Still searching for truth’: Daughter of Sikh activist killed 30 years ago

x whatsapp-stroke copylink google Add Al Jazeera on Google info By Arsalan Bukhari Published On 7 Aug 2026 7 Aug 2026 On the morning of September 6, 1995, human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra was washing his car outside his home in Amritsar city, India’s Punjab state.

His wife, Paramjit Kaur Khalra, a librarian, was getting ready to leave for work; their son, Janmeet, and daughter, Navkiran, were getting ready for school.

Nothing about the morning suggested that, within hours, their lives would be changed forever.

Minutes after Paramjit and the children left home, Khalra was picked up by the police, secretly tortured for days in custody, and later murdered. His body was never found.

Khalra was killed because of his investigation into thousands of disappearances and extrajudicial killings by the Indian security forces during a separatist movement launched by Punjab’s Sikh community in the 1980s to establish a homeland, called Khalistan .

In June 1984, the government sent troops inside Amritsar’s Golden Temple, Sikhism’s holiest site, where hundreds of rebels were believed to be hiding. Hundreds of people, including Sikh religious leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, were killed in Operation Blue Star.

The military operation led to the assassination of the then-Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards in October that year. Gandhi’s assassination triggered anti-Sikh riots across the country, killing thousands.

In Punjab, a brutal crackdown on the Khalistan movement started, with security forces given special powers to torture, forcibly disappear and even kill thousands of rebels and suspects.

Among those forcibly disappeared were one of Khalra’s friends and the friend’s mother, pushing the 42-year-old bank manager on a pursuit that saw him investigate thousands of similar cases.

In 1995, Khalra filed a petition with the Supreme Court of India, claiming the police had cremated 25,000 such bodies, labelling them “unidentified” and “unclaimed”. Police said his claim was exaggerated.

As he mobilised families who had lost loved ones and continued to seek answers from the police, he was repeatedly threatened with consequences and eventually abducted from his home and killed.

Khalra’s abduction and murder became one of India’s most consequential human rights cases. His wife’s campaign for justice forced the government to order an investigation. Five police officials are currently serving life sentences for Khalra’s killing.

But for three decades now, thousands of other people across Punjab and beyond are still seeking justice and closure over the disappearance and presumed killing of their loved ones.

Last month, a feature film, titled Satluj – after a river in Punjab in which many bodies, including Khalra’s, are believed to have been thrown – attempted to answer some of their questions by revisiting his life and work.

The government blocked the film within 48 hours of its release on a streaming platform over “security concerns”. But Sikh groups and rights activists organised community screenings of the film across Punjab and other parts of India and abroad, reigniting a decades-old debate over Khalra’s legacy, state accountability, and freedom of expression.

Thirty years after her father’s disappearance and murder, Navkiran Kaur Khalra reflects on his life, legacy and the long fight for justice, in an exclusive conversation with Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera: Take us back to September 6, 1995. What do you remember about the day your father disappeared?

Navkiran Kaur Khalra: It was an ordinary morning. My mother was getting ready for work, and my brother and I left for school. As she stepped outside around 9am, she noticed several police officers standing outside our house. She didn’t think much of it and went to work. When I returned from school later that day, my brother came running towards me in panic and said, ‘The police have taken Papa’. That was the beginning of a nightmare that changed our lives forever.

AJ: When did your family realise his was not a routine detention, and that your father had been forcibly disappeared?

Khalra: We immediately went to the police station in Tarn Taran [a place in Punjab], but the officers denied everything. They said it was impossible that anyone had picked him up from their jurisdiction and discouraged us from filing a complaint. Later, my mother started receiving phone calls from the then-deputy inspector general of police. He told her, ‘Withdraw the case against us and we’ll tell you where he is.’ He even said they could bring my father back alive and create a story that he had gone to Pakistan and had now returned. For years, we searched everywhere. We explored every possibility because we genuinely believed he might still be alive.

AJ: People around the world know Jaswant Singh Khalra as a human rights activist. Who was he to you as a father?

Khalra: Before he became known internationally, he was simply our father. He was a Sikh, a human rights activist and a concerned citizen, but at home, he loved spending time with us. He brought us gifts, took us on family vacations, and made time for us whenever he could. We were an ordinary middle-class family. No matter how busy he was, he always came home. He travelled to Chandigarh [Punjab’s capital] almost every day, spending five or six hours on the road, but however late it became, he returned home to us.

AJ: What kind of home did you grow up in during Punjab’s insurgency?

Khalra: As children, we didn’t fully understand what was happening around us. Our home was always full of lawyers, activists, journalists and visitors from India and abroad. The walls were covered with photographs of people who had been killed in alleged extrajudicial killings across Punjab. Those images became part of our childhood. Looking back, I realise how unusual that was.

AJ: At what point did your family realise your father’s work had put him in serious danger?

Khalra: By early 199...

Indexed and credited by AIPROPX. Originating outlet: Al Jazeera. Open at source →