Khalra case sentences enhanced to life

Who: Four former Punjab Police officers, Prithipal Singh, Satnam Singh, Surinderpal Singh and Jasbir Singh, and their victim, the human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra. His widow, Paramjit Kaur Khalra, pursued the case for years.

What: Khalra was taken from his Amritsar home on September 6, 1995 and killed. Working from municipal cremation records, he alleged that police had illegally cremated thousands of people who disappeared from custody. The Supreme Court later said his press note on this was "found to be correct", citing a CBI report of 984 bodies cremated as unidentified in Tarn Taran district alone.

The CBI took up the case. In November 2005 a court in Patiala convicted six policemen. The Tribune reported life terms for DSP Jaspal Singh and a serving inspector, and seven years' rigorous imprisonment for the other four. The Supreme Court's 2011 judgment records that the two life terms went to Jaspal Singh and Amarjit Singh, an assistant sub-inspector. On 8 October 2007 the Punjab and Haryana High Court acquitted Amarjit Singh and left Jaspal Singh's life term standing, and on October 16 it raised the four seven-year terms to life, according to a UNI report. Reports differ on the rest: UNI wrote that two other policemen were acquitted, and ThePrint that one of five convicted men died during the High Court proceedings. The judgment records neither.

Paramjit Kaur Khalra said the accused "should have been hanged" and that she would go to the Supreme Court to seek the death penalty. On November 4, 2011 a bench of Justices B. S. Chauhan and P. Sathasivam upheld life imprisonment for the four. It held that "recovery of the dead body is not a condition precedent for conviction of the accused for murder", since Khalra's body was never found.

Where: Amritsar and Tarn Taran, where Khalra worked and was held; Patiala, Chandigarh and Delhi, where the courts sat.

Why it mattered: Ensaaf's 2007 report says none of the key architects of the counterinsurgency had been brought to justice, which makes these convictions an exception. The Supreme Court criticised the "excesses" of the Punjab Police and said the force had "united in an unholy alliance" to protect its image. The convictions reached only junior and middle ranks. Paramjit Kaur Khalra urged then Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal to act against the former police chief K. P. S. Gill and asked the SGPC to begin proceedings to excommunicate him. Ensaaf records that in September 2006 she petitioned the High Court to have the CBI investigate Gill, and that he died in 2017 without facing trial.