From Ghallughara to Satluj: Cinema and the Memory of the Dark Years
From Maachis through the banned biopics to the three year war over the Khalra film released as Satluj: how Indian cinema remembered and was forbidden to remember the Punjab years, and what the screen can and cannot settle.
Read MoreTruth Without Reconciliation: Punjab’s Unfinished Accounting
Punjab's dark years are not unknown; they are unassembled, documented in fragments each constituency curates and no institution was ever mandated to compose. The condition of truth without reconciliation, named, and the final batch it organises.
Read MoreThe NHRC Cremations Case: A Reckoning Cut Short
The Supreme Court's 1996 reference promised an audit of the disappearances; a quarter century later the NHRC had compensated 1,500 families within the original sample and investigated no culpability. The reckoning was not defeated but formatted.
Read MoreThe Courts and the Carnage: Justice for 1984 and the Punjab Years
Ten commissions and a generation for the pogrom's convictions, massacres extinguished by encounter rather than adjudicated, dozens of police convictions against thousands of documented disappearances: the judicial record's shape, assembled.
Read MoreThe Cost in Numbers: Counting the Dead of Punjab’s Dark Years
Above twenty one thousand by the official count, a third or more higher once the disappeared are entered, five thousand dead in the peak year alone, concentrated in the Majha and in one rural generation: the era's arithmetic, assembled and explained.
Read MoreWomen in the Insurgency Years: Widows, Mothers and the Missing Half of the Record
Widowed by every side, regulated and targeted by the codes, leveraged in the interrogations, and then, in the aftermath, the habeas petitioners and testimony builders who forced the counting: the women's half of Punjab's record, entered deliberately.
Read MoreThe Villages That Fought Back: Defence Committees and Rural Resistance
Night pickets, shotgun licences and gurdwara loudspeakers turned alarm systems: the village defence committees made the population's turn visible and armed. Their courage, their effectiveness, their manipulation, and their excesses, entered together.
Read MoreWhy the Militancy Collapsed: Five Forces That Ended the Insurgency
From the bloodiest year of the conflict to effective extinction in under three years: the population's turn, the campaign, the fratricide, the reopened ballot and the hollowed cause, ranked in the order the record supports.
Read MoreThe Assassination of Beant Singh, August 1995
A human bomb in police uniform killed the chief minister and sixteen others at the Chandigarh secretariat on August 31, 1995. The Babbar Khalsa operation, the Rajoana case that ran three decades, and why the bomb changed nothing.
Read MoreBeant Singh: The Chief Minister of the Endgame
An unglamorous Congress veteran took a fraction of a mandate in 1992, gave the endgame its political cover, presided over the militancy's collapse and the campaign's costs alike, and predicted accurately what the signature would cost him.
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