In 30 Seconds
The previous article described a machinery built to erase men and the single flaw in its design, the registers it could not stop keeping. This one is about the man who found the flaw. Jaswant Singh Khalra was a bank director in Amritsar, a Sikh of farming stock from Khalra village on the border, a husband and father in his early forties, and, until the last two years of his life, unknown outside his district. He is now among the most consequential human rights figures Asia has produced, and his story has already reached readers of this journal through our coverage of the film Satluj, whose subject he is. Here the record stands on its own.
The Investigation
Khalra came to the registers through grief: colleagues and a friend connected to his circle disappeared in the campaign years, and his search for one of them led him, with fellow activist Jaspal Singh Dhillon, to the municipal cremation grounds of Amritsar district in 1994. What they found and photocopied, at Durgiana Mandir, at Tarn Taran, at Patti, were the logs this series has described: thousands of entries for unclaimed and unidentified bodies delivered by police across the peak years, receipted down to the firewood. Khalra’s method was an accountant’s, matching register entries against families’ testimony of abductions, and his public estimate, extrapolating the sampled grounds to the state, was that as many as twenty five thousand had been disappeared and secretly cremated across Punjab. In early 1995 he and Dhillon took the evidence public through the Akali Dal’s human rights wing, filed for investigation, and, when Indian avenues stalled, Khalra carried the documents abroad, addressing parliamentarians and diaspora congregations in Canada in the spring of 1995.
The Lamp
It was in a Canadian gurdwara that he delivered the speech from which his memory is inseparable, recounting a fable in which, as darkness conquered the world, a single lamp at the edge of the village refused to accept the dark’s dominion, saying it would deny darkness as far as its small light reached. He told the congregation he knew what was done to those who lit such lamps in Punjab, and that he was returning regardless. Warnings had by then been explicit; senior police figures are recorded in the subsequent trial evidence as having conveyed threats. He went home.
The Abduction and the Trial
On the morning of September 6, 1995, Jaswant Singh Khalra was washing his car outside his Amritsar home when he was taken by a police party and driven away. He was never lawfully seen again. The state denied custody for years while his wife, Paramjit Kaur Khalra, litigated a habeas petition to the Supreme Court, which handed the matter to the CBI. The investigation established that Khalra had been held illegally for weeks at Chhabal police station in Tarn Taran district, tortured, and killed, his body disposed of in the Harike canal. In 2005, a decade on, six Punjab Police personnel were convicted for the abduction and murder; in 2007 the Punjab and Haryana High Court enhanced four of the sentences to life imprisonment, and the Supreme Court sustained the convictions. A special police officer who testified to witnessing Khalra’s final custody and killing, at repeated risk to his own life, provided the trial’s spine, a reminder that the era’s honest witnesses included men inside the force.
What He Proved
Khalra’s evidence outlived him precisely as he had designed it to, in certified copies distributed beyond recall. The CBI’s verification of 2,097 cremations in the sampled grounds and the NHRC proceedings that followed, the subject of a later article, exist because the file could not be disappeared with the man. His widow’s three decade pursuit of the case, and her later public life, kept the matter in the national record. What Khalra proved is exact and should be stated exactly: that the disappearances were real, systematic, and documented in the state’s own hand; that one citizen with photocopies could establish what commissions had not; and that the machinery this batch has described feared nothing so much as arithmetic. The lamp metaphor is remembered as poetry. It was, in fact, methodology.
