Punjab activists screen banned film on Jaswant Singh Khalra's case

In Tatley village in Gurdaspur district, activists projected Satluj in a Sikh temple courtyard after ZEE5 pulled the film from its India service. Elderly survivors of Punjab’s insurgency sat beside teenagers born long after the violence ended, and the room went quiet as the screening began.

The film centers on Jaswant Singh Khalra, the human-rights activist who investigated disappearances and extrajudicial killings during the crackdown on Punjab’s separatist insurgency in the 1980s and early 1990s. Khalra’s work focused on alleged secret cremations. He documented more than 2,000 mass cremations in Amritsar district alone and alleged that Punjab security forces had cremated thousands of unidentified bodies between 1984 and 1994. Khalra was abducted on September 6, 1995, and a Patiala court convicted six Punjab police officials in the case on November 18, 2005.

The movie was first titled Punjab 95 and later retitled Satluj for release. Its path to viewers was blocked for years after the Central Board of Film Certification sought 127 cuts. After finally reaching ZEE5, the film remained online in India for only about two days before being removed. ZEE5 tied the takedown to “current developments” and later hoped to restore the film while asking viewers not to encourage piracy.

Sikh organizations and local activists began organizing community screenings across Punjab, shifting the movie into temple courtyards, villages and civic spaces outside the formal entertainment system. In Gurdaspur, that informal circuit allowed older witnesses and younger viewers to watch the same story together.

Political and Sikh groups in Punjab condemned the takedown and called for the film to be shown. Shiromani Akali Dal planned to screen the film across Punjab to educate youth about historical Sikh repression.