In Spectrum: Satluj: The film India could not watch

In South Asia, the state has often existed in tension with society, asserting control not only over governance but also over history, memory, and legitimacy, while society is forced to negotiate or submit to official narratives.

Rather than reinforcing one another, the political and social spheres frequently become antagonistic, with the imperatives of postcolonial state-building overriding justice, dissent, and collective memory. It is against this backdrop that Satluj, inspired by the life of human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, assumes significance beyond cinema as an effort to reclaim a contested history. Its removal from ZEE5 only two days after its July 2026 release in India highlights the persistent struggle over who has the authority to narrate the past and whether censorship can erase, or merely delay, historical memory. Originally produced as Punjab 95, Honey Trehan’s film traces Khalra’s investigation into enforced disappearances and illegal cremations during Punjab’s insurgency, a pursuit that made him one of India’s foremost human rights defenders. Yet before reaching audiences, the film became embroiled in a prolonged certification dispute, with reports that the Central Board of Film Certification demanded extensive changes - including the title, references to Khalra, and portrayals of the Punjab Police - which the filmmakers argued would compromise the historical truth at the heart of the film, preventing its original theatrical release.

After years of uncertainty, the producers released the film directly on ZEE5 under the title Satluj on July 3, 2026. The respite proved brief. Within 48 hours, the film was withdrawn from the platform’s Indian catalogue following government directions issued under the Information Technology Rules, 2021. While no detailed public explanation accompanied the decision, the effect was unmistakable: Indian audiences were denied access to a film that continued to remain available internationally. The episode reignited debates about censorship, freedom of expression, and the state’s enduring discomfort with narratives that interrogate its own conduct during periods of internal conflict.

The irony is difficult to ignore. States often justify censorship in the name of preserving public order or national unity, yet history suggests that societies are strengthened not by enforced forgetting but by the capacity to confront painful truths. Democracies derive legitimacy from accountability rather than amnesia. When art, scholarship, or journalism is prevented from engaging with uncomfortable episodes, the silence that follows rarely resolves historical wounds; it merely deepens them.

The life of Jaswant Singh Khalra exemplifies this uncomfortable collision between official power and moral conscience. Born in 1952, Khalra lived an outwardly unremarkable life as a bank manager in Amritsar. He was neither a career politician nor a professional activist. His transformation into a defender of human rights emerged not from ideological ambition but from an encounter with absence—the unexplained disappearance of countless young men during Punjab’s violent insurgency years. Across villages and towns, families searched endlessly for sons, brothers, and husbands who had vanished after allegedly being taken into custody. The official record offered little explanation. For many households, uncertainty became a permanent condition of existence.

Where others accepted the opacity of the system as inevitable, Khalra chose to investigate. His method was painstakingly empirical. Rather than relying upon rumours or political slogans, he examined municipal cremation records and compared them with reports of missing persons. The documents revealed thousands of unidentified bodies cremated under official supervision, many accompanied by names, addresses, and personal details that contradicted the description of the deceased as “unidentified.” From these fragments of bureaucratic record-keeping emerged a disturbing pattern that challenged the state’s narrative of counter-insurgency.

Khalra’s investigation eventually led him to allege that approximately 25,000 people had disappeared and been secretly cremated during the years of militancy. While that broader estimate has remained disputed, subsequent investigations by the Central Bureau of Investigation confirmed that 2,097 unlawful cremations had occurred in Tarn Taran district alone. Proceedings before the Supreme Court of India and inquiries by the National Human Rights Commission further established that illegal cremations and enforced disappearances had indeed occurred on a significant scale in parts of Punjab. Khalra had not invented a conspiracy; he had uncovered documentary evidence that compelled India’s highest institutions to acknowledge grave violations of law.

What distinguished Khalra was not simply the evidence he assembled but the moral clarity with which he presented it. He challenged the assumption that every disappeared individual could be dismissed as a militant and insisted that constitutional protections did not cease to exist during periods of insurgency. His work restored individuality to those who had been reduced to statistics and gave grieving families something they had long been denied: recognition. Through meticulous documentation, he transformed private sorrow into public evidence.

Such acts of truth-telling inevitably invited retaliation. On September 6, 1995, Jaswant Singh Khalra was abducted outside his home in Amritsar. For weeks, the authorities denied any knowledge of his whereabouts despite eyewitness accounts implicating police personnel. The subsequent investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation concluded that he had been illegally detained and murdered. After a prolonged legal battle that lasted more than a decade, six Punjab Police officials were convicted for his abduction and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. The case became one of independent India’s most significant judicial reckonings with custodial violence and enforced disappearance. Khalra himself did not live to witness that verdict, but his death ensured that the questions he had raised could no longer be dismissed as speculation.

There is a striking symmetry between Jaswant Singh Khalra’s life and the fate of Satluj: both sought to uncover histories powerful institutions preferred to keep buried, and both faced resistance from the very structures they challenged. Their stories reveal that the struggle over history is never merely about the past but about who shapes the moral and political imagination of the present and future. While states often construct official narratives to preserve legitimacy, democratic legitimacy rests on the courage to subject those narratives to scrutiny. The withdrawal of Satluj from Indian screens is, therefore, more than an act of censorship; it reflects the enduring contest between authority and truth in South Asia. Yet history repeatedly shows that memory outlives suppression - archives endure, witnesses survive, families remember, and art restores what official histories erase. Khalra’s legacy, built not on power but on meticulous evidence and an unwavering commitment to human dignity, stands as proof that truth can be delayed but rarely defeated. States may silence voices and ban films, but they cannot command remembrance. Power can censor the record; it cannot erase the conscience of a people. In the end, governments rule through authority, but history belongs to those who refuse to forget.

Published in Dawn, July 26th, 2026