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

Published 7 August 2026 · india

Slain Indian activist Jaswant Singh Khalra’s daughter, Navkiran, reflects on his life and legacy, which also inspired a recent film on rights abuses by officials

Slain Indian activist Jaswant Singh Khalra’s daughter, Navkiran, reflects on his life and legacy, which also inspired a recent film on rights abuses by officials during crackdown on Punjab separatist movement. 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.