Khalra abducted

Who: Jaswant Singh Khalra, a former bank director and human rights activist, and the Punjab Police of Tarn Taran district. The Supreme Court, as ThePrint reports its judgment, found that senior officials beat him in illegal detention, among them the then Tarn Taran SSP Ajit Singh Sandhu. The Tribune says the CBI charge-sheeted Sandhu in 1996 and that he died by suicide in 1997, before trial.

What: Khalra had used crematorium records to show that police had secretly cremated thousands of people. On 6 September 1995 he was last seen washing his car outside his house in Amritsar, and police took him. Human Rights Watch notes that the government first claimed men posing as police officials had kidnapped him. He was held illegally at Jhabal police station and beaten, and was killed in custody that October. His body was never found.

Where: He was taken from Amritsar and held at Jhabal police station in Tarn Taran district.

Why it mattered: The case went to the CBI, and it took more than ten years to reach a verdict. The convictions came from a court at Patiala in November 2005, not from the Supreme Court: The Tribune reports six police personnel convicted, with life imprisonment for DSP Jaspal Singh and a serving inspector and seven years for four others (ThePrint counts five officers given seven years). In 2007 the Punjab and Haryana High Court raised the seven-year terms to life, and on 4 November 2011 the Supreme Court upheld the life sentences of four former officers, Prithipal Singh, Satnam Singh, Surinderpal Singh and Jasbir Singh, holding that "recovery of the dead body is not a condition precedent for conviction of the accused for murder".

The convictions reached only junior and middle ranks. Ensaaf and Human Rights Watch wrote in 2007 that none of the key officials had been brought to justice, and that the former DGP K. P. S. Gill, whom a witness placed in the room where Khalra was held, had not been charged by the CBI. Gill died in 2017 without facing trial.

Khalra is remembered well beyond Punjab. In January 2025 the board of the Central Unified School District in Fresno, California, voted unanimously, with one abstention, to name a new elementary school the Jaswant Singh Khalra Elementary School.