Jaswant Singh Khalra (1952–1995)KHALRA

His ancestor Bhai Sura Singh attained shaheedi alongside Bhai Tara Singh Vaan. His grandfather Harnam Singh, a Ghadar revolutionary tied to the Komagata Maru, spent nine years in British prisons for fighting firanghi raj. Rebellion was not something Khalra discovered as an adult. It was his inheritance, passed down like land.

By the time he was abducted in 1995, he was not a newcomer to struggle. He had been organising since his college days, in student movements, village reform, employee unions and labour organising alike, for a decade and a half before the cremation grounds made him internationally known. In a formal statement to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees on 26 June 1991, he himself put the number at roughly ten arrests on political grounds, five of them never even taken to court because the police had nothing to charge him with, the other five ending the same way once charges were tested. He was a seasoned, experienced activist long before he was a famous one.

But something changes in June 1984. Before Sri Darbar Sahib was stormed, Khalra's activism ran through the vocabulary of the revolutionary left, civil liberties, and rural reform: student unions, panchayat employees, anti-corruption campaigns, fact-finding into police killings framed as encounters. After it, that same method, the same insistence on names, evidence and accountability, was rededicated entirely to Sikhi, the sangarsh, and Khalistan. This is not a small shift in emphasis. It is the point at which the Indian state stopped treating him as one civil-liberties organiser among many and started treating him as a threat, because from 1984 onward his writing and his work no longer just criticised the state's conduct. They humanised the jujharoos, argued for Khalistan as a political destination, and treated the Sikh nation's sovereignty, not Indian reform, as the point of it all.

Khalra did not document atrocities so that India could reform itself. He documented them because he believed the Sikh nation must be free of India altogether.

Read his record plainly. He founded and edited a magazine named Liberation Khalistan. He led the Khalistan Liberation Movement International, whose name was painted across his desk. He renounced his Indian citizenship and declared himself stateless before the President of India. He rejected Indian elections as subedari, refused to swear any oath on a constitution the Khalsa never accepted, and honoured the shaheeds of the jujharoo lehar. He called the war of Khalistan a righteous war, in writing, in the magazine that carried its name.

There is no honest reading of this record in which Khalra believed in the Indian state, its democracy, its courts or its promises. The human rights investigation that made him famous was not a plea to Delhi. It was an indictment of Delhi, assembled by a man who had already resigned from India and was building the case for what comes after it: patshahi raised on Gurbani, a halemi raj worthy of the shaheeds who paid for it, in the service of sarbat da bhala. Even the Sikh Research Institute records that he came to understand the only option for Sikh survival lay in an independent state, Khalistan.

Khalistan was not a chapter of his life. It was the destination his whole life pointed to. When you remember him, remember what he was for.

This was not occasional praise. When Khalra wrote "The Next Phase of the National Struggle" in June 1993, he called the decline of the armed movement a bitter truth, and set down what he believed the jujharoo lehar had already achieved, achievements he said no detractor could match: it had awakened the Panth, exposed the communal nature of the Indian state, put the question of sovereignty onto the political agenda, ended the monopoly of the old crocodiles of Sikh politics, and drawn a clear line between the Panth and the Indian state from top to bottom. With its blood, he wrote, it illuminated a path toward independence. He called that phase of the struggle the first struggle for independence.

He did not treat this as abstract. On 31 August 1995, days before his own abduction, Chief Minister Beant Singh was assassinated by a Sikh warrior, Bhai Dilawar Singh Babbar. Khalra's own documentation had, by then, already given that act its context: the tens of thousands of secret cremations were the record of what that state apparatus had done to Sikhs for a decade. He did not need to editorialise the connection. He had spent years supplying the evidence.

He did not die asking India to be better. He died building what comes after it.

Through the early 1990s the Indian state police forces abducted Sikhs, tortured them to death, and cremated the bodies as "unclaimed." Khalra's search began close to home. Baba Gurbachan Singh Manochahal was Jathedar of Akal Takht and a founding member of the Panthic Committee that declared Khalistan from the Golden Temple complex on 29 April 1986, and he went on to found and lead the Bhindranwale Tiger Force of Khalistan, one of the most prominent guerrilla outfits of the armed struggle in the Majha belt, until Indian forces killed him in an encounter near Rataul on 28 February 1993. When police refused to return his body, Khalra went looking, and what he found was the state's own paperwork. Workers at the cremation grounds told him the police delivered the bodies and the municipal committee supplied the firewood. The receipts for the firewood became the receipts of a genocide.

Manochahal was not an isolated case in Khalra's files. Bhai Avtar Singh Shatrana, a provincial political candidate whose brother was a jujharoo, was abducted and tortured for information on his brother's whereabouts, then killed in custody. Police claimed he had been shot attempting to escape and refused to hand over his body; only after his entire village mounted pressure did they relent. When the family finally received him, there were no bullet holes, only burn marks from a clothes iron and the marks of sustained torture.

In January 1995 he released the evidence with a warning attached. The government, he said, was highly mistaken in thinking that eliminating him would put the matter of 25,000 unclaimed bodies to an end, and if he was killed, the people should hold police chief K.P. Gill accountable. He named his own murderer eight months in advance.

"Thousands of mothers await their children even though some may know that the oppressor has not spared their child's life on this earth. A mother's heart is such that even if she sees her child's dead body, she does not accept that her child has left her. And those mothers who have not even seen their children's dead bodies, they were asking us: at least find out, is our child alive or not?"

Shaheed Bhai Jaswant Singh Khalra

"If I can make 25,000 Sikhs vanish, then making one more Sikh vanish will not be difficult at all."

Threat sent to Khalra by SSP Ajit Sandhu, police chief of Tarn Taran

Gill was never alone at the top. Below him and beside him stood field commanders who ran the machine district by district, and above the whole apparatus stood a political family that made sure none of them ever answered for it.

Mohd. Izhar Alam

As SSP of Amritsar and Jalandhar through the 1980s, Mohd. Izhar Alam organised and ran a private paramilitary force of roughly 150 men, cashiered officers and surrendered militants alike, known as the Alam Sena. A US Embassy cable later made public by WikiLeaks recorded that the Alam Sena "had carte blanche in carrying out possibly thousands of staged encounter killings" across Punjab. Ensaaf's dossier on Alam documents at least 287 enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions committed under his command, nearly all of them Sikh, most of them young men abducted off roadsides and at checkpoints and never seen again. The government of India awarded him the Padma Shri in 1987, the same year his command dossier logs six of those killings, and went on promoting him to Additional Director General of Police before he retired untouched in 2009. He died in 2021, having never answered for any of it.

Sumedh Saini

Saini joined the Indian state police forces in 1982 and rose through Batala, Ferozepur, Ludhiana, Bathinda, Ropar and Chandigarh during the same counterinsurgency years, becoming, in the words of officers who served under both men, Gill's protege. Ensaaf holds Saini responsible for at least 150 enforced disappearances and unlawful killings, a figure other accounts put as high as 159, and names him one of the chief architects of systematic disappearance, extrajudicial execution and torture in Punjab. A CBI inquiry established that in 1991, as SSP Chandigarh, his police picked up Balwant Singh Multani along with the father and uncle of Prof. Davinderpal Singh Bhullar; all three were tortured in custody and never seen again. Gursharan Kaur, a lawyer detained alongside her husband and young child, later testified to witnessing Multani's torture firsthand, his eye forced from its socket. One of Saini's own officers, Jagir Singh, eventually confessed and testified against him, detailing how Multani's disappearance was covered up as an escape that never happened. In 1992, police under Saini's command fired on a fleeing car near Ambala and killed an unarmed man, his brother-in-law, and his four-year-old son.

437+ is the personal body count of just two field-level commanders, Alam and Saini, on Ensaaf's own conservative accounting. Neither number touches what their commander was responsible for. Gill sat atop a doctrine that produced an estimated 25,000 disappearances across Punjab and left 2,097 illegal cremations verified by India's own CBI in Tarn Taran district alone. Alam and Saini were not rogue exceptions inside that structure. They were how it worked.

The Badals were not bystanders to this machine. They were its domestic surrogates, the Sikh political face that let Delhi's violence against Sikhs pass as Punjab's own governance. One family built Saini's career, supplied his lawyers, and made room at its podiums for Alam. Between them, the state and its surrogates made sure the machine never had to answer for Khalra, or for the thousands who came before him.

The state aimed to silence him; instead it amplified him a hundredfold. Ensaaf and the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab expanded his documentation into thousands of verified cases in Reduced to Ashes. His Toronto speech has been viewed millions of times. In Fresno, California, a public elementary school bears his name.

But a second erasure is underway. His discourses on Khalistan are scrubbed from public commemoration in favour of a sanitized "human rights advocate," a domestication carried out even by the celebrity culture that profits from portraying him on screen while staying silent about the repression he died exposing. To flatten his politics is to erase him a second time. Gill's own record gets the opposite treatment. The Institute for Conflict Management, the think tank he founded and ran until his death, is now headed by his son-in-law, and its figures on his tenure are still cited as neutral data rather than the legacy of an interested party.

His warning did not age into history. In June 2023, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Khalistani organiser, was shot dead outside a Gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia. Months earlier, Avtar Singh Khanda, another Khalistani organiser, died suddenly in England. That September, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Parliament there were credible allegations linking agents of the Indian government to Nijjar's killing on Canadian soil. And the same flattening Khalra warned against was applied to Nijjar within hours: much of the coverage described him only as a Canadian citizen killed on Canadian soil, as though the reason a foreign government wanted him dead were incidental to the story. The machine Khalra named a killer for Sikhs abroad has not stopped operating. It has only changed passports.

"Let us grasp the hem of Truth and throw ourselves into the struggle for the freedom of Truth: into the struggle for Khalistan."

Des Pardes, 26 June 1992