ਜਸਵੰਤ ਸਿੰਘ ਖਾਲੜਾਜਸਵੰਤ ਸਿੰਘ ਖਾਲੜਾ

Jaswant Singh Khalra (1952 to 1995) was an Amritsar human rights activist who used cremation ground records to document secret cremations of thousands killed during Punjab's insurgency years. Abducted outside his Amritsar home on 6 September 1995 and killed in custody, he was the subject of a landmark case: six Punjab Police officers were convicted of his abduction and murder.

Early life and the bank in Amritsar

He was born in 1952 in Khalra village in Punjab, the village his family name comes from. Activism ran in the family: his grandfather Harnam Singh was a Ghadar movement activist who sailed on the Komagata Maru to Canada in 1914 and was later tried in the Lahore conspiracy case. Jaswant Singh Khalra settled in Amritsar and worked in banking, rising to director of the Amritsar Central Co-operative Bank. Alongside the bank job he became general secretary of the Human Rights Wing of the Shiromani Akali Dal, the role in which he pursued cases of people who had gone missing during the militancy years.

What did Jaswant Singh Khalra document?

Jaswant Singh Khalra documented secret cremations: using municipal and cremation ground records in Amritsar district, he and his colleague Jaspal Singh Dhillon showed that police had brought large numbers of bodies to cremation grounds and had them cremated as unidentified or unclaimed. His search began with missing colleagues, among them a fellow bank director, and led him to cremation registers and firewood purchase records, which recorded the officers who delivered bodies and the wood issued to burn them. On 16 January 1995 Khalra and Dhillon publicly released their findings on thousands of such cremations. Khalra spoke of more than 6,000 cremations in Amritsar district alone and asserted that the statewide figure could exceed 25,000, a claim his supporters still cite and which official inquiries never took up in full. In April 1995 the Committee for Information and Initiative on Punjab took the material to the Supreme Court of India, asking for a comprehensive inquiry.

Abduction and killing in 1995

On the morning of 6 September 1995, witnesses saw Khalra taken away by Punjab Police personnel from outside his home in Kabir Park, Amritsar, where he was washing his car. The police denied arresting or detaining him and said they knew nothing of his whereabouts. His wife, Paramjit Kaur Khalra, filed a habeas corpus petition in the Supreme Court. In November 1995 the Supreme Court ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to investigate, and in 1996 the CBI reported evidence that Khalra had been held at a police station in Tarn Taran and recommended the prosecution of nine Punjab Police officials for his abduction and murder. His body was never recovered. Witness testimony accepted in the later trial described his detention, torture and killing in custody in October 1995 and the disposal of his body in a canal near Harike.

The courts: convictions in 2005, upheld in 2011

The trial took a decade. On 18 November 2005 a trial court convicted six Punjab Police officials for Khalra's abduction and murder: two were sentenced to life imprisonment and four to seven years. On 16 October 2007 the Punjab and Haryana High Court enhanced the four shorter sentences to life imprisonment. On 11 April 2011 the Supreme Court of India dismissed the appeals against those life sentences, and the convictions stood, in a judgment that strongly criticised police conduct during the militancy period. The former Punjab police chief K. P. S. Gill, named by witnesses and by the family, was never charged or tried in the Khalra case. Separately, the CBI's inquiry into the cremations themselves, submitted in December 1996, listed 2,097 illegal cremations at three cremation grounds of Amritsar district. The Supreme Court referred that wider case to the National Human Rights Commission, which over the following years awarded compensation to families in cases drawn from the CBI list, while human rights groups argued that accountability for the killings themselves remained largely unaddressed.

Family and the Khalra Mission Organisation

Paramjit Kaur Khalra, who had worked as a librarian at Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar, carried the legal fight for a decade and continued her husband's work after the verdicts. Supporters formed the Khalra Action Committee in 1995 to pursue the cases of unidentified bodies; the organisation later took the name Khalra Mission Organisation, with Paramjit Kaur Khalra as its patron, and it continues to press for answers for the families of the disappeared. The couple's two children, Navkiran Kaur and Janmeet Singh, have also been part of keeping his work in public view.

Legacy

Khalra is commemorated each year in Punjab and in the diaspora, and 6 September, the day he was taken, is marked by human rights groups as a day of remembrance for Punjab's disappeared. In 2017 the city of Fresno, California renamed a park in his honour, and in June 2025 the Jaswant Singh Khalra Elementary School opened in Fresno, described as the first elementary school in the United States named for a Sikh human rights activist. British Columbia proclaimed 6 September 2025 as Jaswant Singh Khalra Day. A feature film based on his life, with Diljit Dosanjh in the role of Khalra, was made under the titles Punjab '95 and Satluj. His name now stands for a simple proposition that outlived the case against his killers: that official records, patiently read, can force a state to answer for people it said never existed.