Ajit Singh Sandhu

Ajit Singh Sandhu was a Punjab Police officer who rose to Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) in the years of the counter-insurgency. Human rights groups name him in the abduction, torture and killing of the human rights defender Shaheed Jaswant Singh Khalra in 1995. He died in 1997, before the case against him was decided. What he is said to have done below is an allegation by the sources named, or a court record; no court found him guilty.

Career: Ensaaf records that he joined the Punjab Police Service in June 1986 and was promoted to the Indian Police Service on 1 September 1990. He was SSP of Majitha, Kapurthala, Tarn Taran (1991 to 1993), Ropar (1993 to 1995) and again Tarn Taran from 23 January to 4 December 1995. Ensaaf adds that, according to The Wire, he twice received the President's Award for Gallantry.

What human rights groups allege: on Human Rights Day Ensaaf released a dossier attributing more than 500 enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings to his command. Ensaaf says that Punjab police abducted, tortured and unlawfully killed Kuljit Singh Dhatt on 23 July 1989, and its dossier names Sandhu, then a DSP, as leading the police who took him. It adds that he reported to the press as "encounters" killings that families describe as murder after abduction.

Key moments

• February 1995: Khalra publicly disclosed death threats. Human Rights Watch writes that they included threats from the Tarn Taran police under SSP Sandhu, who allegedly said Khalra too would become an unidentified dead body.
• 6 September 1995: Khalra was abducted outside his home in Amritsar. According to Human Rights Watch, a reporter who was present, Rajiv Singh, heard DSP Jaspal Singh tell Khalra that SSP Sandhu wanted to meet him.
• November 1995: the Supreme Court directed the CBI to investigate. The CBI charged nine Tarn Taran officers on 30 October 1996. The court case was titled State (CBI) v. Ajit Singh Sandhu and Others.
• 23 May 1997: a man was run over by the Delhi Kalka Himalayan Queen Express near Dera Bassi. Police said he was Sandhu, who was out of jail on parole, and called it suicide. The Tribune's account of 2026 records that his mother told police he had been killed, that the state's handwriting expert differed with a private examiner who judged the note found on him genuine, and that the claim that he faked his death has never been tested by an inquiry.
• 18 November 2005: six policemen were convicted of Khalra's abduction and murder. Sandhu and DSP Ashok Kumar had died during the trial. In 2007 the High Court upheld five convictions and enhanced all sentences to life, and in 2011 the Supreme Court upheld them (Ensaaf).

The then Director General of Police, KPS Gill, saw it differently. Human Rights Watch quotes him blaming the petitions against the police for Sandhu's death and, in a 1997 letter to the Prime Minister, calling the cases against Sandhu and other policemen "an unprecedented and unprincipled inquisition". Ensaaf calls Sandhu one of Punjab's most notorious police commanders.