KHALRA — 1952

01 — The Story

Born into
resistance.

His ancestor Bhai Sura Singh attained shaheedi alongside Bhai Tara Singh Vaan. His grandfather Harnam Singh was a Ghadar revolutionary tied to the Komagata Maru, jailed nine years by the British. Rebellion wasn't something Khalra found — it was something he inherited.

1952

Born in village Khalra

Near the border in Amritsar's Tarn Taran region — the district whose cremation grounds would one day make his name immortal.

1970s

Radical politics, first draft

He organised with the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, tied to Punjab's revolutionary Naxalite currents, spending brief periods underground, then joined the International Democratic Party backing the Anandpur Sahib Resolution.

1984

The turning point

The Indian Army's assault on Sri Darbar Sahib and the shahadat of Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale transformed him. He threw himself into the Sikh sangarsh and engaged with the gurmukhs leading the armed struggle.

1988

Director, Amritsar Central Co-operative Bank

The respectable banker by day — organising, writing and agitating the rest of the time.

1991–92

England: the Slough office & the renunciation

Nearly a year abroad. An office behind a garden in Slough — telephone, fax, printer, typewriter — correspondence with Western governments, the UN and Amnesty International, protests at the Commonwealth Office in London, and the founding of Liberation Khalistan, printed with the support of Singhs associated with Baba Gurbachan Singh Manochahal. On 15 July 1991 he wrote to the President of India renouncing his citizenship and declaring himself stateless; Britain confirmed his political asylum application on 6 January 1992. He returned to Punjab anyway, in May 1992.

1994–95

The investigation

Searching for the disappeared — with his father S. Kartar Singh and brother Amarjit Singh helping gather families' testimony — he uncovered municipal firewood records at cremation grounds: the paper trail of thousands of secret police cremations. The High Court dismissed his petition, so he took the evidence to "the biggest court of all: the people's court."

6.9.1995

Abduction. Torture. Shahadat.

Taken outside his Amritsar home. Held illegally for seven weeks. Executed at Chhabal on 27 October 1995. His body was thrown into the Harike canal and never returned.

A young Khalra — the inheritance of rebellion.

Khalra being felicitated on his election as director of Amritsar Central Co-operative Bank, 1988

Felicitation as director, Amritsar Central Co-operative Bank, 1988.

02 — England, 1991–92

A fax machine
against an empire.

From a lofty room built behind a garden in Slough, Khalra ran a one-man foreign ministry for the Sikh struggle: letters to Western governments, the United Nations and Amnesty International; political columns in England's Punjabi weeklies; a 1991 protest against extra-judicial killings outside the Commonwealth Office in London; meetings with British parliamentarians; and the printing press of Liberation Khalistan.

When faction leaders courted him, his answer never changed: "I don't want to strengthen factions; I want to eliminate them for the community's interests." And before returning to Punjab, he wrote to the Secretary General of the Commonwealth — not to ask permission, but to put his position on the record:

And on 15 July 1991, he went further than any critic of Delhi would dare: he wrote to the President of India and quit the country itself. "I, Jaswant Singh Sandhu, son of Kartar Singh, former resident of Khalra village…" the letter begins — and then severs the tie. The state had threatened his life instead of protecting it, he wrote; its police had arrested and tortured him and failed to prove any guilt in court; denied him a passport until a High Court forced it on technical grounds; and were now conspiring "to kill or disappear me on my return." His record showed a democratic Sikh activist fighting an undemocratic state — while the state's record showed police who "declared every opposition political worker to be a 'terrorist' and then killed him." He could not, he wrote, claim to be a citizen of a country that had taken the lives of his people.

"I declare myself stateless — and henceforth not to be considered an Indian citizen."

— Letter to the President of India, 15 July 1991

Britain confirmed receipt of his political asylum application on 6 January 1992. This was not a man who believed India's democracy could be reformed, petitioned, or voted into decency. He had resigned from it — on paper, addressed to its head of state. And in his letter to the Secretary General of the Commonwealth, he stated the politics plainly: "As a Sikh, it is my moral right to support the right of self-determination for us. That is why I support the slogan of Khalistan." Then, in May 1992, the stateless man went home to Punjab — because the sangarsh was there.

Khalra with newly elected MP John Watson in London, standing before the Khalistan Liberation Movement International banner

With newly elected MP John Watson, London — before the banner of the Khalistan Liberation Movement International.

Khalra in London during his time in England

London — carrying the evidence into the heart of the Commonwealth.

03 — His Words

What he wrote.

Khalra's Khalistan was not a slogan he tolerated — it was a body of thought he built, issue by issue, in the magazine he founded and edited.

He wrote from the desk of the Khalistan Liberation Movement International — the organisation whose name is painted across that desk in Punjabi — insisting that a Sikh state be raised on Gurbani, accountable to the sangat, and worthy of the shaheeds who paid for it. From his own pen:

At the desk of the Khalistan Liberation Movement International.

The Foundation of Khalistan

"The concept of Khalistan in Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwala was born out of his study of Gurbani… he encouraged every Sikh to adopt Gurbani to become a Khalistani."

Liberation Khalistan · "Strengthening the Foundation of Khalistan"

No Rusty Bricks

"Today, when we are building Khalistan, we should refrain from using the crumbling and rusty bricks from their kilns… every brick of the imminent halemi raj is prepared and approved with the warmth of Gurbani."

Liberation Khalistan · on rejecting failed state models

The Game of Elections

"Elections are not democracy in and of themselves… it is a contradictory argument to accept elections as a decisive battlefield when this field itself was created for the very purpose of imprisoning us."

Liberation Khalistan, February 1992

Militant ≠ Terrorist

"Sikhism itself is a militant religion. The Khalsa was created as a militant movement to eradicate social evils and oppression… Sikhs will not become terrorists, but Sikhs will always maintain their militant traditions to cleanse society from its ills."

Liberation Khalistan · "Difference between Militant and Terrorist"

The Greatest Gift

"Our giver's greatest gift is martyrdom, but it is given only to one who is fortunate… in the ongoing struggle for the community's freedom, the wazir's dreams, albeit not bad, are below the dreams of martyrdom."

Liberation Khalistan · from his collected writings

Khalistan Day

"Let us overcome our weaknesses and try to set an example for others by making ourselves a Khalistani model. This is the message of Khalistan Day."

Liberation Khalistan · Message on Khalistan Day, 29 April

Accountable Leadership

"Sikh doctrine forbids lying to the sangat… the congregation has the right to criticize [leaders] and the leader is duty-bound to consider the opinion of the congregation. Thus, we should move towards building a people's movement."

Liberation Khalistan · on Khalsa principles of leadership

Against Stagnation

"The same faces, the same old clichés repeated on the same stages… The youth of the new generation, who are more educated and intelligent than our old leaders, can do this work better. But they are not being given the opportunities."

Liberation Khalistan · "Signs of Stagnation within the Diaspora Khalistani Movement"

The Scale of Sacrifice

"More than 50,000 freedom fighters have made the ultimate sacrifice for Khalistan. About 50,000 Khalistani heeray have been languishing in jails… More than 500,000 Indian Army and countless more paramilitary forces are hunting Sikh naujawan day and night."

Liberation Khalistan, February 1992

"Political people fight for the greed of the wazir, but righteous people fight for liberation… I consider the war of Khalistan to be a righteous war."

— Bhai Jaswant Singh Khalra, Liberation Khalistan

04 — The Count

He counted what
India burned.

Through the early 1990s, Punjab Police abducted Sikhs, tortured them to death, and cremated the bodies as "unclaimed." When his own colleagues disappeared and police refused to return the body of Baba Gurbachan Singh Manochahal, Khalra went looking — and found the state's own paperwork. Cremation-ground workers told him the police delivered the bodies and the municipal committee supplied the firewood. The receipts for the firewood became the receipts of a genocide.

In January 1995 he released the evidence and issued a warning: the government "was highly mistaken in thinking that by eliminating him the matter relating to 25,000 unclaimed bodies could be put to an end" — and if he was killed, the people should hold police chief K.P.S. Gill accountable. He named his own murderer eight months in advance.

6,000+

Secret cremations he documented in Amritsar — one district of Punjab's thirteen

2,097

Illegal cremations later verified by India's own CBI in Tarn Taran alone

25,000

His Punjab-wide estimate — from just two of the state's 82 tehsils

Seeking a CBI probe for unidentified bodies.

Baba Manochahal's brother sharing information about his disappeared family members, alongside Khalra's father S. Kartar Singh and brother Amarjit Singh, 1994

Baba Manochahal's brother shares information on his disappeared family, alongside Khalra's father S. Kartar Singh and brother Amarjit Singh, 1994.

"If I can make 25,000 Sikhs vanish, then making one more Sikh vanish will not be difficult at all."

— Threat sent to Khalra by SSP Ajit Singh Sandhu, police chief of Tarn Taran

05 — The Machine

K.P.S. Gill was not
a rogue cop.
He was the state.

Khalra's murder is told as the crime of a few policemen. The record says otherwise: the man at the top of the machine met its most famous victim in an illegal cell, the courts of India accepted that evidence — and the Republic protected, funded and decorated him until the day he died. And when Gill retired, the machine simply produced the next one: Sumedh Singh Saini, an architect of the disappearances, elevated to the same chair. This was not a police force out of control. It was a police force doing precisely what the Indian state built it to do — twice.

The doctrine

As Director General of Punjab Police, Gill presided over a counterinsurgency built on abduction, torture, staged "encounters" and secret cremation. India's central government created a special fund to finance it — paying informants and rewarding police who captured and killed "militants," roughly ₹50,000 a head. India Today wrote in 1992 that the rush to claim cash rewards was "turning police into mercenaries." Delhi didn't fail to stop the killing machine. Delhi financed it.

The lie to the Supreme Court

On 11 September 1995 — five days after the abduction — a writ of habeas corpus from the Supreme Court of India was presented to Gill. Officials denied police had detained Khalra at all. He was, at that moment, locked in a room at Jhabal police station.

The visit

Special Police Officer Kuldip Singh — the man given the keys to Khalra's cell and ordered to feed him — testified that in October 1995, when Khalra bore the marks of torture on his body, DGP K.P.S. Gill visited him at SSP Sandhu's house in Manawala and remained with him for half an hour. Days later, Khalra was executed. The trial court, the High Court and the Supreme Court of India all accepted this testimony as reliable.

"The advice of the DGP"

After the murder, on the drive back to Jhabal, SHO Satnam Singh told the witness that Khalra could have saved himself if he had listened to the advice of the DGP. The head of the Punjab Police had personally delivered the choice: silence or death.

The protection racket

The state then defended its man. Kuldip Singh's father-in-law was picked up by police and pressured to make him drop Gill's name. A false case alleged Khalra's widow had bribed the witness. The prosecution's lawyer was threatened with bodily harm at the courtroom door. Human Rights Watch and Ensaaf concluded Gill knew of the illegal detention, could be expected to know of the torture, and had the authority to order Khalra's release — and didn't.

The reward

Six junior and mid-level officers were convicted. Sandhu died under a train before trial — an official "suicide." Gill was never charged, never even summoned. The Indian state gave him the Padma Shri, security details, and sinecures, and celebrated him as a "supercop" until his death in 2017. Bibi Paramjit Kaur Khalra demanded he be tried as a war criminal in a world court. India's answer was a state honour.

The production line: Sumedh Saini

Gill was not an aberration; he was a template. Ensaaf holds Sumedh Singh Saini responsible for at least 150 enforced disappearances and unlawful killings — "one of the chief architects of widespread and systematic enforced disappearances, extrajudicial executions and torture in Punjab." A CBI inquiry established that in 1991, as SSP Chandigarh, his police picked up Balwant Singh Multani along with the father and uncle of Prof. Davinderpal Singh Bhullar; all three were tortured in custody and never seen again. In 1992, police under his command fired on a fleeing car near Ambala, killing an unarmed man, his brother-in-law — and his four-year-old son. He still faces a CBI trial for the 1994 abduction and disappearance of businessman Vinod Kumar, his brother-in-law, and their driver.

The promotion

India's answer to that record: in March 2012, while on trial for abduction and murder, Saini was made the youngest Director General of Police in India — Khalra's Punjab Police — superseding five senior officers, his "outstanding" service reports produced in court to defend the choice. The UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions cited Saini by name that same year as the emblem of an Indian state that promotes the perpetrators of human rights violations rather than prosecuting them.

Impunity, thirty-four years on

The Supreme Court quashed the Bhullar-family case on technical grounds. The Multani murder FIR could only be filed in 2020 — after a former "encounter specialist" turned witness — and the Supreme Court promptly granted Saini anticipatory bail; the case reached a sessions court for trial only in 2025, thirty-four years after the disappearance, with no verdict to this day. And in October 2015, police under DGP Saini's command opened fire on Sikhs peacefully protesting the desecration of Sri Guru Granth Sahib at Behbal Kalan, killing two; a judicial commission held him responsible. His punishment was a transfer — to chairman of the Police Housing Corporation.

The machine killed Khalra. The state built it, paid it, gave Gill a medal for running it — and gave Saini the keys next.

06 — 6 September 1995

Disappeared, like
the disappeared.

A Congress MLA had warned him that the government had authorised the police to kill him. Khalra refused security — the families he served had none. On the morning of 6 September 1995, while he washed his car outside his Amritsar home, police under SSP Ajit Singh Sandhu took him. For seven weeks he was held illegally in defiance of India's Supreme Court and tortured at Jhabal and Chhabal.

On 27 October 1995 he was beaten a final time and shot twice. His body was thrown into the Harike canal. The officers who disposed of it were rewarded with two bottles of liquor. His family never received his body.

"He was made to stand, thrashed and pushed onto the ground… 'Save me. Please give me some water,' he cried. As I was about to fetch some water, I heard two shots." — eyewitness Kuldip Singh, prime witness in the murder trial.

A decade of struggle led by his wife Bibi Paramjit Kaur Khalra forced the conviction of six Punjab Police officials in 2005; in 2007 the High Court raised four sentences to life; in 2011 the Supreme Court upheld them, scathingly criticising the Punjab Police's atrocities. The men who gave the orders were never touched.

Original 1995 'Disappeared' flyer: Jaswant Singh Khalra has not been seen since September 6, 1995, when he was picked up by Punjab police at home in Kabir Park, Amritsar

The original "Disappeared" flyer circulated after his abduction, 1995 — the man who counted the disappeared, now one of them.

07 — The Last Speech

One lamp against
the night.

Months before his murder, invited by the World Sikh Organization, Khalra carried the evidence from Parliament Hill to the sangat at Ontario Khalsa Darbar. Friends begged him to stay and claim asylum. He answered with a fable: when darkness first fell on the earth, one little lamp in one hut lifted its head — "I challenge the darkness. If nothing else, then at least around myself I will not let it settle." Other lamps rose, and the darkness could not spread. "Ankhila Punjab," he said, "like a lamp, is challenging this darkness."

Then he went home to Punjab. To be the lamp.

Read the full speech

Khalra at the microphone delivering an address

At the microphone — the voice they could not silence.

Khalra smiling as he is honoured with a siropa before a Sikh movement banner

Honoured with a siropa by the sangat. Photo: 1984tribute.com

"You have called us terrorists. Recognize the reality of the prophets of democracy — then tell us who is the terrorist and who is righteous."

— Last international speech, Canada 1995

08 — The Legacy

They killed him.
It didn't work.

The state aimed to silence him; instead it amplified him a hundredfold. Ensaaf and the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab expanded his documentation into thousands of verified cases in Reduced to Ashes. His Toronto speech has been viewed millions of times. In Fresno, California, a public elementary school bears his name.

But a second erasure is underway. His discourses on Khalistan are scrubbed from public commemoration in favour of a sanitized "human rights advocate" — including by the celebrity culture that profits from portraying him on screen while staying silent about the repression he died exposing. To flatten his politics is to erase him a second time. And his warning did not age into history: decades later, allegations of Indian transnational assassination plots against Sikh activists in Canada and the US have put the machine he named back on front pages worldwide.

Portrait of Bhai Jaswant Singh Khalra in a blue dastaar and shawl

Shaheed Bhai Jaswant Singh Khalra, 1952 — 1995.

Addressing human rights activists.

"Abandoning the politics of subjugation and domination, come let us attach ourselves to Truth, and commit to the fight for true freedom — Khalistan."

— Des Pardesh, 1992

Not your "safe" hero.

Born into
resistance.

Born in village Khalra

Radical politics, first draft

The turning point

Director, Amritsar Central Co-operative Bank

England: the Slough office & the renunciation

The investigation

Abduction. Torture. Shahadat.

A fax machine
against an empire.

What he wrote.

The Foundation of Khalistan

No Rusty Bricks

The Game of Elections

Militant ≠ Terrorist

The Greatest Gift

Khalistan Day

Accountable Leadership

Against Stagnation

The Scale of Sacrifice

He counted what
India burned.

K.P.S. Gill was not
a rogue cop.
He was the state.

The doctrine

The lie to the Supreme Court

The visit

"The advice of the DGP"

The protection racket

The reward

The production line: Sumedh Saini

The promotion

Impunity, thirty-four years on

Disappeared, like
the disappeared.

One lamp against
the night.

They killed him.
It didn't work.

Sources.

Not your "safe" hero.

Born intoresistance.

Born in village Khalra

Radical politics, first draft

The turning point

Director, Amritsar Central Co-operative Bank

England: the Slough office & the renunciation

The investigation

Abduction. Torture. Shahadat.

A fax machineagainst an empire.

What he wrote.

The Foundation of Khalistan

No Rusty Bricks

The Game of Elections

Militant ≠ Terrorist

The Greatest Gift

Khalistan Day

Accountable Leadership

Against Stagnation

The Scale of Sacrifice

He counted whatIndia burned.

K.P.S. Gill was nota rogue cop.He was the state.

The doctrine

The lie to the Supreme Court

The visit

"The advice of the DGP"

The protection racket

The reward

The production line: Sumedh Saini

The promotion

Impunity, thirty-four years on

Disappeared, likethe disappeared.

One lamp againstthe night.

They killed him.It didn't work.

Sources.

Born into
resistance.

A fax machine
against an empire.

He counted what
India burned.

K.P.S. Gill was not
a rogue cop.
He was the state.

Disappeared, like
the disappeared.

One lamp against
the night.

They killed him.
It didn't work.