Khalra killed in police custody

Who: Jaswant Singh Khalra, a former bank employee turned human rights activist and general secretary of the Human Rights Wing of the Shiromani Akali Dal, and the Punjab Police officials who held him. The Supreme Court, as ThePrint reports its judgment, found that senior officials beat him, among them the then Tarn Taran SSP Ajit Singh Sandhu.

What: In 1994 and early 1995 Khalra and Jaspal Singh Dhillon used government crematoria records to expose secret cremations by the police: over 6,000 in just one of Punjab's 13 districts, say Ensaaf and Human Rights Watch, while Khalra's press note of 16 January 1995, as Reduced to Ashes prints it, counted about 2,000, 700 and 400 at three grounds and does not carry the 6,000 figure. The Committee for Information and Initiative on Punjab took the findings to the Supreme Court in April 1995. After repeated threats, Khalra was taken on 6 September 1995 from outside his home in Amritsar, where he had been washing his car. The government first claimed that men posing as police officials had kidnapped him, Human Rights Watch notes. He was kept illegally at Jhabal police station and beaten, and Ensaaf says he was held for almost two months.

He was killed in custody in October 1995; The Tribune gives 27 October. A former Special Police Officer, Kuldeep Singh, testified in 2005 that he heard two shots and saw blood on Khalra's chest, and alleged that the body was taken away and thrown into a canal at Harike. The body was never recovered. The Supreme Court held that recovery is not a condition for a murder conviction.

Where: Taken from Amritsar. Held at Jhabal police station and, the same witness said, at Manawala in Tarn Taran. The body was disposed of in a canal near Harike.

Why it mattered: Khalra's work forced the state to admit what it had done. The Indian government later accepted that it had illegally cremated 2,097 people in Amritsar (the CBI's count; Reduced to Ashes also gives 2,098), and in 1996 the Supreme Court ordered the National Human Rights Commission to address the mass cremations. A CBI report cited by the court found his press note on the cremations to be correct, and found 984 bodies cremated as unidentified in Tarn Taran district.

Accountability was partial. It took ten years to convict six police officers, and on 4 November 2011 the Supreme Court upheld life sentences, saying Punjab Police excesses encourage men in uniform to think themselves above the law. The same witness said he saw former DGP K.P.S. Gill enter the room where Khalra was kept a few days before the killing. Ensaaf and Human Rights Watch report that the CBI refused to prosecute Gill, and Ensaaf notes he died in 2017 without facing trial.