Rajvinder Singh Bains

Rajvinder Singh Bains is a senior advocate of the Punjab and Haryana High Court who has taken the cases the Punjab state would rather not have heard: disappearances, secret cremations and the killing of Jaswant Singh Khalra. He is a living public figure. The Wire reports that he served as a commissioned officer in the Indian Navy from 1979 to 1982, then studied law and began practice in 1985, and that he is the son of former High Court judge Ajit Singh Bains.

Key moments

• 1997 to 2011: counsel in the Khalra case. The Wire credits him with securing the conviction of five police officials in the kidnapping and murder of Jaswant Singh Khalra, in a trial it says ran from 1997 to 2011 and ended at the Supreme Court. The Tribune reported in 2005 that six had been convicted at Patiala, and quoted him as counsel for Khalra's wife. When one convicted officer turned out to have been pardoned earlier in another case, he said: "We are not sure if he won't be let off again."
• 6 September 2006: with Ensaaf's help on the law, he filed Paramjit Kaur Khalra's High Court petition for the investigation and prosecution of the former police chief K. P. S. Gill after the CBI declined to act. Gill died in 2017 without facing trial.
• 2014: in a recorded testimony posted by the 1984 Living History project, he describes how his experience of 1984 reshaped his political ideology, his identity as a Sikh and his life's work.
• November 2019: one of the lawyers for the Punjab Documentation and Advocacy Project and nine individuals, eight of them family members of victims, in a High Court petition seeking an independent investigation into 6,733 disappearances and illegal cremations in Punjab, Caravan reported in July 2021.
• 1 October 2021: the Punjab government appointed him special public prosecutor for four FIRs tied to the 2015 sacrilege-related firing incidents at Behbal Kalan and Kotkapura. He said he would "go by evidence". Critics said the appointment was bound up with the Congress's internal dispute over the Advocate General, and an SGPC member called it a "sham".
• July 2026: the writer of the film Satluj, Niren Bhatt, said the script was based on the Supreme Court judgment and on interviews with R. S. Bains, whom The Federal describes as the Supreme Court advocate who fought the case.

The Wire adds that he fought the murder case of Kuljit Singh Dhatt, Bhagat Singh's nephew, has opposed the UAPA and AFSPA, and has given legal aid to farmers protesting the farm laws.

Remembered for: the Khalra prosecution, the one case in which Punjab police officers were convicted over a disappearance and held to account up to the Supreme Court, won by lawyers, a family and witnesses who kept going under threat.