‘Still searching for truth’: Daughter of Sikh activist killed 30 years ago

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His wife, Paramjit Kaur Khalra, a librarian, was getting ready to leave for work; their son, Janmeet, and daughter, Navkiran, were getting ready for school. Nothing about the morning suggested that, within hours, their lives would be changed forever. Minutes after Paramjit and the children left home, Khalra was picked up by the police, secretly tortured for days in custody, and later murdered. His body was never found. Khalra was killed because of his investigation into thousands of disappearances and extrajudicial killings by the Indian security forces during a separatist movement launched by Punjab’s Sikh community in the 1980s to establish a homeland, called Khalistan. In June 1984, the government sent troops inside Amritsar’s Golden Temple, Sikhism’s holiest site, where hundreds of rebels were believed to be hiding. Hundreds of people, including Sikh religious leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, were killed in Operation Blue Star. The military operation led to the assassination of the then-Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards in October that year. Gandhi’s assassination triggered anti-Sikh riots across the country, killing thousands. In Punjab, a brutal crackdown on the Khalistan movement started, with security forces given special powers to torture, forcibly disappear and even kill thousands of rebels and suspects. Among those forcibly disappeared were one of Khalra’s friends and the friend’s mother, pushing the 42-year-old bank manager on a pursuit that saw him investigate thousands of similar cases. In 1995, Khalra filed a petition with the Supreme Court of India, claiming the police had cremated 25,000 such bodies, labelling them “unidentified” and “unclaimed”. Police said his claim was exaggerated. As he mobilised families who had lost loved ones and continued to seek answers from the police, he was repeatedly threatened with consequences and eventually abducted from his home and killed. Khalra’s abduction and murder became one of India’s most consequential human rights cases. His wife’s campaign for justice forced the government to order an investigation. Five police officials are currently serving life sentences for Khalra’s killing. But for three decades now, thousands of other people across Punjab and beyond are still seeking justice and closure over the disappearance and presumed killing of their loved ones. Last month, a feature film, titled Satluj – after a river in Punjab in which many bodies, including Khalra’s, are believed to have been thrown – attempted to answer some of their questions by revisiting his life and work. The government blocked the film within 48 hours of its release on a streaming platform over “security concerns”. But Sikh groups and rights activists organised community screenings of the film across Punjab and other parts of India and abroad, reigniting a decades-old debate over Khalra’s legacy, state accountability, and freedom of expression. Thirty years after her father’s disappearance and murder, Navkiran Kaur Khalra reflects on his life, legacy and the long fight for justice, in an exclusive conversation with Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera: Take us back to September 6, 1995. What do you remember about the day your father disappeared? Navkiran Kaur Khalra: It was an ordinary morning. My mother was getting ready for work, and my brother and I left for school. As she stepped outside around 9am, she noticed several police officers standing outside our house. She didn’t think much of it and went to work. When I returned from school later that day, my brother came running towards me in panic and said, ‘The police have taken Papa’. That was the beginning of a nightmare that changed our lives forever. AJ: When did your family realise his was not a routine detention, and that your father had been forcibly disappeared? Khalra: We immediately went to the police station in Tarn Taran [a place in Punjab], but the officers denied everything. They said it was impossible that anyone had picked him up from their jurisdiction and discouraged us from filing a complaint. Later, my mother started receiving phone calls from the then-deputy inspector general of police. He told her, ‘Withdraw the case against us and we’ll tell you where he is.’ He even said they could bring my father back alive and create a story that he had gone to Pakistan and had now returned. For years, we searched everywhere. We explored every possibility because we genuinely believed he might still be alive. AJ: People around the world know Jaswant Singh Khalra as a human rights activist. Who was he to you as a father? Khalra: Before he became known internationally, he was simply our father. He was a Sikh, a human rights activist and a concerned citizen, but at home, he loved spending time with us. He brought us gifts, took us on family vacations, and made time for us whenever he could. We were an ordinary middle-class family. No matter how busy he was, he always came home. He travelled to Chandigarh [Punjab’s capital] almost every day, spending five or six hours on the road, but however late it became, he returned home to us. AJ: What kind of home did you grow up in during Punjab’s insurgency? Khalra: As children, we didn’t fully understand what was happening around us. Our home was always full of lawyers, activists, journalists and visitors from India and abroad. The walls were covered with photographs of people who had been killed in alleged extrajudicial killings across Punjab. Those images became part of our childhood. Looking back, I realise how unusual that was. AJ: At what point did your family realise your father’s work had put him in serious danger? Khalra: By early 1995, the threats had become very serious. When the police claimed that missing people had simply gone abroad, my father would hold press conferences and ask, ‘If they have gone abroad, why are their names in the cremation records?’ Around February 1995, my grandfather received a message from a ruling party legislator, telling my father to stop his work before it was too late. We were also told that permission had been obtained from the government to eliminate him. Friends and lawyers urged him to seek police protection, but he refused. He used to say, ‘I visit families whose loved ones have disappeared because of the police. How can I go to them with the same police standing beside me?’ AJ: Shortly before he disappeared, your father asked your mother if she could take care of the children. Looking back, what does that moment mean to you? Khalra: A day before he was abducted, he turned to my mother and asked, ‘Will you be able to take care of the children?’ At the time, she didn’t think much about it. It sounded like an ordinary question. Only afterwards did we realise he may have known something was going to happen. AJ: Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh was assassinated in a suicide bombing on August 31, 1995, only days before your father was abducted. Singh’s government had led the state’s crackdown on the Sikh rebellion, and the killing triggered fears of a renewed security response. Your father had been documenting alleged police abuses during that period. How did Singh’s assassination impact your family? Khalra: I remember we were at a grocery store when we heard on television that Beant Singh had been assassinated. Everything changed after that. Friends, colleagues and even my grandfather urged my father to leave home for a few days because they feared the police would come after him. Many other activists had already left their homes. But my father refused. Instead, he began sleeping near the entrance of our house because he said that if the police came during the night, they would reach him first and would not harm the rest of the family. Less than a week later, they came. AJ: What was life like for your family in the years after your father’s disappearance, when you still believed he might return? Khalra: We lived in two different worlds. In one world, we went to school and tried to live ordinary lives. Many people around us didn’t even know who my father was or what had happened to him. In the other world, we spent our time with families whose loved ones had also disappeared. They understood our pain because they were living through the same uncertainty. For more than three years, we held on to the hope that my father was still alive. We searched everywhere, believing he would one day come home. AJ: For more than three years, there was no official account of what had happened to your father. Then, in 1998, Kuldip Singh, a former special police officer with the Punjab police, became the prosecution’s key witness and testified about your father’s illegal detention, torture and killing. How did hearing that testimony change things for your family? Khalra: That was the moment everything changed. Until then, we still believed my father might be alive. When Kuldip Singh described my father’s illegal detention, torture and killing, we finally had to accept the truth. My grandfather gathered the family together, and we performed my father’s last prayers. We never recovered his body, and neither our family nor anyone in the human rights community ever saw him again after September 6, 1995. AJ: Several police officers were eventually convicted. Did those verdicts bring justice? Khalra: The trial ended, but justice never happened. As Sikhs, we have grown up believing there is no equal rule of law for our community. My father may have had political differences with the state, but he was a law-abiding citizen. The legal battle lasted 16 years, and our childhood was shaped by it. We experienced how justice could be denied at every level – not only by the police and the courts but also through society and the education system. Families like ours were labelled as separatists. The trial ended, but justice never happened. As Sikhs, we have grown up believing there is no equal rule of law for our community. AJ: What was your father ultimately fighting for? Khalra: People often think my father’s work was only about documenting killings. It wasn’t. He used to say, ‘You have mocked a community that is simply asking for death certificates.’ Even today, many families still don’t have official confirmation of what happened to their loved ones. Without death certificates, they cannot access bank accounts, transfer property or settle inheritance claims. The system didn’t just take one person away; it condemned entire families to decades of uncertainty. That is why my father’s work still matters. AJ: You said many filmmakers approached your family. But you declined. What made you decide to support Satluj? Khalra: Many filmmakers approached us over the years, but we always refused. We weren’t interested in making a film for the sake of it. What we wanted was to take our case to the people’s court, to the people of India. We wanted them to hear our story, not only the version presented through state institutions. When [Satluj writer-director] Honey Trehan approached us during the COVID-19 pandemic, we asked him to come back with a script. He spent years researching the case and returned with a draft that reflected the facts and the spirit of my father’s work. Only then did we agree to be part of the project. AJ: After Satluj was removed from streaming platforms in India, public screenings sprang up across Punjab. What did that response mean to your family? Khalra: We had expected resistance. We even warned the filmmakers that telling my father’s story would be controversial because he wasn’t just one voice in Punjab. He represented thousands of untold stories. When the film disappeared, we weren’t surprised. What surprised us was what happened afterwards. Farmers’ organisations and local communities organised public screenings across Punjab. People set up projectors in villages, on buses and in community spaces so others could watch it. The state miscalculated. They underestimated how many people still wanted to hear my father’s story. Thirty years later, people are still searching for truth, justice and accountability. That is why his story continues to matter. 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