Bhai Jaswant Singh Khalra

Jaswant Singh Khalra was born in 1952 in Khalra village, Tarn Taran district, the youngest of four brothers and five sisters. His grandfather, Harnam Singh, had joined revolutionaries linked to the Ghadar movement and was kept under house arrest in the village until 1922. As a student at Bir Baba Buddha College, Jhabal, Khalra led a statewide agitation against a rise in cinema ticket prices in 1972, which led to his first arrest. ThePrint calls him a bank employee who became a human rights activist, and the Supreme Court identified him as general secretary of the Human Rights Wing of the Shiromani Akali Dal.

What he found. In 1994 and early 1995 Khalra and Jaspal Singh Dhillon used government crematoria records to expose more than 6,000 secret cremations by the police in one of Punjab's then 13 districts, as Ensaaf and Human Rights Watch report. The Committee for Information and Initiative on Punjab took the findings to the Supreme Court in April 1995, and in 1996 the court sent the matter to the National Human Rights Commission. The counts differ because they measure different things. The government later admitted illegally cremating 2,097 people in three crematoria in Amritsar, and Human Rights Watch reports a December 1996 CBI figure of at least 2,098 in Amritsar district. In its 2011 judgment the Supreme Court cited a CBI report of 984 bodies cremated as unidentified in Tarn Taran, and found Khalra's press note on the cremations to be correct.

Key moments

• 6 September 1995: Punjab Police officials pick him up outside his home in Amritsar. The government first said men posing as police had kidnapped him, Human Rights Watch notes.
• September to October 1995: he is held illegally at Jhabal police station and beaten by senior officials, among them the then Tarn Taran SSP Ajit Singh Sandhu, as the Supreme Court found.
• 27 October 1995: he is killed, according to The Tribune. His body was never recovered. A former Special Police Officer, Kuldeep Singh, testified in 2005 that he heard two shots and saw blood on Khalra's chest, and that the body was thrown into a canal at Harike. That is the witness's account.
• 2005: ten years later, a court convicts six Punjab Police officers.
• 2007: the High Court upholds five of the convictions and raises the sentences to life.
• 4 November 2011: the Supreme Court upholds the life sentences of the four who appealed. It holds that a body is not needed for a murder conviction, and says the police acted as an "unholy alliance" to protect their own.

Unfinished justice. Ensaaf and Human Rights Watch noted in 2007 that despite eyewitness testimony implicating the then Director General of Police, KPS Gill, in Khalra's illegal detention and murder, the CBI had brought no charges against him. Ensaaf records that Gill died in 2017 without facing trial, and that more than twenty years after Khalra's death no senior officers had been held accountable.

Remembered for. Khalra's widow, Paramjit Kaur, fought for justice for about twenty years. The Sikh Research Institute remembers him as a Shaheed who spoke truth to power at great personal cost, arguably better known now than in his lifetime. In 2025 British Columbia proclaimed 6 September, the date of his disappearance, as Jaswant Singh Khalra Day.