Jaswant Singh Khalra
Bank manager turned human rights investigator who found records of thousands of unidentified bodies secretly cremated by Punjab police. Abducted in 1995 and killed in custody.
Jaswant Singh Khalra was born in 1952 at Khalra in Amritsar district, near the Pakistan border, into a family of freedom fighters. He became a bank director in Amritsar and general secretary of the human rights wing of the Akali Dal.
In the early 1990s he began to look for colleagues and friends who had disappeared in police custody during the counter-insurgency. Searching the records of municipal cremation grounds in Amritsar, Majitha, Patti and Tarn Taran, he found the purchase of firewood for thousands of 'unidentified' bodies cremated by the police. In January 1995 he made the evidence public: in Amritsar district alone, some 2,000 bodies had been secretly cremated. Later investigations by the National Human Rights Commission confirmed thousands of cases.
He went to Canada and spoke to Parliament in Toronto, and was told by the police that if he continued he would be among the disappeared himself. He went home. On 6 September 1995 he was abducted from outside his house in Amritsar by Punjab Police officers, held and tortured in police stations, and murdered in October; his body was thrown in a canal. Six policemen were convicted of his abduction and murder in 2005.
His wife Paramjit Kaur Khalra continued his work. He is honoured as a shaheed of the struggle for justice, and a 2025 film, Punjab '95, about his life, was long held up by Indian censors.