vidya Ohlyan. It had been waiting for Censor Board clearance since 2022. Its original title was Ghallughara – a Punjabi word meaning massacre or genocide. The Board objected, and the title became Punjab 95. The Board then proposed 127 cuts. At the time, Trehan had said: “The film is a biopic of Jaswant Singh Khalra, and we were asked to remove his name entirely. That is, quite simply, a crime.”

And so the film stayed stuck. In February 2025 an international release was announced and a teaser dropped, only for the release to be postponed once again. Then, on July 3, it appeared on ZEE5 as Satluj. Trehan insisted that “there are no cuts in this film, nor has there been any compromise regarding its original form”. Khalra’s family also maintains that the version streamed on ZEE5 is exactly the one that was screened for them.

Not everyone agrees. Gyan Singh Sandhu, a founding member of the World Sikh Organization in Canada, recalls a different cut: “A few months ago, when Honey visited Canada, he screened the film for some people. I watched it then. He has since removed certain scenes I saw at the time – powerful ones. The scene where the then DGP, K P S Gill, meets Khalra face to face. A scene showing Khalra being brutally beaten in police custody. Some of the courtroom scenes are gone too. Even so, I believe the film stays close to the truth.” It is worth remembering that it was the World Sikh Organization that invited Khalra to Canada in 1995 – an episode the film itself depicts.

Gurpreet Singh, an Indian-origin journalist based in Canada, offers another glimpse of that period: “Honey Trehan came to Canada in February. He wanted to sell the film there, because India’s Censor Board was blocking its clearance. He seems to have changed that plan later. He screened it for several people and looked to be under enormous pressure. When I asked for an interview, he declined. He said his legal team had advised him not to speak to foreign media.”

Explaining the India takedown initially, ZEE5 had said: “In light of current developments, Satluj will not be available in India until further notice. We are exploring all appropriate legal avenues to bring this film back to our audience as soon as possible.”

A committee formed by the union information and broadcasting ministry to examine the film said the restrictions should remain as the movie goes against India’s sovereignty and integrity.

The politics of a ban

The reaction in Punjab was immediate, and, predictably, partisan. Every party found something in the film to use.

The governing Aam Aadmi Party opposed the removal, defending the film’s story and its factual basis while using the occasion to attack the Congress, the Akali Dal and the BJP. Within the Congress, leaders such as Dharamvir Gandhi, Sukhpal Khaira, Charanjit Singh Channi and Pargat Singh have backed the film and opposed the ban; others in the party have judged silence to be the safer course.

The Akali Dal, meanwhile, opposes the ban while attacking the Congress government of Beant Singh that presided over those years, and simultaneously claims Khalra as one of its own. The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee and the Jathedar of the Akal Takht have also come out against the removal. With a BJP-led government at the Centre, the opposition has naturally trained its fire there.

The BJP’s Punjab unit, for its part, looks caught. State president Kewal Dhillon has met the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to demand that the ban be lifted. Union Minister of State Ravneet Singh Bittu, on the other hand, is opposing the film openly; in one video he can be seen stoking Hindu sentiment in Punjab against it. Party spokesperson R P Singh has tried to lower the temperature by announcing that a committee has been formed to review the film.

The ban has had the effect bans usually have. Digital copies are circulating hand to hand across Punjab on WhatsApp and other apps. Screenings are being held in village gurdwaras and community spaces, with the Shiromani Akali Dal and Amritpal Singh’s Waris Punjab De actively organising them. Diljit Dosanjh, who plays Khalra, has voiced support for these public screenings. Trehan, the director, has asked people to stop. It is, after all, piracy.

The police cases were real

Beneath the noise, the film has pushed older questions back to the surface: about Khalra’s work, his vision, and the era he lived and died in.

Satluj follows Khalra’s effort to expose extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances and illegal cremations carried out by the police during the years of militancy in Punjab. Khalra had documented bodies cremated in Tarn Taran, Patti, Ajnala and Durgiana (Amritsar) between June 1984 and December 1994 – bodies that, he argued, were evidence of the police’s unlawful conduct.

According to the Central Bureau of Investigation, it was precisely this campaign that made him a target of the local police. A conspiracy was hatched; on September 6, 1995, police officers abducted Khalra from his home. He was held in illegal custody, killed, and his body thrown into a canal at Harike in Tarn Taran district.

The case eventually reached the CBI, which filed a charge sheet in a Patiala court in 1996 against nine police officers. The prime accused was Ajit Singh Sandhu, then SSP of Tarn Taran. The others included Ashok Kumar, Satnam Singh, Rachhpal Singh, Jasbir Singh, Amarjit Singh, Surinder Pal Singh and DSP Jaspal Singh. Charges could never be framed against Sandhu – he had already taken his own life. The rest were tried under Sections 364, 120-B and 34 of the IPC. The film goes further than the charge sheet, raising questions about the roles of the then Chief Minister and of Punjab Police chief K P S Gill, and suggesting that Khalra was killed at Gill’s behest – Khalra had repeatedly challenged Gill to a public debate on custodial deaths.

No comparison with propaganda films

The most obvious question about the film is why it could not get a censor certificate for four years. What is striking is how little there is in it to justify that delay. The film does not really indict the system or those who ran it. It lays the blame on a handful of policemen and officers, and portrays national agencies such as the CBI as honest and diligent. 

Its release on a platform like ZEE5 – and its quiet disappearance from it – is worth thinking about. As much as it is worth remembering how often films have arrived in the neighbourhood of state elections in recent years: The Kerala Story before the Kerala polls, Bengal Files before the West Bengal Assembly elections, and before them outright propaganda vehicles like Sabarmati Express and The Kashmir Files, championed by everyone from the Prime Minister down to local BJP functionaries, and rewarded with tax exemptions.

Should Satluj be read the same way? 

Not straightforwardly. There is no religious hatred in it; the victims of the atrocities it depicts share a religion with most of the perpetrators. It is a work of art, and it contains what is arguably Diljit’s finest performance. But does the timing – an election season – mean nothing at all?

Pavel Kussa, a political and social activist and editor of the revolutionary magazine Surkh Leeh, states: “Filmmakers are businessmen, and artists like Diljit are merely tools of the trade. The real game begins afterwards. When a film is halted, when it is cleared, when it is banned – these are decided by the vote-bank arithmetic of governments and parties. Films like The Kashmir Files and Dhurandhar are made to a plan. And even films made with no such intent become opportunities that politicians go looking for, depending on the moment.”

The behaviour of the BJP, the Akali Dal and Waris Punjab De around this film illustrates the point well enough.

It misses the question of Khalra’s ideology

The second large question the film raises is about Khalra himself. Ideology neither adds to nor subtracts from the value of his work, and it certainly does not excuse his murder. But it does tell us something about a man’s convictions and his cast of mind.

The film presents Khalra as a human rights activist and a humanist, and nothing more. Among Panthic circles, the picture is more contested. 

One camp sees him as a liberal Sikh and a rights defender; the other sees an activist shaped by Khalistani ideology. The split runs through the two books written about him – Ajmer Singh’s Shaheed Jaswant Singh Khalra, in Punjabi, and Gurmeet Kaur’s The Valiant Jaswant Singh Khalra, in English.

Khalra was born in 1952 in Khalra village, Tarn Taran district, into a family with a history of resistance. His grandfather, Harnam Singh, was a Ghadar Party activist who took part in India’s freedom struggle; he was one of the 376 passengers aboard the Komagata Maru, and served time in Lahore Jail. As a student, Jaswant Singh Khalra held leftist views, was drawn to Marxism and Leninism, and was associated for a time with the Naujawan Bharat Sabha. He later worked as a bank manager. It was the sudden disappearance of a colleague, and his own attempt to find him, that turned him into a human rights activist, working with a rights organisation.

Contemporaries recall that several human rights organisations were active in Punjab in that period, but that Khalra preferred to work alone rather than alongside them. At first he condemned both police atrocities and killings by Khalistanis. Later, he narrowed his attention to police killings of Sikh youths associated with the Khalistan movement. One explanation offered for this shift is the far greater interest that national and international rights bodies were then taking in those killings.

Gurdyal Singh Bal, a Punjabi journalist from Khalra’s own area who knew him well, writes in his long essay Gurmeet Singh Pinki Diyan Chinghaaran te Punjab Siyasat Diyan Smritiyan de Kujh Ansh (The screams of Gurmeet Singh Pinki and some fragments of Punjab’s political memories) that Khalra would defend several killings carried out by Khalistanis.

Between 1990 and 1992, while in England, Khalra wrote for Liberation Khalistan, a newspaper shaped by Khalistani politics. An article of his from February 1992 was titled “Chonan di Khed: Ki eh khedni chahidi hai jaan nahi?” — later published in English by Baaz News as “The game of elections: Should it be played or not?” 

The piece leaves little doubt about his views at the time. In it he puts the number of “martyrs” who died for Khalistan at 50,000. He describes Satwant Singh and Kehar Singh, Indira Gandhi’s assassins, as martyrs greater than Bhagat Singh and Kartar Singh Sarabha. And he argues that Khalistan will never be won through elections. This was, it should be said, the moment when the Akali Dal and several hardline Sikh factions were boycotting the 1992 Punjab Assembly polls.

The Canada visit misrepresented

In 1995 Khalra was invited to Canada by the World Sikh Organization – a body where a section has been sympathetic to the cause of Khalistan. A Toronto-based journalist and radio host, speaking on condition of anonymity, is dismissive of how the film handles this: “In reality the organisation has been dominated by 30 or 35 families. The film treats the invitation as a monumental event. It wasn’t. We routinely arrange meetings between visitors from India and our Members of Parliament. In its early years, the organisation openly advocated Khalistani views; later it confined itself to legal and human rights work. Khalra was invited by Sukhvinder Singh Hansra, one of its founding members. Hansra held Khalistani beliefs but did not believe in violence. It was around the second anniversary of his radio group, Ankhila Punjab.”

It was that media group which interviewed Khalra during his visit. The host, Inderjit Singh Bal, opens the programme sounding sympathetic to Khalistan. Khalra expresses his support for the idea of ​​Khalistan and calls Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale “one of the heroes of the community in this century”. “In my view, his sacrifice has awakened us to redefine our (the Sikhs’) relationship with India.” He criticises the hardline politics of the BJP and Shiv Sena, and questions whether India is truly democratic and secular. The interview is on YouTube. 

So is a second video – a speech he gave at a Toronto gurdwara – from which the film borrows excerpts.

In her book, Gurmeet Kaur writes that Khalra went on hunger strike in protest when the Babri Masjid was demolished, and resigned from the Akali Dal. Rajiv Singh Randhawa – a close friend and an eyewitness to Khalra’s abduction – disputes this. Khalra did oppose the demolition, he told me, but the resignation story is wrong: Khalra only joined the Akali Dal in 1994, and served as General Secretary of its human rights wing. According to Randhawa, no Akali leader other than Gurcharan Singh Tohra paid that wing the slightest attention.

Khalra’s wife, Paramjit Kaur, alleges that Prakash Singh Badal, on coming to power in 1997, shelved the investigation into fake encounters. She contested the 1999 election from Tarn Taran on a ticket from Tohra’s Sarb Hind Akali Dal, and the 2019 Lok Sabha election from Khadoor Sahib for the Punjab Ekta Party. She lost both times.

The toll doesn’t add up

The film also invites scrutiny over its numbers. It cites 25,000 unclaimed bodies. 

That figure does not hold up.

What Khalra actually documented were 2,097 bodies in his own area. From that he made an extrapolation – later repeated as a settled number – that the total across Punjab would exceed 25,000. And here a crucial qualification is in order: the highest concentration of fake encounters in that period occurred precisely in Khalra’s area. Twenty-seven percent of Punjab’s police atrocities took place there, which means his area was the worst case, not a representative sample.

Advocate R S Bains, speaking in an India Today debate, adds other tallies to Khalra’s 2,097: the rights activist Ram Narayan traced 2,700 cases; the activists Jaswant and Sukhwant found 5,500; Satnam Bains identified 6,600. Added together, these still fall well short of 25,000, and it is extremely difficult to know how much overlap there is between them.

The film does make us remember Punjab’s darkest years

For all the questions the film leaves unanswered, it does what a film about this period should do: it makes us remember. It returns us to Punjab’s darkest years – the state’s brutality, and the killing of innocent young Sikh men in the name of a crackdown on militancy.

But that is only half the picture. The other half is that the champions of the Khalistan movement pulled passengers off buses, checked their identities, and shot them. Many of Punjab’s finest – people who stood against the Khalistanis and against state repression – were killed for it. 

Who can forget Avtar Singh Pash, Baldev Singh Mann, Jaimal Singh Padda, Deepak Dhawan, all of whom gave their lives for communal harmony? Or the playwright Gursharan Singh, who through those long, bleak nights stood against both state tyranny and communal forces, using his theatre to plead for unity and brotherhood? It was people like these who carried slogans across the countryside: We will not let Hindus and Sikhs be turned against each other; we will not let 1947 happen again.

That era also produced human rights activists and organisations who refused to take sides by religion. Who named oppression and murder for what they were. Whether the hand that committed them belonged to the police or to the Khalistanis. Punjab in those years cannot be understood without reading their stories, sitting with them, and giving them their due.

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