Bibi Paramjit Kaur Khalra

Bibi Paramjit Kaur Khalra is the widow of Shaheed Jaswant Singh Khalra, the human rights worker who documented the secret cremations of Punjab's disappeared. When police abducted him in September 1995 she did not wait for the state. She went to court, and she kept the case alive for years against pressure on herself and on the witnesses. She is a living public figure, and she is remembered for that persistence.

According to The Wire (Preetika Nanda, 2019) she worked as a librarian at Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar. After her husband was taken she filed a habeas corpus petition, which led to two CBI inquiries, one into his abduction and one into police abductions and mass secret cremations. In 1995 she also formed the Khalra Mission Organisation with his friends to keep Punjab's disappeared in public view.

Key moments

• 6 September 1995: Jaswant Singh Khalra is picked up outside their home in Amritsar. The Tribune says he was killed on 27 October 1995 and his body disposed of at Harike.
• February 2005: a former Special Police Officer, Kuldeep Singh, testifies at Patiala that he had resisted severe pressure from the accused police officials to stay silent, the Tribune reports. November 2005: the court convicts six police personnel, ten years after the abduction.
• 6 September 2006: she files a petition in the Punjab and Haryana High Court, with Ensaaf's help on the law, asking for the investigation and prosecution of the former police chief K. P. S. Gill after the CBI refused to act. Her counsel was Rajvinder Singh Bains. Gill died in 2017 without facing trial.
• 2007 and 4 November 2011: the High Court raises the sentences to life, and the Supreme Court upholds the life terms and rules that recovery of a body is not needed for a murder conviction, ThePrint reports.

What it took: from the abduction to the Supreme Court's ruling was more than sixteen years, and in 2019 The Tribune still called it a 20-year fight. The Tribune reported in July 2026 that several witnesses and supporters allegedly faced threats and criminal cases, many later found false, quashed or ended in acquittals. One eyewitness, Kirpal Singh Randhawa, was acquitted of a 2003 rape case and later awarded Rs 49 lakh for malicious prosecution.

In elections: she contested the 1999 Tarn Taran Lok Sabha seat for Gurcharan Singh Tohra's Sarb Hind Shiromani Akali Dal and polled 37,985 votes. In 2019 she stood at Khadoor Sahib for the Punjab Ekta Party and came third with 214,489 votes. In March 2024 the Khalra Mission Organisation announced she would not contest that year's Lok Sabha election; its president said contesting elections was beyond the organisation's approach.

Remembered for: turning a widow's petition into a case in which Punjab police officers were convicted and the life terms upheld by the Supreme Court, though the convictions reached only junior and middle ranks, and the former police chief was never tried.