The kidnapping and murder of human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra is one of the most significant human rights cases in independent India. Khalra, who spent years exposing illegal cremations carried out during the insurgency period in Punjab, disappeared in 1995, reportedly after being picked up by police personnel. This led to the intervention of the Supreme Court, a CBI investigation and ultimately the conviction of six Punjab Police officers, making the case a landmark judicial investigation into enforced disappearances and custodial killings in India.

The issue is back in the public conversation this year with the release and removal of OTT SatlujDiljit Dosanjh plays the role of Khalra in Honey Trehan’s film, which is based on his investigation and its aftermath.

“Secret cremation” revealed

Khalra’s work as a human rights activist began by investigating municipal cremation records in Amritsar during Punjab’s insurgency years in the 1980s and early 1990s. Comparing cremation registers to firewood purchase records, he alleged that Punjab Police had secretly cremated thousands of bodies, and recorded them as “unknown” or “unclaimed”, without investigating how people had died.

On January 16, 1995, Khalra made his findings public through a press note titled ‘The Disappeared and the Cremation Grounds’. In it, he said that around 2,000 unclaimed cremations have taken place in Punjab’s Tarn Taran district alone, hundreds of which are recorded at the cremation grounds of Patti and Amritsar. The revelations spread far beyond Punjab, attracting the attention of human rights groups in India and abroad. This brought Khalra into direct confrontation with the same police force he had implicated.

kidnapping

Less than eight months later, on the morning of September 6, 1995, Khalra was kidnapped. Around 9:20 am, he was washing his car outside his house in Kabir Park, Amritsar, when he was picked up by Punjab Police personnel. According to the findings later recorded by the Supreme Court, uniformed policemen forced him into a sky blue Maruti van along with an armed police gypsy. Neighbors reportedly witnessed the hijacking, among them Rajeev Singh, who is said to have noted down the registration number of the van. Khalra was never seen alive again.

Supreme Court intervenes

Within a few days, the concern about his disappearance reached the Supreme Court. On September 11, 1995, a telegram sent by Gurcharan Singh Tohra to Justice Kuldeep Singh was treated as a habeas corpus petition, a legal petition asking the court to order the authorities to produce the person believed to be illegally detained and explain why they were being held. After this, the Supreme Court issued notice to the Central Government, Punjab Government, Director General of Police and Senior Superintendent of Police of Amritsar.

On the same day, this petition was also formally submitted to the then DGP of Punjab, KPS Gill. Separately, Khalra’s wife, Paramjit Kaur, filed her petition under Article 32 of the Constitution, seeking a writ of habeas corpus.

The matter came to a head on 15 November 1995, when the Supreme Court, hearing Paramjit Kaur v. State of Punjab, took note of Khalra’s earlier allegations about illegal cremation and ordered the CBI to investigate both her kidnapping and her wider claims. The court also directed that Tarn Taran’s then SSP Ajit Singh Sandhu be moved out of the area and the investigation be removed from the Punjab Police, saying the family could not be expected to trust the state police to investigate its own officers. This is one of the rare instances in which the Supreme Court directly intervened in a case of alleged custodial disappearance involving serving police officers.

What did CBI get?

Between 1995 and 1996, the CBI conducted its investigation under the supervision of the Supreme Court and submitted periodic status reports to the court. Its conclusion was clear: Khalra had indeed been illegally detained in a police facility in Tarn Taran before he was murdered. The agency recommended prosecution of several Punjab Police personnel and named senior officers, including SSP Ajit Singh Sandhu, who supervised the operation.

The list of accused was changed before the trial reached its conclusion. Sandhu himself died in 1997, which was widely reported at the time as suicide. DSP Ashok Kumar also died before the proceedings could conclude, while another accused, Rashpal Singh, had already been acquitted or acquitted. Ultimately, six police officers were prosecuted.

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Along with the criminal case, the Supreme Court directions also opened parallel proceedings before the National Human Rights Commission in connection with illegal cremations that allegedly took place in Amritsar, Majitha and Tarn Taran between 1984 and 1994.

Conviction, appeal and final verdict

The trial court delivered its verdict on 18 November 2005, almost a decade after the disappearance of Jaswant Singh Khalra. Additional Sessions Judge Bhupinder Singh in Patiala held all six accused guilty of kidnapping and murder of the worker. DSPs Jaspal Singh and Amarjeet Singh were sentenced to life imprisonment, while sub-inspectors Satnam Singh, Surinder Pal Singh and Jasbir Singh, head constable Prithvipal Singh were sentenced to seven years each, with the latter four also given concurrent sentences for conspiracy and destruction of evidence.

That difference in sentencing did not last long. On October 16, 2007, a division bench of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, comprising Justice Mehtab Singh Gill and Justice AN Jindal, enhanced the seven-year sentence of the remaining four officers to life imprisonment, placing all six convicted persons on equal footing. The convicts appealed to the Supreme Court, which rejected their plea and upheld the life sentence, delivering a verdict that strongly criticized the conduct of the Punjab Police during the counter-insurgency years.

Why does the case still matter?

Three decades later, the Khalra case is still considered a watershed moment in India’s human rights jurisprudence. What began as a habeas corpus petition filed by a bereaved family became one of the most widely documented prosecutions to emerge from Punjab’s insurgency period, establishing that even police officers could be held responsible for custodial disappearances and murders.

This, through the NHRC proceedings that ran alongside it, forced widespread exposure of claims of large-scale illegal cremations during the insurgency era, a subject that was largely undocumented until Khalra’s own investigation.

The matter has again come into limelight due to the discussion about Honey Trehan’s film on the internet. Satluj. Starring Diljit Dosanjh as Khalra, the Hindi drama was released three days ago on Zee5, after an almost three-year battle with the Central Board of Film Certification, which had reportedly demanded 127 cuts before clearing it. film, first title Punjab ’95It eventually came out uncut and under its new name, only for the OTT platform to remove it from platforms in India within 48 hours, citing no fixed timeline for its return.