Who Was Jaswant Singh Khalra? The Real Man Behind Diljit Dosanjh's Banned Film Satluj

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On 3 July 2026, a film that had spent three years fighting India's censor board finally streamed uncut. Forty-eight hours later, it was gone from Indian screens again. Diljit Dosanjh's Satluj, which chronicles Sikh activist Jaswant Singh Khalra's work exposing extrajudicial killings, premiered uncut on ZEE5 India before being abruptly removed within 48 hours, with the platform citing only "current developments". The film remains available to international audiences.

Photo Credit: Instagram: @lifeofpunjabiofficial

For many viewers outside Punjab, the removal was the first they'd heard the name Jaswant Singh Khalra. His real story is harder to look away from than any list of censor-board cuts.

A Bank Employee Who Started Asking Questions

Jaswant Singh Khalra was an Indian Sikh human rights activist who served as director of a bank in Amritsar during Punjab's militancy period. His forced disappearance came at the end of what's often called Punjab's "decade of darkness," the period between 1984 and 1995.

Following Operation Blue Star, Indira Gandhi's assassination, and the 1984 Anti-Sikh riots, Punjab police were given sweeping powers to detain suspects on suspicion of terrorism. Colleagues and acquaintances of Khalra's began disappearing. He didn't let it go.

The Discovery That Changed Everything

Khalra's inquiries led him to municipal cremation records in Amritsar. He alleged that more than 25,000 Sikhs had been illegally killed and cremated by police, and that around 2,000 police officers who refused to cooperate had also been killed. His findings were compiled into a report titled "Who Are the Guilty?", published in 1994, which drew international attention to human rights abuses in Punjab.

He didn't stop at publishing. In early 1995, Khalra travelled to Canada and the UK to present his findings before international human rights forums and parliamentary bodies - taking a domestic story onto a global stage, at real personal cost.

The Disappearance

Khalra was last seen on 6 September 1995, washing his car outside his house in Amritsar, before being abducted by Punjab Police personnel and taken to Jhabal Police Station. Witnesses later gave statements implicating the police, including naming then-Director General of Punjab Police, Kanwar Pal Singh Gill, as a conspirator - an allegation the police denied. Reports indicate he was tortured in custody and eventually dumped in the Harike Central Canal; his body was never recovered.

Justice, Decades Later

Six Punjab police officials were eventually convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for Khalra's abduction and murder, following what stretched into a roughly ten-year legal battle before a CBI court passed judgement. A division bench of the Punjab and Haryana High Court delivered its verdict on 16 October 2007, sentencing four former officials to life imprisonment.

His widow, Paramjit Kaur Khalra, has continued his activism and is a recognised human rights advocate in her own right. In 2017, a city park in Fresno, California was renamed in his honour - a sign of how far his story travelled.

Why the Film Kept Running Into Trouble

Satluj was originally titled "Ghallughara," a historic term referring to the massacres of Sikhs in 1746, 1762 and 1984. When producers RSVP applied for certification from India's Central Board of Film Certification in late 2022, a six-month process ended with the film cleared subject to 21 cuts and a title change - it later released as Punjab '95, then finally as Satluj. Forbes reports the eventual censor demands ran to 127 cuts before the uncut version reached streaming.

Diljit Dosanjh, who plays Khalra, told Variety India: the role stayed with him long after filming - he needed a week to "process everything" he went through portraying the character. Separately, he said Khalra's "martyrdom and his contribution to humanity" were the reasons he took on the film, and that he felt a responsibility to portray him "with truth, honesty, and utmost respect."

Critics reviewing the film have noted it takes some liberties - the real Khalra came from a family steeped in leftist politics, whereas the film frames him and other characters as driven primarily by religious belief, sidelining the wider civil society movement that backed him. Even so, reviewers have called it a measured, powerfully performed film that lays bare a culture of impunity rather than playing as a conventional biopic.

Its removal has also drawn comparison to other politically charged Indian films - including The Kashmir Files, The Kerala Story, The Bengal Files and The Kerala Story 2 - all of which remain available on ZEE5 in India, a contrast that's fuelled much of the current debate about why Satluj alone was pulled.