Ensaaf

Ensaaf, a word meaning justice, is a US-based non-profit that documents mass state crimes in India and campaigns to end impunity. Its site gives its founding year as 2004 and names Sukhman Singh Dhami as co-founder and executive director. Jaskaran Kaur, its co-founder and co-director, wrote its first major report. It works mainly through interviews with survivors and witnesses, and says it has published 5,315 cases, mostly enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions.

Leaders in order: Dhami and Kaur were the co-founders. The sources found name no other head.

Key work

• 2004, second edition October 2006: "Twenty Years of Impunity: The November 1984 Pogroms of Sikhs in India", by Jaskaran Kaur.
• 18 October 2007: "Protecting the Killers", a 123-page report with Human Rights Watch. It found that the security forces abused tens of thousands of Sikhs, that thousands were killed and secretly cremated, and that no key architect had been brought to justice. It asked for a commission of inquiry, a special prosecutor and reparations.
• 26 January 2009: with the Human Rights Data Analysis Group at Benetech, a study of six datasets and more than 21,000 records. It found that enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions peaked in the early 1990s and mainly hit young Sikh men aged 18 to 45.
• 30 August 2019: its first perpetrator dossier, on Sumedh Singh Saini.
• December 2025: a dossier on former SSP Ajit Singh Sandhu, attributing more than 500 enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions to his command. Ensaaf's own database lists 66 victims it ties directly to him and calls that an undercount. These are Ensaaf's findings. The Supreme Court found in 2011 that Sandhu was among the senior officials who beat Jaswant Singh Khalra in illegal detention.

Its place in this history: Khalra exposed secret cremations by the Punjab Police; the National Human Rights Commission later took up the cremation of 2,097 unclaimed bodies. Ensaaf's work carries that effort forward with names, dates and datasets, and its data is the main public record of the counter-insurgency's victims.

Where it stands: Ensaaf continues to release dossiers on police officers. It describes them as part of its effort to preserve evidence and pursue accountability.