Why Jaswant Singh Khalra’s story must be seen
A week ago, I stood in the quiet home of Jaswant Singh Khalra in Amritsar. I had been invited to speak about my book The Kaurs of 1984, which documents the stories of Sikh women who survived the trauma of that year, from Operation Blue Star to the anti-Sikh pogroms in Delhi, and the long silence that followed. But as I stepped through the doors of Khalra Sahib’s home, I felt I wasn’t there to speak so much as to listen — not to words, but to memory.
This was no ordinary house. It was a living archive of resistance, a quiet testament to what it means to stand for truth — a truth that often meets with discomfort, denial, or disappearance.
In the 1990s, Jaswant Singh Khalra — a banker and human rights activist — exposed one of independent India’s most chilling cover-ups. At the height of police repression, he uncovered proof that thousands of Sikhs were abducted, tortured, and killed in custody. Their bodies were secretly cremated. Deaths were never registered. Names were struck from official records. Families were left with no answers — and no graves.
Khalra did what few dared. He meticulously documented the disappearances. He went public with the evidence — in India and abroad. He challenged the state to acknowledge what had been done under the guise of national security. And then, in 1995, he himself disappeared. He was abducted, tortured, and murdered. The very fate he had uncovered became his own. His killers were brought to justice and sentenced.
Outside Punjab, his story remains largely unknown. That might have changed with Punjab ’95, a feature film starring acclaimed actor Diljit Dosanjh, which tells the story of Khalra’s life, work, and death. The film was privately screened at Cannes for a small group of Indian and international journalists. And yet, its public release remains indefinitely stalled — not by formal bans, but by delay, deferral, and quiet resistance.
The changes reportedly demanded from the film— from removing Khalra’s name to muting the sound of gurbani, deleting national symbols, avoiding mention of the Punjab Police, and changing real names and locations — would strip the film of its historical spine. What remains is not a record of a life lived with courage, but a fictionalised shadow of a truth still too uncomfortable to name.
Why should a film about a man who died telling the truth be treated as a threat?
India rightly celebrates those who stand against injustice. Globally, we remember Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved Jews during the Holocaust, immortalised in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Khalra, who gave his life to expose mass disappearances on Indian soil, deserves no less remembrance. Yet his name is missing from textbooks. His story rarely enters our national conversations. And now, the screen that might have carried his voice to a new generation has gone dark.
This is not just about artistic freedom. It is a test of democratic maturity — a measure of how we face what we have tried to forget. Justice is not possible without memory. And memory cannot survive if it is silenced in the name of discomfort or decorum.
Punjab ’95 is not only about the past. It is about how we shape the future — how we honour those who spoke out when silence was safer, and how we tell the next generation who stood for what was right.
When I left Khalra Sahib’s home that day, I carried more than notes from a book talk. I carried the weight of a man who chose truth, even when it cost him everything. And the quiet urgency that his story not be buried again.
Let Punjab ’95 be seen. Let Jaswant Singh Khalra be remembered. Let truth, at long last, breathe.
