Khalra village

Khalra is a village on the India-Pakistan border in Punjab, in the Patti tehsil of Tarn Taran district, about 3.4 km from the border; it had 5,831 people at the 2011 census. Jaswant Singh Khalra was born in the village in 1952. The CCDP report places it in Amritsar district; it is best known as the home village of Jaswant Singh Khalra.

Key moments

• Before 1947: the village was part of a larger parish called Pathana, which the border divided. Sikhs revere a shrine there believed to have been built by Guru Nanak, whose remains can still be seen. The Sikh families trace their descent from Sandhu Sikhs who, the book says, captured the region in 1714 as part of Banda Singh Bahadur's peasant army; a monument to their leader Sardar Surat Singh, an ancestor of the Khalra family, stands in the village (p. 11).
• 1914: Jaswant Singh's grandfather Harnam Singh, who had gone to Shanghai and joined Gurdit Singh's Ghadr circle, reached Vancouver in May on the Komagata Maru (pp. 11 to 13).
• August 1947: as the CCDP retells the recollection of Kartar Singh Khalra, about 1,500 people lived in the village and about 1,000 were Muslims, with no communal enmity before the decision to partition Punjab. As refugees brought stories of violence and fear grew that the village would fall in Pakistan, the book says, the spirit of amity gave way, and many Muslim residents who fled were killed by people who had been friendly neighbours. The book gives this as a memory, not a documented count (pp. 20 to 21).
• 1961: the government took over the Khalsa school in the village, where Kartar Singh Khalra, Jaswant Singh's father, had been secretary of the school committee (pp. 18, 21).
• 4 September 1995: after his father told him a sub-inspector had warned that the local police station had informal instructions to pick him up, Jaswant Singh went to Khalra police station and invited the SHO to arrest him if he had orders. The SHO, embarrassed, said he had no reason to arrest him. Jaswant Singh returned to Amritsar that afternoon and was abducted two days later (pp. 60 to 61).

What it means today. Farmers in Khalra with land beyond the border fence needed special permission from the Border Security Force to work it, and could do so only for certain hours in daylight, according to the CCDP report. The village is where the man who exposed the secret cremations grew up.