Punjab Police

The Punjab Police is the state police force of Punjab, headed by a Director General of Police (DGP). Wikipedia traces its structure to the Police Act of 1861. Gaurav Yadav, a 1992-batch IPS officer, led it in an officiating capacity from July 2022, and UNI reported on 9 October 2026 that he had been named regular DGP.

Its part in this history: in the counter-insurgency of 1984 to 1995 the force was the state's main instrument. K.P.S. Gill served twice as DGP; The Quint says he is credited with countering Khalistani violence. Human Rights Watch and Ensaaf reported in 2007 that security forces had abused tens of thousands of Sikhs, with thousands of killings, and that none of the key architects had been brought to justice.

Key moments

• June 1984 to December 1994: the National Human Rights Commission, acting on Supreme Court orders of 12 December 1996, took up the cremation of 2,097 unclaimed bodies by Punjab Police in Amritsar, Majitha and Tarn Taran.
• January 2009: Ensaaf and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, using six datasets and more than 21,000 records, reported that enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions were concentrated in the early 1990s and mainly hit young Sikh men aged 18 to 45. After Operation Rakshak II began in November 1991, families recovered fewer bodies and illegal cremations rose.
• September 1995: Jaswant Singh Khalra, who had exposed the cremations, was abducted and killed. On 4 November 2011 the Supreme Court upheld life terms for four former policemen. It found that he was held at Jhabal police station and beaten by senior officials, among them SSP Ajit Singh Sandhu, and that a CBI report of 984 bodies cremated as unidentified in Tarn Taran district bore out his press note.
• 14 October 2015: police firing at Behbal Kalan killed two Sikh protesters. A police SIT chargesheet of 15 January 2021 named former DGP Sumedh Singh Saini and IGP Paramraj Singh Umranangal for murder and attempt to murder, and the Faridkot court summoned both.

Accountability: Human Rights Watch and Ensaaf wrote that eyewitness testimony placed Gill interrogating Khalra in illegal detention days before his murder, and that the CBI had refused to investigate or prosecute him. Gill died in 2017. Sandhu died on 23 May 1997, an alleged suicide while on parole, according to Ensaaf's data.

Where it stands: since 2024 the force has reported a run of grenade attacks on police posts and says it has traced them to modules run from abroad. Those are police allegations and the accused have not been tried.