Patti

Patti is an old town in the border belt of Punjab's Majha region, about 44 km south-west of Amritsar according to the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism. It is now in Tarn Taran district, which was formed in 2006 out of Amritsar district; before that, Reduced to Ashes calls it a sub-division of Amritsar district (p. 354).

In Sikh tradition. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism records a tradition, taken from Giani Gian Singh's Panth Prakash, that Duni Chand, a rich landlord and revenue collector of Patti, married his youngest daughter Rajani to a poor man of Patti who had leprosy, after she told him that God and not her father was the source of her comforts. The tradition says her husband was cured after bathing in a pond at the site where Guru Ram Das was then founding Amritsar, and that the Guru turned the pond into the tank that gave Amritsar its name. A gurdwara and a women's college at Patti are named after Bibi Rajani.

In the record of the counter-insurgency

• 14 August 1947: Reduced to Ashes says the area under four police stations of Patti sub-division, including Khalra, used to be administratively under Lahore, and that on this day many Muslims there believed it belonged to Pakistan (p. 20). It stayed in India.
• The book says Kartar Singh, father of Jaswant Singh Khalra, studied briefly at the Arya Samaj school at Patti and did not like its atmosphere, which seemed to him biased against Sikhs (p. 15).
• 1991 to 1994: the book says Khalra read the wood purchase register at the Patti cremation ground and found that police had burnt 538 bodies as unidentified or unclaimed (p. 54). In its case summaries, police of the Bhikhiwind, Valtoha and Harike stations appear again and again as cremating at the Patti ground (for example pp. 212, 228).
• 16 January 1995: Khalra's press note said 400 unclaimed bodies had been brought to the Patti municipal cremation ground (pp. 54, 603).
• February 1995: the book says a Congress MLA from the Patti constituency invited Khalra to his house and asked him not to pursue the cremations. On 27 February Khalra told a press conference in Amritsar that an MLA of the ruling party had told him senior police officers wanted him to stop or become "an unidentified dead body" (p. 56).

What it means today. For Sikhs, Patti is the town of Bibi Rajani's gurdwara. In the history of the disappearances it is the place whose cremation ground gave Khalra the first register he could read, a record that the Committee for Information and Initiative on Punjab then put before the Supreme Court, with the wood purchase records of Durgiana Mandir, in its petition (p. 5).