Satluj (Punjab 95): The Film That Erased Khalistan, KPS Gill and the Bounty System

A tariff, not a racket
In May 1994, Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights published a joint report on Punjab called Dead Silence. Buried in its account of how the counter-insurgency was financed is a set of figures that ought to be better known than it is.

There was an annual outlay of one crore and thirteen lakh rupees for the killing of listed militants. Alongside it ran a parallel system of unannounced rewards for killing unlisted ones, and the sums there ranged from forty thousand rupees to five lakh. Every week, Inspectors General across the state sent their lists upward to an Additional Director General for Intelligence. India Today, reporting on the same arrangement at the time, wrote that the rush to claim cash rewards was turning the police into mercenaries.

The report's own summary of the policy is unambiguous. The Director General of Police, it states, expanded a bounty system of rewards for police who killed known militants, and it says in terms that the practice encouraged extrajudicial executions and disappearances. The operation this belonged to, Rakshak II, had as its object the elimination rather than the arrest of the militant leadership.

I set that out first because Satluj, the film about Jaswant Singh Khalra released in July and suppressed within two days, asks precisely the right question and gives an answer that cannot be reconciled with any of it.

The film asks why. Not what happened, which has been documented for thirty years, but why. Why did a police force kill many thousands of people, burn them, and enter them in a register as unidentified. Why did it continue for years while courts sat and newspapers published and elections were held. Very few Indian films have put that question at all, and this one puts it directly, in dialogue, in a courtroom.

Its answer is that the police were running an extortion racket. Bodies were held. Families were made to pay. A licence to kill militants degenerated into a business.

That is not a compression of the record. It is a different account, and the difference is not a matter of degree.

Extortion is a crime. It is committed by individuals, against families, for private gain, and it is prosecutable under laws that already existed at the time. A film whose answer is extortion has told its audience that the system was sound and that some men inside it were not.

A tariff is a policy. It is designed, costed, approved, budgeted and disbursed, and it produces exactly what it is built to produce, because a payment per body creates a demand for bodies and the identity of the supplied stops mattering. A film whose answer is a tariff has told its audience that the killing was the point.

The usual defence of Satluj does not reach this. That defence says a film cannot show everything, that compression is inevitable, that no biography survives a demand for completeness. All of that is true and none of it is relevant here, because this is not an omission. The film does not decline to explain the killings. It explains them at length, in its own voice, through its most sympathetic characters, and the explanation it gives is not the one in the record.

That is the argument of this essay. Everything that follows is an attempt to show how far the substitution reaches, and what it costs.

What the record names

Before going further into the film it is worth saying plainly what it is that the film is describing, because one effect of an argument conducted at this level of abstraction is that the abstraction becomes comfortable. Words like abuses and violations and excesses do a great deal of work in discussions of Punjab, and most of that work consists of keeping the reader at a distance.

Dead Silence is not written at that distance, and it is worth borrowing its precision.

The methods of torture it documents include electric shock; prolonged beating with canes and leather straps; binding a detainee's hands and suspending them from the ceiling; forcing the legs apart at the crotch; and rotating a heavy wooden or metal roller across the thighs, a technique which crushes muscle and leaves the characteristic scarring and tissue loss that the report's medical examiners found on the men they examined. To these it adds the psychological repertoire: death threats, forced disrobing, isolation, and compelling family members to watch while a relative was worked on.

A serving police officer, quoted in the report, described the practice as universal. Without exception, he said, any person detained at a police station was tortured. The purpose was information, but only in part. Those suspected of being militants who gave nothing under torture were tortured to death. Those who admitted to being militants, or to supporting them, were killed anyway. And torture was used to punish people suspected of pro-Khalistan sympathy, so that those thought to have sheltered anyone were routinely detained and worked over as a message to every Sikh in the district.

Then the sentence that explains the entire architecture of the disappearances. If a detainee was too brutally tortured, or if serious injury resulted, he was executed in a staged encounter.

That is how torture became disappearance. Not as a separate crime but as the disposal of evidence produced by the first one. A body that shows what was done to it cannot be returned, so the body must become a militant killed in a gun battle, and then it must be cremated quickly and without a proper examination.

Sikh researchers add a detail about geography which the published reports touch only lightly and which matters more than it appears. The practice was not confined to police stations. Schools were taken over and used as interrogation centres, as were the premises of the state intelligence apparatus, and the accounts gathered from survivors describe treatment beyond anything the reports set down in print. The dispersal is the point. Torture inside a police station can be represented as an excess committed by the men who work there. Torture in a requisitioned village school is not an excess. It is an occupation, and it requires a chain of authority to arrange.

The report documents that too. Post mortems were perfunctory and were conducted, in violation of Indian law, on police premises rather than in civil hospitals. Bodies were cremated in secret, or where they were returned, cremated under police supervision. Doctors were compelled into the process. In one case the report records, a family was told their son's body had already been burned and that the ashes would be released only if they signed a statement saying he had left home two years earlier. They signed.

It documents the killing of family members as reprisal, including an incident in which a house was set alight with people inside it, among them three women and a child of five, and the relatives were advised the next morning by a plainclothes officer to go and look for five bodies. That case was linked in the Indian press at the time to a senior officer, Sumedh Saini, who has since faced an arrest warrant over the custodial death of a young engineer, Balwant Singh Multani, in a case in which a witness described the man's eye having been forced from its socket, and in which Saini's own subordinates have confessed and turned approver. The organisation Ensaaf has connected Saini to the disappearances of at least a hundred and fifty-nine people, and has implicated more than thirty senior officers in comparable patterns.

The report records the legal architecture that made all this safe. Under the security legislation then in force, no prosecution of any officer could be instituted at all without the previous sanction of the state government.

Two categories of violation belong here which the report touches only in passing and which the film does not touch at all.

The first is sexual violence. Custodial rape of Sikh women, documented in Amnesty International's reporting of the same period and central to the case histories Sikh organisations have assembled since, does not appear anywhere in Satluj. It was not incidental to the counter-insurgency. It was one of its instruments, used against women in their own right and used against fighters through their families.

The second is the paramilitary formations operating outside uniform. The best documented is the group assembled by a senior officer, Mohammad Izhar Alam, known as the Black Cats or Alam Sena, roughly a hundred and fifty men who are alleged in diplomatic reporting to have carried out staged encounters across the state with effectively no constraint, and whose commander was later awarded the Padma Shri. The purpose of such a formation is obvious: it performs the acts that cannot be performed in uniform.

I set this out at length for a reason that will matter throughout. Everything above is what the film's characters are referring to when they speak of what the police were doing. And the film's account of why is that they wanted money from families.

The man the film does not show

If the film's answer to why the killing happened is wrong, its account of the man who exposed it is wrong in a related way, and the two errors support one another.

Satluj introduces Khalra as a bank employee who stumbles into the disappearances. He is, when we meet him, a decent private person to whom something happens. Sikh critics have described the film's protagonist as effectively a blank slate, and the description is fair. Almost nothing of what formed him is present.

The record is not obscure.
Khalra was, on the accounts compiled by Sikh researchers, arrested thirteen times between 1972 and 1982. That is before any of the events the film depicts. He entered the period the film covers not as a novice but as a seasoned organiser with a decade of confrontation behind him: a student activist first, then an organiser among agricultural labourers and village workers, raiding the storehouses of traders who were hoarding fuel and fertiliser, in continual friction with the police, and a village council secretary who resigned in 1985 with a letter describing the bureaucracy as a mechanism for stripping ordinary people of what they had. In November 1975, during the Emergency, he organised a procession in his own village in which the Panj Pyare halted outside the police station and fired shots into the air.

None of that is in the film, and its absence is not a matter of running time. It is what makes the film's causal story possible. A man with no prior politics can be radicalised by an atrocity. A man with twenty years of politics behind him was doing something he had already decided to do.

Then there is what he wrote, which is the part most consistently missing from every account of him in the Indian press and in Indian cinema.

Khalra founded a magazine in Britain in 1991 called Liberation Khalistan, and an organisation to go with it. In the first issue, dated January 1992, he wrote that the call for Khalistan had been cultivated in the fighters through their study of Gurbani, that their activity therefore carried the seal of Gurbani, and that they asked every Sikh to attach themselves to Gurbani in order to become a Khalistani. In the February issue he wrote of more than fifty thousand who had made the ultimate sacrifice for Khalistan and of fifty thousand more languishing in jails. In Des Pardes, in September 1992, he wrote that the greatest weakness of Sikhs lay in trying to domesticate the truth of Sikhi within a dominant politics of falsehood, and called on Sikhs to abandon the politics of subjugation and commit to the fight for true freedom, which he named as Khalistan. In May 1994 he published an article on the crisis in Sikh politics and the way out of it, in which he argued that the whole community would have to become militant again, distinguishing that from terrorism and grounding it in what he described as a Sikh tradition of militancy directed at cleansing society of its ills.

And there is the speech, the one everybody quotes and almost nobody reads closely. It was given in Punjabi, in Canada, in April 1995, from the stage of a gurdwara openly aligned with the movement. It is the source of the image of the lamp lit against a darkness that has fallen for the first time. In the same speech, having announced the discovery of 6,017 cremation records, he named three of the dead. Mata Gurmej Kaur, mother of Baba Gurbachan Singh Manochahal. Bibi Mohinder Kaur, mother of Bhai Paramjit Singh Panjwar. Baba Piyara Singh, uncle of Bhai Harminder Singh Sultanwind.

Those are not three names selected at random from six thousand. Each is the close relative of a commander of the armed movement. Khalra chose them, named them, gave them the title of Shaheed, and presented them as the spirit of the Punjab he was describing.

Sikh critics draw from this a conclusion that I think is correct and that has not been engaged with anywhere in the coverage of this film. Khalra was not killed for contradicting the police about numbers. Numbers can be contested and the state was well practised at contesting them. He was killed because he humanised the people the state had spent a decade dehumanising. He took the men who were being called terrorists and presented them as sons and nephews of murdered elders, and he made the killing of those elders legible as the punishment of a family for what its sons had done.

That is a far more dangerous act than an accurate body count, and it is entirely absent from the film.

There is a related absence which Sikh critics identify and which is easy to miss because it consists of connections rather than facts. The Khalra of the record understood the killing in Punjab as one expression of a larger arrangement, and he wrote about the relationship between the machinery of the state, Brahmanical social order, Indian nationalism and the conduct of electoral politics as a single subject. It is why his critique of the elections held under the Beant Singh administration is an argument about the constitution of the polity rather than a complaint about a rigged ballot. The film's Khalra makes none of these connections. He is not shown to have a theory of anything. He notices a wrong, pursues it, and is destroyed for pursuing it, and the wrong he notices is bounded by the police station and the crematorium.

Blank slates and drunk policemen

The film's framing is set before its story begins.

It opens on drunken police officers. Then a narration tells the audience that Punjab had endured a decade of conflict, that the whole of Punjab had grown weary of the fighting between police and militants, that the police had stopped distinguishing between militants and civilians, and that a few corrupt officers took advantage of the resulting disorder.

Each clause does a specific job.
Weariness makes the violence nobody's project. Things had gone on too long and everyone had had enough, which is a description of weather rather than of policy. The pairing of police and militants makes it a quarrel between two local parties, and once a conflict has two parties it acquires symmetry, and once it has symmetry it can be deplored at length without anyone being held responsible for it. The claim that all of Punjab was weary disposes of the possibility that a substantial part of Punjab supported one of the parties, which is the only explanation for how a movement without mountains, without forest and without a standing army sustained itself for a decade in flat and open country. And the few corrupt officers arrive at the end to absorb whatever blame is left over.

The record describes something else. Rakshak II was a declared counter-insurgency operation, advocated over years by the most senior police officials, whose stated object was elimination rather than arrest. It was conducted alongside a deployment of central forces on a scale that bears no relationship to a district gone wrong. Sikh researchers put Indian Army strength in the state during 1991 and 1992 in the region of a hundred and fifty thousand. The Central Reserve Police Force appears again and again in individual case histories, along with the Border Security Force and other central formations rotated in from elsewhere, in the pattern used in Delhi in 1984.

There is a simpler objection still, and it undoes the film's geography entirely. There is no such thing as the Punjab Police in the sense the film requires. There is an Indian police service operating in Punjab, under Indian law, supplemented by central paramilitary formations answerable to Delhi. To speak of Punjab's police as a body that went wrong on its own account is to invent an autonomy that does not exist, and it is worth noticing that this invention is the one thing the film cannot do without.

Which is what permits the arrangement the film settles into. Punjab is where the problem is: chaotic, drunken, brutalised, incapable of governing itself. Delhi is where the remedy comes from. The record has Delhi arriving to run the operation. The film has Delhi arriving to stop it.

Sikh critics who have watched it closely put the point more bluntly than I would, and I think they are right. What the film shows, they say, is Sikhs killing Sikhs while the men in charge grow rich on it. A counter-insurgency directed from the centre becomes a squalid local arrangement, closer to a feudal racket than to a policy, and the audience is left with an impression of Punjab as a place that fell apart on its own and had to be picked up by outsiders.

The mechanism by which the blame settles where it does is worth naming, because it is not stated anywhere in the film and does not need to be. At no point does the audience learn what the armed movement wanted. Its members appear, its actions are referred to, and its purpose is never given. A conflict in which one party has a stated grievance and the other has no stated aim at all is not a conflict an audience can hold in balance. The side with no reason becomes the cause of the trouble by default, and the film arrives at that conclusion without ever having to argue for it.

The man who is not named

There is a fact about this film that has gone almost entirely unremarked, and once noticed it is difficult to get past.

Kanwar Pal Singh Gill is not in it.
The character who occupies his position, who says the things he said, who assures reporters that the missing have gone abroad and that without men like him there would be no democracy left in Punjab, is given a different name. Sikh viewers report it as Bitta. So the most consequential police officer in modern Indian history, the man who held the office of Director General of Police in Punjab from 1988 to 1995, who expanded the reward system, who was named by Khalra in advance as one of the two men responsible for his coming death, and who was placed at the scene of Khalra's detention by the testimony of a police officer who confessed, appears in a film about Khalra's murder under an alias.

Consider what that means alongside everything else. The film cannot name Khalistan. The film cannot name Gill. Its makers were required by the censor board to remove the word Punjab, the phrase Punjab Police, the words state, system, law, judiciary and extrajudicial, and the name of a former prime minister. And before any of that, they had themselves already declined to name the dead man's politics and the living man's identity.

A film about a killing that will not name the man widely held to have ordered it has conceded something more fundamental than any individual scene.

What is being protected by that silence is worth setting out, because the record on Gill is not ambiguous.

He was brought into Punjab to crush the movement and he did. He claimed throughout his career and into retirement that staged encounters had not taken place, and told the Tribune in January 1995 that the thousands of missing were missing with the consent of their parents and relatives, who knew perfectly well where they were. He founded and led a research institute which produced the statistics later used to defend him, and which is now run by his son-in-law. He was never charged in the Khalra case. He was never questioned in it. Reports cited by Sikh organisations state that officials of the Central Bureau of Investigation apologised to him under pressure from the central government.

And he was celebrated. He was called a super cop, held up as a model, and defended after his death in 2017 by Hartosh Bal, political editor of the Caravan, a magazine with a serious reputation for holding power to account, in an article and a memorial address which described him as a defender of democracy, attributed his success to strategic brilliance, and asserted that liberal democracy survived in Punjab because he ensured it did. Bal is Gill's nephew, a relationship he has not generally disclosed in his writing on Punjab. In defending his uncle he interrogated the extrapolated figure of twenty-five thousand disappearances while declining to condemn the documented cremations that the extrapolation was built from, and he did not mention Khalra at all.

The man was also, in a detail that says more than any argument, a prisoner of his own protection. Having supposedly restored law and order, he lived the rest of his life under the highest level of security the Indian state provides, and died under it.

A name in the paperwork

There is a further detail here which I want to set out carefully, because it is striking and because it can be overstated.

In the film, the officer who succeeds the Director General is presented as a decent man, appalled by what he finds, and his arrival is part of the movement towards resolution. His name is Sharma.

In Dead Silence, the weekly lists of killings submitted by Inspectors General for the purpose of claiming cash rewards went upward to an Additional Director General for Intelligence named O. P. Sharma.

I do not know whether the film intends the same man and I would not assert that it does. The name is common, the film composites throughout, and the resemblance may be accidental. Anyone writing about this should establish the point rather than assume it, and I flag it here as something to be checked.

Sikh critics go further, and their claim should be recorded even though it is not proved. They say that the officer who succeeded Gill, and whom the film presents as appalled by what he inherits, held the intelligence directorate of the Punjab police at the height of the operation, and that he is widely held within Punjab to have been among those directing which families were to be targeted. If that is right, the film has taken a man from the operational centre of the machine and made him the conscience of the story. If it is wrong, the coincidence of the name remains, and remains awkward.

Either way the difficulty the film has made for itself is the same. In a period when the paperwork of the reward system ran through a named intelligence officer at the top of the force, the film's route out of the horror is a senior officer from that same force who is shocked by it. The problem is not that the character is invented. It is that the invention runs against the grain of the documentation at precisely the point where the audience is being invited to feel relief.

Dilbag Singh

One invented character shows the method more clearly than any other.

In August 1995 the Chief Minister of Punjab, Beant Singh, was killed by a bomb outside the state secretariat in Chandigarh. In the film the man who does this is called Dilbag Singh. He is the brother of a friend of Khalra's whose family the police have destroyed, and he acts out of grief. It is a comprehensible motive, humanely dramatised, and an audience will follow it without difficulty.

The men who actually did it were Dilawar Singh and Balwant Singh Rajoana. Both were serving Punjab Police officers.

That fact is the whole of the matter. They were not outsiders who had been wronged and struck back. They were inside the machine. They had seen at close range what the force was being required to do, and they concluded that the man issuing the orders should be stopped. Rajoana, arrested afterwards, declined legal representation and made a full statement setting out that reasoning, saying that the Chief Minister had directed the killing of thousands of Sikhs at the behest of the central government. The Chief Minister at the time enjoyed the highest level of security in India, which is why the act could only have come from within his own protective circle, and did.

Khalra had made the same identification himself, publicly and in advance. Knowing what was coming for him, he told the people of Punjab to hold the Chief Minister and the Director General of Police responsible for his death when it came. He named the two men before they killed him.

So the film takes a killing carried out by police officers, against the person they held responsible for a policy, for stated political reasons, in the same period in which the man who had publicly named that person was being tortured in illegal detention, and turns it into a bereaved brother's revenge.

Consider what the conversion achieves. A revenge killing has a cause but no argument. It requires no answer, because there is nothing in it to answer. Grief explains it completely, and grief is not a position. A political killing contains a claim about who is responsible for what, and a claim can be disputed, which means it must first be admitted to exist.

The film's version is kinder to the man who plants the bomb. It is also the version in which he has nothing to say.

The rescuer

At roughly eighty minutes an officer of the Central Bureau of Investigation arrives from Delhi, and the film changes hands.

For much of what follows its subject is no longer Jaswant Singh Khalra. It is the investigation into what happened to him. The officer builds his case, finds his witness, meets obstruction and presses on, with Khalra's widow sustaining the work beside him. From that point to the end, the film's hope rests on whether evidence can be assembled and brought before a court.

He is also given the film's central speech, in which he asks what debt Punjab is paying, describes a cycle of violence which the powerful exploit for their own purposes, and says it will not stop until someone steps in and sets an example rather than turning away and standing on the wrong side of history for ever. He uses the word genocide. He refers to the Anandpur Sahib Resolution. He does not use the word Khalistan.

Set the institution beside its portrait.
Paramjit Kaur Khalra filed a habeas corpus petition in the Supreme Court within days of her husband's abduction. Amnesty International issued an urgent action on 20 September 1995. Police officials appeared before the Supreme Court and denied that he was in their custody. He was in their custody. On the account given by Sikh organisations, he was held and tortured for nearly two months after the court had ordered the Director General to disclose his whereabouts. During that detention the hair was torn from his head and beard and he was beaten until he could neither eat nor walk without support, and according to the officer who later confessed, he refused the advice of the Director General which would have saved him. That advice was to abandon his work.

A decade into the investigation the CBI had interviewed a fraction of the witnesses available to it. It did not charge the Director General. It did not question him, despite testimony placing him at the scene. Meanwhile five key witnesses, including Khalra's widow, were charged with fabricated offences ranging from bribery and robbery to rape and to running a terrorist organisation. Witnesses were intimidated and some did not survive the process.

Roughly a decade passed before six low-ranking officers were convicted. By then two of the senior men named in the case were dead. Human Rights Watch's assessment was that although those convictions were an exception to the impunity otherwise enjoyed, justice had not been done, the truth had not been established, the most responsible senior officials had not been charged, and the proceedings had been marked by inordinate delay and by egregious intimidation and harassment of witnesses. Sikh organisations report that the convicted officers have since been seen at bars and hotels at weekends.

The whole process took sixteen years. The film compresses it into what plays as a matter of months and gives the redemption to the institution that did not deliver it.

In fairness, the film does not claim the outcome was complete, and it is not triumphant. But audiences do not retain qualifications. They retain shapes. The shape here is that a decent man came from Delhi and got something done. Nobody watching will carry away the apology to the Director General, or the rape charge laid against the widow of the murdered man, because those things are not in the film.

How the film shows the people Khalra was killed for humanising

Two armed Sikhs appear in Satluj. Sikh critics who have watched the film closely describe them as meek, physically unimpressive, shown without the articles of faith that would identify them, and framed as traitors. One is shown touching the Director General's feet.

Set that against what those men were, and against what happened to people who sang about them. Sikh organisations record fighters whose relatives had their tongues cut out for singing ballads in their honour. Whatever one concludes about the armed movement, the depiction of its members as grovelling and contemptible is not a compression of anything. It is a claim, and it is the state's claim.

The pattern extends. The film tells its audience that the press had become a mouthpiece for the militants and that the judiciary had been paralysed. Neither proposition survives contact with the record. The press was, with rare exceptions, compliant; human rights workers were themselves detained and disappeared, among them the district secretary of a Punjab human rights organisation who vanished after his arrest in January 1992, a lawyer who vanished after his in September 1992, and a retired High Court judge held for four months. The judiciary was not paralysed. It was functioning, and what it produced was sixteen years and six junior convictions.

There is a scene, described by those critics as among the film's most distressing, in which an officer arrives at a house while an elderly Sikh woman is serving prasad, and she is shown pleading for her son's life. What unsettled them was not the violence in it but the posture: a Sikh mother rendered as a supplicant to the man destroying her family.

And there is the treatment of the dead. The film handles bodies with what one critic called a clinical clarity, and it is exactly the right word. There is no reverence in it, no Sikh vocabulary for what a dead body is and what is owed to it. Khalra himself wrote of pieces of bodies in the streets of Amritsar. The film's dead are evidence.

Alongside this the film uses Gurbani, and Sikh devotional registers on the soundtrack, at intervals. Sikh critics read that as borrowed authority: sacred material used to certify a story told in someone else's terms. I think the reading is arguable rather than proven, but the underlying observation stands. The film reaches for Sikh sanctity while operating inside a frame with no room for Sikh politics.

The clearest instance of the whole method comes at the end, in the cell, when the film has to give Khalra his last words.

It does not write him any. What it does instead is take the speech, the one about the lamp and the darkness, and put it in his mouth as a private conversation with the policeman guarding him. Sikh viewers have described the effect as a poor refitting, and it is, but the interest of it is not the craft. That speech was a public address, delivered from a gurdwara stage to a congregation, naming the dead as the kin of named fighters, and its whole force lies in being said out loud to a community that was expected to act on it. Relocated to a cell and directed at one man, it becomes a dying prisoner's consolation. The same words. The audience is gone.

That is the film's characteristic move performed on a single scene: a public political act, addressed to a people, converted into a private moral one, addressed to nobody in particular.

Which language, and for whom

The simplest evidence in the case has attracted the least comment. Satlujis in Hindi.

Jaswant Singh Khalra wrote in Punjabi. He organised in Punjabi, in the district he was born in and returned to. His magazine was in Punjabi. His speeches, including the one everybody quotes, were in Punjabi. He was a village council secretary in Punjabi villages and a student organiser in Punjabi colleges. There is no part of his life conducted in Hindi and no audience he ever addressed in it.

Rendering his story in Hindi is not a neutral distribution decision with incidental artistic consequences. It identifies the audience. A film that speaks about Sikhs in the language of the state to that state's general public has settled a great many questions before it opens.

There is an argument on the other side and it should be acknowledged. Reaching an Indian audience with any part of this history may be the more useful act, and a film in Punjabi would reach fewer of the people who most need reaching. But that argument has to be made rather than assumed, and it carries a cost worth naming. Told in Hindi, this is no longer a community speaking about its own dead. It is a community being explained to the people among whom it lives. The difference shows in everything: in what needs explaining and what can be assumed, in what will be found tolerable, and in who is permitted to be the hero.

Force, and violence

The film operates two vocabularies and never mixes them.

What the state does is described as restoring order, doing what had to be done, dealing with a situation that had got out of hand. What the insurgents do is terrorism. The senior policeman tells reporters that without men like him there would be no democracy left in Punjab.

It is worth stopping on that, because it is not a small thing and it is easy to read past.

Both parties in this conflict killed people. That much is not in dispute and no honest account of the period pretends otherwise. But the film does not have one word for killing. It has two, and it allocates them by who is doing it. When the state kills, the act is placed inside a vocabulary of function: order, control, necessity, the law, the situation. When the other side kills, the act is placed inside a vocabulary of criminality: terror, madness, mayhem. The allocation is made in the opening narration, before the audience has seen anything, and it is never revisited.

Notice what that settles. Once the state's killing has been named as the performance of a function and the other side's has been named as crime, no evidence introduced afterwards can disturb the arrangement. Every new atrocity by the state becomes an excess within a legitimate activity, which is to say a departure from something proper, correctable by removing the men who departed. Every act by the other side confirms what it was already said to be. The film's own material works this way throughout. The killings it shows are appalling and are presented as appalling, and every one of them is absorbed as a lapse, because the category they fall into was decided before they were shown.

This is why the argument about a few corrupt officers cannot be dislodged by producing more corpses. It was never an empirical claim. It is a rule about how the corpses are to be classified.

The same operation, on a larger scale, produces the phrase that governs almost all Indian discussion of this period. The dark days. A black time. A chapter of madness that everybody now wishes to move past.

Consider what that image does. Darkness has no author. It falls. Nobody signs off on it, nobody budgets for it, and nobody can be prosecuted for it. It is a condition rather than an act, and conditions are endured rather than committed. And because it works as an image rather than as a description, it cannot be argued with. Produce the reward schedule, the cremation registers, the medical findings, the confessions of the men who did it, and the image absorbs the lot: all of that is simply further evidence of how dark the days were. The documentation, which ought to be the strongest thing the record has, ends up feeding the very framing it was assembled to defeat.

That is why the framing of this film matters more than any single inaccuracy in it. It is not competing with the record. It is operating at a level the record cannot reach.

Which is what makes Khalra's own image so much more dangerous than it now appears, and explains why it is quoted everywhere with its subject removed.

He also reached for a picture rather than an argument, and he chose the same one, and turned it round. The lamp lit against a darkness that has fallen for the first time is not, in the speech, a figure for individual moral courage, which is how it is now almost universally read. In the speech the light is the resistance of Punjab, and the people he names as its bearers are the families of the men who fought. He took the state's image of a darkness that had descended on Punjab and reassigned every role in it. The darkness was not a condition afflicting Punjab. It was something being done to Punjab, and by someone.

Strip that reassignment out and you are left with a man holding a candle against the night, which is an image nobody needs to do anything about. That is the version in the film, and it is the version on the posters.

One further thing the two vocabularies conceal is the arithmetic. The figure the Indian government itself accepts for security personnel killed across the entire period is in the region of two thousand one hundred. Against that stand tens of thousands of Sikh dead, of whom 6,017 were documented as cremated unidentified in a single district. The armed movement never fielded anything resembling a standing army; its full-time strength ran at most to a few thousand, against deployments in the hundreds of thousands, in flat country with nowhere to hide.

None of which establishes that the armed movement was right, and I do not argue that it was. Numbers do not settle questions of that kind, and the movement committed atrocities of its own which no honest account omits; Dead Silence devotes a section to them, documenting executions of civilians and kidnappings by militant groups, and it should be read alongside everything else. What the numbers establish is narrower and harder to evade. Whatever was happening in Punjab between 1984 and 1995, it was not a symmetrical contest between two comparable parties, and the film's framing of two exhausted sides with a few bad men among them does not survive contact with them.

The cut before the cuts

The censorship of this film has been reported at length and I will not rehearse it. But one aspect has gone almost unremarked and it is the more important one.

The makers submitted for certification in late 2022. The film was cleared subject to twenty-one cuts and a change of title; they appealed; the requirement grew to 127 alterations. They declined, forfeited the theatrical release, and published on a streaming platform where no certificate is required. It was removed within two days following a citation of security concerns by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and internationally within the week.

Among the things the board wanted removed were the references in the CBI officer's speech to genocide and to the Anandpur Sahib Resolution. Sikh viewers report that the demands also reached the place names Amritsar and Tarn Taran, and the number of cremations itself. Note what that list has in common with the rest of the board's requirements, which included the word Punjab, the phrase Punjab Police, and the words state, system, law, judiciary and extrajudicial. What is being removed is not an opinion. It is the apparatus by which an act can be located, attributed and counted. A killing in an unnamed district, by an unnamed force, of an unstated number of people, is not denied. It is made impossible to point at.

Note also where the genocide reference sits: in the mouth of the film's most sympathetic representative of the Indian state, in a monologue resolving towards constitutional conscience, and stopping short of the word that would have made it dangerous. That is the material the board found intolerable.

But the decisive cut was made earlier and by nobody at the board. Khalistan was gone in the writing. Gill's name was gone in the writing. Neither was removed under instruction; neither was ever present to be removed. By the time the board saw the film, only the residue was left to object to.

Sikh critics who have watched it make an observation which I think is right and which cuts against the way the whole affair has been reported. Watch the film and try to identify the scene that provoked the ban. There isn't one. There is no moment at which the Indian state is indicted in a manner it has not survived a hundred times before, no argument advanced that is not available in any human rights report of the last thirty years, and nothing on screen that a confident government would trouble itself about. Their conclusion is that the trigger was not the content but the name on the poster.

That reading is speculative and they say so. But it fits the surrounding facts better than the alternatives. It fits the reports that members of the board did not watch the film before rejecting it. It fits the producer's account of receiving calls warning that an international release would not be viewed favourably, in jurisdictions where no Indian certificate applies and no legal instrument was available. And it fits the general pattern by which the mere invocation of Khalistan is treated as contaminating, by a state which simultaneously insists that the movement is finished and behaves as though the word alone could bring the building down.

What the defenders say

There is a case for this film and it should be put properly.

It has made Khalra's name known to millions who had never heard it. It was made across four years of obstruction, at real professional cost, by people who refused the cuts and gave up a theatrical release rather than comply, and who have been threatened for it. Khalra's widow, Paramjit Kaur Khalra, approved the released version, said publicly that it was the version screened for the family, and thanked the director for not compromising it under pressure. And the alternative on offer was not a better film. It was no film.

Against a critique written from a British desk, all of that carries weight and none of it can be waved away.

The strongest reply is one Sikh critics have made, and it is not about the film's contents at all. The question is not whether some viewers will be moved to look further. Some will. The question is how many people will now believe that the man in this film is who Jaswant Singh Khalra was, and stop there. For most audiences a film is not a doorway. It is the room. One of those critics noted that a folded leaflet his organisation produced contains more about Khalra's life than a film of two hours and forty-five minutes, and the point of the remark is not that the leaflet is better made. It is that the film's omissions are not a function of running time.

I would add one thing against my own argument. Those critics are not themselves settled. In the same discussion in which the film is condemned, one of them says he had thought, the day before, that it might work as a teaching text for someone who already has a standpoint, who has read the biographies and understands the movement, and who could sit with a younger person and take the film apart scene by scene; and that he had then changed his mind, because it is a violent way to learn. That hesitation is honest and should be preserved rather than resolved. People who have thought about this longer and at greater cost than I have are genuinely divided about whether the thing should be watched at all.

The widow's approval remains the hardest fact in the case. It establishes that the makers dealt honourably with the people who had the strongest claim to be dealt with honourably, and nothing here suggests otherwise. What it does not establish is what the film transmits to an audience with no other source, which is a different question and not one the bereaved are obliged to answer. It is also worth noting that her own public language has run well beyond the film's. She has called what happened Sikh genocide, has asked the Akal Takht to convene a people's commission to establish the true numbers, and has demanded that honours be revoked.

The institution that does not exist

The most uncomfortable question in this whole argument is not about the film, and it is where I want to end.

Why, thirty years after his death, is the Indian film industry the body making films about Jaswant Singh Khalra?

Sikh organisations that have criticised Satluj have asked this of themselves and answered it without flattery. The community built gurdwaras. It did not build publishing houses, archives, production companies or film schools. Its energy went into buildings, and its intellectual work has been carried by individuals and small volunteer efforts, so that when a major cultural artefact about its own history finally arrives, it arrives from outside, and the only available response is critique.

This part survives the film entirely, and it is the reason I have written about it.

A critique is not a substitute for a work. It arrives second by definition, it addresses whatever it is handed, and it accepts the terms of the thing it disputes in the act of disputing them. Every essay of this kind, including this one, is parasitic on the object it criticises and confirms that object's centrality by attacking it. A community that can only review is a community whose history will be written by other people and corrected afterwards in the margins.

Which returns to the tariff, and to what it was for.

The reward schedule in Dead Silence is not a scandal about corrupt policemen. It is a costed instrument of policy, with an annual budget line, an approval chain and a weekly reporting cycle, and its purpose was to make a political demand disappear along with the people who carried it. Jaswant Singh Khalra reconstructed that instrument from the state's own paperwork, made it public, named the men responsible, named the dead as the kin of fighters, and was killed for it.

A film that renders the whole of that as an extortion racket has not simply got a detail wrong. It has taken the one thing he established, at the cost of his life, and handed it back to us smaller and more manageable, in the language of the government that ordered his death, with an officer of that government as the closest thing the story has to a rescuer, and with the name of the man who ordered the killing changed.

Sikh critics have a word for what the film does with him, and having spent this long with it I cannot improve on theirs. It uses him as scaffolding. He is the structure erected around the building work, load-bearing while the job is done and dismantled once it is finished, and the building being put up is the good name of the Indian state.

He was killed for making the machinery visible. The film has made it invisible again, gently, and with the best intentions in the world.

William Gomes is a British Bangladeshi writer and human rights campaigner based in York. He has spent much of his working life documenting enforced disappearance, extrajudicial killing and custodial torture, first in Bangladesh and later with an international human rights organisation and an Italian news agency, and he continues to work with human rights bodies on accountability for state violence. He writes on racism, displacement and impunity, and his journalism has appeared in the Huffington Post, openDemocracy, the Tablet, the Big Issue, the Yorkshire Post, Yorkshire Bylines, Counter Currents and CounterPunch. He holds a master's degree in Refugee Care from the University of Essex and the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, and is currently completing a doctorate at the University of Essex.