The Khalra
File

No grave. No body. Only paper, and one man's word.

There is a river, a set of firewood receipts, and the testimony of a single frightened policeman who waited for his commanding officer to die before he dared to speak. From these — and almost nothing else — India's courts assembled the truth about how Jaswant Singh Khalra was killed, and jailed five men for it. This file follows that reconstruction, and because the case turns entirely on the weight of evidence, every material claim below carries a tag.

Keep that scaffold in mind. It is the difference between a shaky story and the airtight one the courts actually found — and it is exactly the discipline Khalra himself brought to the cremation grounds.

A banker with a genealogy of defiance

Jaswant Singh Khalra was born on 2 November 1952 in Khalra village, Amritsar district, and made his living as a director of a co-operative bank in the city. ◆ Established He was also general secretary of the Human Rights Wing of the Shiromani Akali Dal — but the activism was almost inherited.

His grandfather, Harnam Singh, had been a Ghadar-movement revolutionary and a passenger on the Komagata Maru, the ship that sailed to Vancouver in 1914 and was turned away, its passengers arrested on their return to India. Eight decades later, Khalra would stand before Canadian parliamentarians and tell them that story himself. ◆ Established

What pulled him into the work that killed him was small and personal: while running the bank, two of his colleagues simply vanished. Trying to find out what had happened to them, he tugged a thread — and an entire machinery of killing began to unravel. ○ Alleged trigger

Letting the ashes testify

In a country where cremation is the norm, mass killing leaves no graves to exhume. Whatever the police had done, they had quite literally reduced to ash. Khalra's genius was to make the bureaucracy of death confess — because even a secret cremation has to buy firewood.

Each body needs roughly 300 kg of wood to burn. So Khalra obtained the firewood-purchase registers and cremation records of three municipal grounds — Tarn Taran, Patti, and Durgiana Mandir in Amritsar — and hunted for anomalies: sudden, inexplicable spikes in wood bought by the police, matched against municipal records naming, ageing and placing bodies logged only as "unidentified," matched again against the dates young men vanished from custody. ◆ Established

On 16 January 1995, Khalra and his colleague Jaspal Singh Dhillon released the findings: the security forces had secretly cremated thousands of bodies labelled "unidentified" between 1984 and 1994. They filed a writ in the Punjab & Haryana High Court seeking an independent probe. The court threw it out — the petition was "vague," it said, and the petitioners had no standing. ◆ Established

The numbers, disaggregated

Even 2,097 is a floor, not a ceiling: cremation-ground workers reported several bodies burned on firewood meant for one, and the investigation never expanded beyond Amritsar.

By the spring of 1995 he was carrying the evidence abroad — Britain, then Canada. In June he addressed a parliamentary dinner in Ottawa; Amnesty International would soon issue an urgent action for his safety. His last recorded speech, in Ontario, opened with a fable about a single lamp facing down the dark. He told the room, plainly, that he expected to be killed for what he had found.

"I challenge the darkness. Around myself, at least, I will not let it settle."

Jaswant Singh Khalra — Ontario, April 1995

Five months later, they came for him.

9:20 a.m., in front of his own gate

The detail here is not reconstructed; it comes straight from the Supreme Court's own record of the habeas-corpus petition. ◆ Established On the morning of 6 September 1995, at about 9:20, Khalra was washing his car outside House No. 8, Kabir Park, Amritsar — across the road from Guru Nanak Dev University, where his wife worked as a librarian. A sky-blue Maruti van, registration BBN-5969, pulled up. Four uniformed policemen in black patkas, carrying automatic weapons and walkie-talkies, overpowered him and pushed him inside. A witness recorded that they radioed a superior that the "mission" was a success.

The alarm went up within hours. Akali leader Gurcharan Singh Tohra sent a telegram to a sitting Supreme Court judge; the Court treated the telegram itself as a habeas petition on 11 September and issued notice to the Home Secretary, the DGP, and the SSP. His wife, Paramjit Kaur, filed her own petition. A local FIR was registered at PS Islamabad, Amritsar, on 7 September — and, the courts later found, quietly doctored, with Paramjit Kaur made to sign a statement not recorded as she had given it. ◆ Established

Through all of it, the Punjab Police maintained a single line: they had never arrested him, never detained him, and knew nothing of where he was.

The witness who waited for a suicide

Everything known about Khalra's final weeks rests on one man — and he is often wrongly described as "solitary." In truth the prosecution built a scaffold of witnesses around him, and understanding that scaffold is the difference between a fragile case and the one the courts found beyond doubt.

The pillars of the case

The abductors lured Khalra with a line preserved in the record: DSP Jaspal Singh told him that SSP Sandhu "wanted to meet him," then pushed him into the van. ◆ Established

Kuldip Singh's account, as given in court

Recruited into the force by SSP Ajit Singh Sandhu himself, Kuldip Singh became his gunman and was posted at the Jhabal police station (also transliterated Chhabal), where he was handed the keys to Khalra's cell and told to feed him. The prisoner, he testified, had grown weak and fragile, his body covered in scratch marks. Then the sequence he narrated: ◐ Testimony

The killing is placed about four days after Diwali 1995 — on or around 27 October. No body was ever recovered, so no exact date is fixed; in law, Khalra's death had to be presumed under the Evidence Act, from the fact that a living man had simply ceased to exist.

Why he stayed silent — and why the courts believed him

Kuldip Singh did not come forward for three years. His explanation, accepted by the courts, was fear: he could not move while Sandhu was alive and controlled his job and his life. He finally walked into the CBI's New Delhi office on 2 March 1998 — after Sandhu was dead — having decided, he said, on hearing an activist speak about the man he had helped kill. The defence made him its whole case: an accomplice, effectively solitary on the murder, coming forward years late, who had even once recanted with a claim that the widow had paid a witness. The fuller story explained the recantation — he was pressured after deposing, told the CBI had "apologised" to Gill, shaken by a false case planted on another witness, and returned to his account only once he secured CRPF protection. Both the trial court and the High Court found him truthful and confidence-inspiring; the Supreme Court let those concurrent findings stand. ◆ Established

"Trying to speak the truth has been the most difficult decision of my life."

Kuldip Singh (PW-16), 2005

Sixteen years, and an agency at war with its own case

Khalra's disappearance set two intertwined cases running: the murder trial of his abductors, and the Punjab Mass Cremations case his own press note had triggered. Both began with a single Supreme Court order.

Who ran the CBI enquiry — and the asterisk beside it

Unusually, the CBI here did not report up its own chain but to the Supreme Court directly. At the top sat Directors K. Vijaya Rama Rao (when the case was handed over) and then Joginder Singh (when both charge-sheets and the cremations report were filed). The investigating team who deposed at trial were SP K.S. Joshi (the senior officer, cited by the Supreme Court on the question of motive), DSP P.L. Meena, and Inspector Ramesh Kumar. ◆ Est.

The nine who were charged — and what became of them

How a mass-atrocity inquiry named no one

When the Supreme Court handed the cremations to the National Human Rights Commission, it looked like the reckoning had finally come. Instead the NHRC spent sixteen years converting a question of mass murder into a question of paperwork.

Referred as a special body carrying the Court's own powers, the Commission first had to beat back the Union of India, which argued a one-year time-bar blocked any inquiry into the past. It won that fight — and then narrowed itself at almost every other turn.

The CBI's final report had sorted the dead into three bins:

Compensation then came in slow tranches over eight years, the Commission pushed committee by committee to identify more of the dead:

The families and their lawyers kept pressing the same point: money is not a verdict. The Commission paid for the disposal of bodies without ever adjudicating how those bodies came to be dead — the precise translation Khalra had spent his life refusing. Human-rights groups following his method have since documented over 8,000 disappearances statewide: the scale the state chose not to see. ◐ NGO record

The architects were never demolished

Ajit Singh Sandhu — the death that pre-empted a verdict

Sandhu, the SSP who allegedly ordered the abduction, had risen through the ranks in the counter-insurgency's hardest years. Arrested on the Court's directions and later bailed, he was by 1997 facing a wall of cases and sinking into depression. On or about 22–23 May 1997 his body — severed at the waist — was recovered from a railway track near Chandigarh, his car parked nearby, a suicide note in Punjabi found on him. ◆ Established

K.P.S. Gill — named in testimony, never in a charge-sheet

The Director-General through those years is the case's great unindicted figure. A witness placed him in the room with a tortured Khalra; the Court had formally served him with notice of the habeas petition while Khalra was still alive, yet his whereabouts were never disclosed. ◆ Established In 2006, human-rights groups and the widow pressed the CBI to investigate him on a superior-responsibility theory. Nothing came of it. Gill was never charged, and died of natural causes in 2017, having never stood trial in this case. ◆ Established

Paramjit Kaur ran the whole case

It is easy to file her under "grieving widow." The record files her differently: as the litigant whose petition created the mass-cremations case, whose revision petition personally turned seven-year terms into life, and who was still blocking her husband's killers from early release two decades on.

The entire Punjab Mass Cremations case originates in her 1995 habeas petition. As PW-2 she testified; then, when the trial court handed four of the killers only seven years, it was her criminal revision that asked the High Court to enhance them — and in 2007 the Court lifted all four to life. The sentences those men are serving exist because she refused the lesser one. ◆ Established

She has also carried the fight into public life, standing for Parliament from Khadoor Sahib in 2019 on the Punjabi Ekta Party ticket. But her framing was never about a seat or a cheque. It was the demand her husband's case always pointed toward — not compensation, but a reckoning, and names.

"Even if the courts do not give us justice, it is still important to tell our stories to the world."

Paramjit Kaur Khalra

Partial, delayed, and structurally incomplete

The honest answer: enough justice to make the case historic, and far too little to touch the system it exposed. It is the rare instance in which Indian courts jailed policemen for a custodial murder — and, at the same time, a study in how the architecture above them survived.

And the people who continued his work paid for it. Four human-rights advocates and two journalists who took up the disappeared after him were themselves disappeared or killed. ○ Alleged The lamp he spoke of in Ontario was passed hand to hand, at a price.

What the record said, as it happened

Contemporaneous coverage, paraphrased from the archives — the paper trail of a story the state kept trying to close.

The film that was disappeared, briefly

Thirty-one years on, the story reached a mass audience — and hit the same wall. Honey Trehan's biopic, with Diljit Dosanjh as Khalra, travelled under three names: Ghallughara (a word for the historic massacres of Sikhs), then Punjab '95, and finally Satluj — for the river his body was thrown into. ◆ Established

Submitted to the film board in 2022, it was met with a demand widely reported as 127 cuts — references to Punjab, to police identity, to human rights, to the numbers — plus a forced title change; the planned Toronto premiere was withdrawn under pressure. It finally streamed uncut internationally on 3 July 2026, and was pulled from streaming in India two days later, "unavailable until further notice." ○ Reported

Dosanjh drew the obvious line: what happened to the film, he said, is what happened to Khalra — an attempt to silence Punjab's history. The lamp, and the hand trying to cover it, once more.