DSP Ashok Kumar

DSP Ashok Kumar was a deputy superintendent of police in the Punjab Police. He appears in this record because his name is in the court record of the case over the abduction and killing of the human rights defender Jaswant Singh Khalra. Ashok Kumar is a common name; this entry covers only the officer of that rank named in the Khalra case.

Key moments

• 6 September 1995: Khalra is abducted from outside his home in Amritsar.
• 13 October 1996: the Central Bureau of Investigation files its charge sheet. The Federal says Ashok Kumar was among the nine officers named in it.
• During the trial: he dies. Ensaaf's press release of 18 November 2005 lists him, with SSP Ajit Singh Sandhu, among the accused who died during the trial; The Federal says Sandhu died before charges were framed. No verdict or sentence was ever given for Ashok Kumar.
• 18 November 2005: a court at Patiala convicts six other police officers, who are sentenced to life imprisonment or seven years. In 2007 the Punjab and Haryana High Court raises the shorter sentences to life, and on 4 November 2011 the Supreme Court upholds the life terms of four officers.

What the record shows. Because he died before the end of the trial, no court has found him guilty or innocent. The sources opened here name him as an accused and say nothing more about his role. Khalra's widow, Paramjit Kaur Khalra, welcomed the 2005 convictions but renewed her demand that former police chief K. P. S. Gill also be tried; Gill was never charged in the case and died in 2017.