Honey Trehan

Honey Trehan is an Indian film director and producer, and for almost two decades a casting director. He is a living person; what is said of him below is attributed to those who said it. Film Companion lists his casting credits as including Udta Punjab, Hindi Medium, Tumbbad and Dedh Ishqiya, and says he produced Talvar, A Death in the Gunj and Sonchiriya. His first film as director was the Netflix thriller Raat Akeli Hai (2020), with Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Radhika Apte.

His roots, in his own words. Scroll reports that he grew up in Tarn Taran and that his family moved to Allahabad in 1995, the year Jaswant Singh Khalra was killed. Asked about his birthplace by The Tribune in July 2026, he called himself a diehard Punjabi, said his birthplace might be outside Punjab, and said he grew up in Goindwal, Tarn Taran, Amritsar.

Key moments

• December 2022: the film, then titled Punjab '95 and earlier Ghalughara, goes to the Central Board of Film Certification. Diljit Dosanjh plays Khalra and Arjun Rampal plays a CBI officer. RSVP and MacGuffin Pictures produce it, and Scroll reports that Trehan credits producer Ronnie Screwvala with standing by the film.
• 2023: its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival is dropped. PTI says the organisers gave no statement. Scroll says the team was forced to pull the film out.
• The board asks for 127 cuts (PTI; Trehan told The Tribune the board asked for 127 cuts without any logical reasoning). Scroll says the requested cuts reportedly included references to Khalra's name, Tarn Taran, Delhi and Canada, and the phrases extra-judicial killings and human rights. Trehan and Dosanjh refuse to release the film with the cuts. Dosanjh told Trehan that if cuts were made, they would remove their names from the credits (The Caravan).
• 3 July 2026: the film is released uncut on ZEE5 as Satluj, with no promotion. On 5 July ZEE5 says it is unavailable in India until further notice. ThePrint reports that it stayed on ZEE5 Global.

Trehan told The Tribune that the film is about Khalra's crusade for humanity and his martyrdom, that he did not want to make a political statement, and that why the government stalled it is a question the government is best qualified to answer. ThePrint's PTI report says that parties and the SGPC slammed the removal as censorship.

What he is remembered for: holding out for more than three years against the cuts so that the story of Jaswant Singh Khalra could reach viewers uncut, at the cost of the film being kept off Indian cinemas and then pulled from Indian streaming.