Jaswant Singh Khalra: The Man Who Counted Punjab’s Disappeared, and Paid With His Life

Amritsar, Wednesday, 6 September 1995, at about 9:20 in the morning. In Kabir Park, a quiet colony of family houses, Jaswant Singh Khalra was washing his car outside his gate. A blue Maruti van pulled up. A police Gypsy stopped behind it.

Four men in uniform, carrying automatic weapons, took hold of him and forced him into the van. His friend Rajiv Singh, a journalist, ran to stop them and was shoved aside. Kripal Singh Randhawa of the Punjab Human Rights Organisation shouted after the vehicles as they drove off. Rajiv Singh later said two Deputy Superintendents of Police, Ashok Kumar and Jaspal Singh, were sitting in the Gypsy.

Khalra carried no gun and faced no criminal case. What he carried was paper. For eight months he had been telling Punjab, and then the world, that the police were killing young men and burning their bodies as ‘unidentified’. He had found it in the government’s own registers.

His family never saw him alive again. This is the story of what he found, what it cost him, and the thirty-year fight over it.

Khalra took his name from his village, Khalra, a few kilometres from the Pakistan border in what is now Tarn Taran district. He was born in 1952 into a family of freedom fighters. By family accounts, his grandfather Harnam Singh was a Ghadar man who sailed on the Komagata Maru in 1914, the ship Canada turned away.

He made his life in banking in Amritsar, and by most accounts rose to be a director of a cooperative bank. Then came 1984: the Army’s assault on the Golden Temple in June and the killing of Sikhs in Delhi in November, which we tell in Punjab 1984: the real story. In the years that followed, Khalra joined the human rights wing of the Shiromani Akali Dal and became its general secretary.

In 1994 a friend of his disappeared. Searching for him, Khalra learned that the police had already cremated the body, as an unclaimed corpse, at the municipal cremation ground by the Durgiana Mandir in Amritsar. That was the thread. He began to pull it.

To understand what Khalra found, you have to see the Punjab he lived in. After 1984, thousands of young Sikhs, called kharkus, took up arms for Khalistan. In many villages they were honoured as shaheeds. In many others, people lived in fear of them.

The armed groups killed on a terrible scale. In July 1987 gunmen stopped a bus near Lalru and shot dead 38 passengers, most of them Hindus. Shekhar Gupta, who reported those years, lists a headmistress, Nirmal Kanta, shot dead; staff of the Hind Samachar newspapers killed one after another; and A.K. Talib, an All India Radio station director, shot in December 1990. Some groups ran their own courts, collected levies and banned music.

By the count of Ajai Sahni’s Institute for Conflict Management, 21,532 people died from 1981 to 1995: 11,696 civilians, 1,746 security men and 8,090 fighters. He says about two in three of the civilians killed by the armed groups were Sikhs. The worst year was 1991, when 2,591 civilians died, by Gupta’s figures.

Rights groups say those official columns hide something else. Many of the people the police listed as fighters, they say, were not fighters at all.

Kanwar Pal Singh Gill, a tall Sikh officer from the Assam cadre, became Punjab’s Director General of Police in 1988. That May he ran Operation Black Thunder at the Golden Temple, a siege that ended with fighters surrendering and the shrine largely undamaged, a contrast with Blue Star that won him praise.

He was moved out in 1990, then brought back in November 1991 under Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao. In February 1992 Beant Singh’s Congress won an election most Akali factions boycotted, and Gill had a free hand. His aim, as Gupta records it, was to make the life of a top-ranked fighter shorter than six months. District police chiefs became near-absolute rulers of their areas.

There was money in it. Human Rights Watch says Gill expanded a system of rewards and incentives for police who captured or killed wanted kharkus. The US State Department’s report on 1993 said bounties had in some cases encouraged killings outside the law. In 1995 American congressmen told the House that more than 41,000 bounties were paid between 1991 and 1993.

And there was the ‘encounter’. A young man was picked up at home or off a bus, held at a police station, and later reported killed in a shootout in which no policeman was hurt. A study of more than 20,000 records by Ensaaf and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group found such killings rose after the Army’s Operation Rakshak II began in November 1991. Most victims were Sikh men aged 18 to 45. Many families never got a body back.

Every municipal cremation ground keeps books. Firewood is bought with public money and has to be accounted for, about 300 kg of it for one body. When the police brought in a corpse, a clerk wrote down the date, the police station, the wood, and often one word: unidentified.

Khalra and Jaspal Singh Dhillon went through those registers at three grounds: Durgiana Mandir in Amritsar, Tarn Taran and Patti. By their count, about 2,000 bodies had been burned as unidentified at Durgiana Mandir, 700 at Tarn Taran and 400 at Patti between 1984 and 1994.

Cremation workers later told the researcher Ram Narayan Kumar that the police often bought wood for one or two bodies and laid many more on the same pyre. If they were right, the registers undercounted the dead.

On Monday, 16 January 1995, Khalra and Dhillon issued a press note headed ‘Disappeared: Cremation Grounds’. It said the police had been bringing the bodies of young men to municipal grounds and burning them as unclaimed. Its strength was that it rested on the state’s own paper, not on rumour. The Supreme Court later reproduced it in a judgment.

Two days later Gill held a press conference in Amritsar and rejected it. Many of the ‘missing’, he said, were Sikh youths who had slipped abroad under false names. Khalra answered the next day, repeated his evidence and challenged Gill to an open debate. In April, Gill returned to the theme.

I’ll tell you where those kids are.K.P.S. Gill, April 1995, saying they were in Europe, Canada and America (as quoted by Human Rights Watch)

The Punjab and Haryana High Court threw out Khalra’s plea for an independent inquiry as too vague. The threats began. In February 1995 he said in public that his life was in danger. Affidavits later filed by Paramjit Kaur, by the Akali leader Gurcharan Singh Tohra and by the lawyer Navkiran Singh said a senior police officer, Ajit Singh Sandhu, had warned that Khalra would end up an unidentified body himself. Sandhu denied making any threat.

In March 1995 Khalra took his papers abroad for the first time, to the United States and Canada. On 30 March a Canadian MP, Colleen Beaumier, introduced him to the Speaker of the House of Commons in Ottawa. If the family account is right, it was eighty-one years after Canada had turned his grandfather’s ship away.

In April, speaking to a Sikh audience in Canada, he told an old Punjabi story. Darkness had covered everything, and everyone was afraid. Then one small lamp, far away, spoke up.

I challenge the darkness.The lamp, in the fable Khalra told in Canada, April 1995 (English subtitles by Ensaaf)

He went back to Canada in July. On 28 July, home again, he told a press conference in Amritsar that he believed about 25,000 young men had been killed and burned in the same way across Punjab. It was an estimate drawn from three cremation grounds in one district. It was also the number that travelled.

On 31 August 1995 a suicide bomber killed Chief Minister Beant Singh and 17 others outside the Punjab Civil Secretariat in Chandigarh. Six days later the van came to Kabir Park.

For two days the police did nothing. When a report was finally registered on the third day, it said Khalra had been taken by ‘Khalistanis in police uniforms’. Paramjit Kaur went to the Supreme Court. Tohra sent a telegram to Justice Kuldip Singh, who took it up as a petition. On 11 September the court issued notice to Gill, as head of the Punjab Police, to produce Khalra. The police filed denials: they had not arrested him and did not know where he was.

The world was asking too. Amnesty International issued an urgent appeal on 7 September. On 19 October members of the US Congress wrote to Prime Minister Narasimha Rao asking for his release.

He was, the courts later found, in police hands all along. A witness, Kulwant Singh, saw him at Jhabal police station on the day he was taken. A special police officer, Kuldip Singh (no relation to the judge), guarded the room. Kuldip later said he carried Khalra his meals, watched officers beat him, and saw him driven one night to Sandhu’s house at Manawala.

On Saturday, 28 October 1995, by Kuldip’s account, officers beat Khalra again. Sent to heat water, Kuldip heard two shots. He helped lift the body into the boot of a Maruti. At about 10 that night the cars reached Harike, where the Beas meets the Sutlej, and the body was thrown into the canal. It has never been found.

On 15 November 1995 the Supreme Court handed Khalra’s disappearance to the Central Bureau of Investigation and told it to look into the cremations as well. Gill was directed to give the CBI every help.

In July 1996 the CBI’s interim report counted 984 illegal cremations at Tarn Taran alone. Its final report, on 9 December 1996, counted 2,097 at the three cremation grounds of what was then Amritsar district. Only 582 of the dead could be fully identified. The National Human Rights Commission later removed duplicates and put the total at 2,059.

flagrant violations of human rights on a mass scaleThe Supreme Court on the CBI’s findings, December 1996, as quoted by Ensaaf

On 12 December 1996 the court passed the cremations to the National Human Rights Commission. What followed was slow and narrow. The commission confined itself to those bodies, not to disappearances across Punjab. It heard no families in person and named no officer.

In October 2006 it ordered compensation for the families of 1,051 people wrongly cremated, and of 194 who died after the police admitted holding them. By April 2012, 1,513 of the dead had been named and the awards came to Rs 27.94 crore: Rs 2.5 lakh for each death in custody and Rs 1.75 lakh for each of the rest. Families got money. Nobody told them who had killed their sons.

Ensaaf faulted the commission for relying on information from the Punjab Police, the very force accused.

On 24 May 1997, before any murder charge was framed, Ajit Singh Sandhu killed himself. His note said it was better to die than to live in humiliation. After the funeral Gill wrote to Prime Minister I.K. Gujral. He complained that the police were facing ‘trial by the media’ and denied any policy of abuse.

Wherever such excesses were detected, action was inevitably taken.K.P.S. Gill, letter to Prime Minister I.K. Gujral, 1997, as published by The Quint

Sandhu’s death freed a frightened man. Kuldip Singh had been bodyguard to Satnam Singh, a station house officer and one of the accused. He went to the CBI. The agency did not want him; his statement, it said, did not inspire confidence. In October 2000 the trial court in Patiala added him as a witness anyway.

In February 2005 he took the stand. He said that a few days before the killing, Gill came to Sandhu’s house at Manawala and spent about half an hour in the room where Khalra was held. He said Satnam Singh later told Khalra he would have saved himself by listening to the DGP’s advice. The judge found what he said in court ‘fully consistent’ with what he had told the CBI.

Legal note: K.P.S. Gill was never charged in the Khalra case, or summoned. On 2 March 2005 the trial court dismissed two applications to summon him. Paramjit Kaur’s 2006 petition asking for him to be investigated had not had a substantive hearing a year later, Human Rights Watch reported. The account of his visit is a witness’s testimony, never tested against Gill in any court. He died in 2017.

On Friday, 18 November 2005, Additional Sessions Judge Bhupinder Singh in Patiala convicted six policemen. DSP Jaspal Singh and Amarjit Singh got life. Sub-inspectors Satnam Singh, Surinderpal Singh and Jasbir Singh and head constable Prithipal Singh got seven years.

In October 2007 the Punjab and Haryana High Court acquitted Amarjit Singh and raised the other four sentences to life. On 4 November 2011 the Supreme Court, Justices P. Sathasivam and B.S. Chauhan, dismissed all five appeals. It accepted Kuldip Singh’s evidence despite his shifting details, because other evidence backed it, and said the truth might never have come out without the court’s own orders.

Extraordinary situations demand extraordinary remedies.Supreme Court of India, Prithipal Singh v State of Punjab, 4 November 2011

It did not end there. Jaspal Singh, serving life in Nabha open jail, was granted interim bail by a court on 27 May 2023. In July 2026 police said he could not be found at the village address in the jail records. The Akali Dal’s Bikram Singh Majithia accused the AAP government of helping him. AAP said early release in a CBI case is for the Union Home Ministry, that his remission pleas had been rejected, and that the Chief Minister approved nothing.

On 3 August 2026 the MLA Manpreet Singh Ayali asked in the Punjab Assembly where Jaspal Singh, Satnam Singh and Jasbir Singh were. Paramjit Kaur had asked the same question. She had had no answer.

Paramjit Kaur Khalra was left with two small children, Navkiran and Janmeet, and a case. Human Rights Watch recorded that police filed false cases against her and against witnesses. One witness, Kikar Singh, turned hostile at the trial after pressure. Human Rights Watch reported that in 1998 officers pressured Kuldip Singh to file a false bribery complaint against her.

She kept going for thirty years. In 2019 she stood for the Lok Sabha from Khadoor Sahib for the Punjab Ekta Party and won 2,14,489 votes, about a fifth of the total, finishing third.

Others followed the trail Khalra opened. In the two years to August 2025, a special CBI court in Mohali convicted 129 police personnel, from constables to senior officers, for killings of that era. That August a former SSP and four others got life for staged encounters in 1993 that killed seven young men from Rani Villa in Tarn Taran. By July 2026, police and lawyers put the number of policemen jailed in such cases at nearly 135.

Navkiran Singh, a human rights lawyer, calls the convictions the ‘tip of the iceberg’. The Punjab Police Welfare Association says its men ‘merely followed orders during a violent period’, and has asked the Governor to restore convicted officers’ pensions.

In October 2007 Human Rights Watch and Ensaaf published Protecting the Killers. Its finding was blunt: security forces had arbitrarily detained, tortured, executed and ‘disappeared’ tens of thousands of Sikhs, and the system had then shielded the men responsible. It noted that Khalra had spoken of more than 6,000 cremations in Amritsar district, nearly three times the CBI count.

In January 2009 Ensaaf and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group published a statistical study of more than 20,000 records. It found that encounter killings were mostly of one person at a time, with few police casualties, which it said pointed to staged killings; that after 1992 the abuses spread from Amritsar to nearly every district; and that after 1991 fewer bodies were returned to families. It gave no final death toll.

The state counts differently. Human Rights Watch cited official estimates of more than 20,000 killed in the conflict: 11,690 civilians, 1,714 policemen and 7,946 people the state classed as militants. Rights groups say that last column is where many of the disappeared were filed.

To millions of Indians, K.P.S. Gill was the man who saved Punjab. He got the Padma Shri in 1989. Civilian deaths fell from 2,591 in 1991 to 48 in 1993, by Gupta’s count. Ajai Sahni, whose institute Gill headed, wrote this of him.

He fought terror with courage, leading from the front.Ajai Sahni, The Tribune, 2019

Sahni argues that most of the decade’s deaths happened when Gill was not in command, and that his police went after the armed groups’ leaders and let foot soldiers go home. Gill called human rights cases against the police a ‘litigation gun’ and the human rights lobby ‘utterly compromised’.

The other ledger is long too. In 1996 a Chandigarh court convicted him of outraging the modesty of an IAS officer, Rupan Deol Bajaj, at a party in 1988; in July 2005 the Supreme Court upheld the conviction, leaving him on probation rather than in jail. Human Rights Watch says the rewards system he expanded fuelled disappearances, and the Khalra trial’s key witness placed him in the room. He died in Delhi on 26 May 2017, aged 82.

Khalra’s name is still being fought over. Honey Trehan’s feature film about him, with Diljit Dosanjh as Khalra, went to the censor board in 2022 as Punjab ’95. The director says the board’s demands grew from 21 cuts to 127, including the title and references to the Punjab Police.

On 3 July 2026 it appeared uncut on ZEE5 as Satluj. Two days later the streamer said it would be ‘unavailable in India until further notice’, and gave no reason. A public interest petition to restore it was withdrawn after the Punjab and Haryana High Court called it proxy litigation and said the producers should come themselves. Among those who protested was Hartosh Singh Bal of The Caravan, Gill’s nephew. A film is not a court record, and this page relies on the record. But thirty years on, Khalra’s registers still unsettle people.

Punjab’s dark decade had more than one set of killers. Armed groups shot bus passengers, teachers, journalists and thousands of Sikhs who would not obey them. The state answered with a police force paid to kill, and some of its men killed whoever they could, then burned the evidence as ‘unidentified’.

Jaswant Singh Khalra did not fire a shot. He read the firewood accounts, added them up and said the total out loud. The police answered by making him one more name in their ledger. The Supreme Court made sure the ledger was read. The least Punjab owes him, and the families still waiting for a body, is to keep reading it.