Jhabal Police Station

Jhabal police station is a Punjab Police station in the Tarn Taran area of Punjab. It is recorded in Sikh history as the place where the human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra was held in illegal detention in 1995, and it appears in the case summaries of the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab (CCDP) as the station of officers named in abductions and cremations.

The Khalra case

• 6 September 1995: Khalra was abducted from his house at Kabir Park in Amritsar. A witness, Kulwant Singh, told the CBI that Jhabal police had detained him on 4 September and that Khalra was brought to the station on 6 September. The Supreme Court's judgment of 4 November 2011 records this and says Khalra was held in a room there.
• Special police officer Kuldip Singh, who was attached to the station's SHO, gave the CBI the account on which the Supreme Court relied. The judgment says his evidence on the illegal detention, the killing and the disposal of the body could safely be relied on, as other evidence supported it, and that recovery of the body is not a condition for a murder conviction.
• Reduced to Ashes gives the account from his statements. On 24 October 1995, 48 days after the abduction, a fellow detainee saw Khalra, injured, at Kang police station. He was then held for four days in a specially guarded room at Jhabal and tortured under interrogation by senior police, among them SSP Ajit Singh Sandhu, with Kuldip Singh in charge of his custody. On 28 October 1995 at about 7 p.m., the book says, Khalra was shot dead at Jhabal under interrogation and his body was dumped in the Harike canal. An earlier summary in the book says he was shot on the night of 24 October and the body thrown into the Sutlej; the two versions are not reconciled (pp. 9 to 10, 61 to 62).
• Outcome: a court convicted six police personnel in 2005, the High Court in 2007 upheld five convictions and raised all five sentences to life, and the Supreme Court dismissed the appeals on 4 November 2011 (Ensaaf). The judgment names Satnam Singh as the station house officer at Jhabal; he is among the four appellants whose life sentences it upheld.

Other cases. An assistant sub-inspector of Jhabal station was among the party that raided the house of Udham Singh at Thathgarh on 1 July 1992, as the CCDP's case summaries record. A former head constable, Balwinder Singh Jhabal, who became a human rights activist, helped Kuldip Singh reach the CBI, according to the book. Spellings vary: the book also writes Jhabbal, and Human Rights Watch writes Chabal.

What it means today. For the Panth the station is where the courts placed the last days of Khalra, who exposed the secret cremations. Human Rights Watch and Ensaaf wrote in 2007 that senior officials had not been charged.