Индия запретила фильм «Сатлудж» о пропавшем бухгалтере, который расследовал исчезновения в 1995 году

Say Satluj and you hear winter fog settling on wheat. You smell wet earth, diesel, and old paper. In geography it is Shatadru, the Rigvedic river of the land of five waters. Rivers do not speak. They file. They keep the record. 1947: it heard trains cut in half at the border, whistles carrying grief across new cartography. 1984: it watched night burn in Delhi and in Punjab’s villages, and mirrored the glow. 6 September 1995, 9:20 am, Kabir Park, Amritsar: it saw a red Maruti stop. Men in uniform took a man washing his car. His name was Jaswant Singh Khalra. Bank manager. His job was to make accounts add up. On 3 July 2026, Honey Trehan’s ’Satluj’ arrived on ZEE5. Diljit Dosanjh played Khalra. Not the pop star. A gaunt, quiet man with rage folded under his shirt. By the night of 5 July, the Ministry of Electronics and IT invoked Rule 3 of the IT Rules, 2021. Forty-eight hours later the film was gone from India. Within a week it vanished from ZEE5’s international catalogue too. In August 2026 it survives on Telegram, WhatsApp, and “guerrilla screenings” in gurdwara halls and college rooms across Punjab. The platform erased it. The river didn’t. The Accountant Who Asked For Bodies Khalra was not a politician. He was not a militant. He was a citizen with an accountant’s discipline and a Sikh’s sense of seva. From the late 1980s to 1994, Punjab was crushed between two fires: armed insurgency and a counter-insurgency that increasingly operated outside law. The word in print and in whispers was “encounter.” Young men were lifted. Then silence. But where were the bodies? That question would not let Khalra sleep. From around 1992 he began visiting cremation grounds across Amritsar district: Tarn Taran, Patti, Majitha, Sarhali. He carried two government registers. One recorded body brought for cremation. The other recorded wood purchased. An adult cremation takes roughly 30-35 kg of wood. The math did not match. The gap was filled with entries marked ‘laawaris’ — unclaimed, unidentified. The state was burning people without names, without FIRs, without post-mortems. On 16 January 1995, Khalra and a small rights collective published ‘Disappeared and Cremation Grounds’. It was dry, forensic, devastating. From three districts’ records it estimated nearly 2,000 “unidentified” cremations in Tarn Taran between 1984 and 1994. Extrapolated, the statewide figure could be close to 25,000. He named officers. He named stations. He sent copies to the NHRC, to the press, and abroad. The report travelled. Amnesty cited it in London. Asia Watch — now Human Rights Watch — referenced it in New York. For the first time, the encounter was given a paper trail. Khalra knew the cost. He continued. And he was not alone. During the Khalistani movement, the Communist Party of India did what is rarely recorded: it confronted Khalistani terror on the ground in Punjab. Poet Pash became its clearest voice. He wrote against state repression and against sectarian violence both. The militants shot him dead. Years later, Anand Patwardhan made ‘In Memory of My Friends’ to mourn Pash and others killed for insisting that freedom cannot be built on the barrel of a gun. That democratic resistance — unarmed, courageous, and largely erased — finds no place in the state’s official story. The Disappearance and the Law Eight months later, on 6 September 1995, Khalra was abducted outside his home in Gandhivinayak Colony. Witnesses noted the van and the armed men. He was never seen alive again. What does a family do with enforced disappearance? Paramjit Kaur Khalra went from police stations to politicians’ doors to the Supreme Court. In September 1995 she filed habeas under Article 32. On 11 September the Court issued notices to the Centre and Punjab. On 15 November 1995, in ‘Paramjit Kaur v. State of Punjab’, a bench led by Justice Kuldip Singh held that the Punjab Police could not investigate itself. The case went to the CBI. SSP Ajit Singh Sandhu of Tarn Taran was transferred. The CBI, 1995-1996, concluded that Khalra had been illegally detained in a Tarn Taran police camp and killed. It also corroborated his central finding: 2,097 bodies illegally cremated in Tarn Taran between 1984 and 1994. That number entered judicial and NHRC records and became the anchor for all later debate. The trial was slow and political. On 18 November 2005 a special CBI court in Patiala convicted six officers. DSPs Jaspal Singh and Amarjit Singh got life. Four others got seven years. On 16 October 2007 the Punjab and Haryana High Court enhanced the four to life. The Supreme Court dismissed the final appeal on 11 April 2011, upholding life for all six and rebuking police impunity. By then Sandhu had died in 1997, and DSP Ashok Kumar had died during trial. The Court’s language matters. It said that if even a fraction of Khalra’s documentation was true, it was a grave violation. More than that, it affirmed a principle: no one in uniform is above law. A citizen with registers and a calculator could force the state to answer. The NHRC built on this. From 1996 it examined cremation records across Punjab. Its 2016 report to the Supreme Court listed 1,245 cases of “illegal cremations” deserving compensation. For families, first acknowledgment. For the state, indictment. The Film as File Three decades later, cinema picked up the file. ‘Satluj’, directed by Honey Trehan and produced by Ronnie Screwvala and Abhishek Chaubey, premiered on ZEE5 on 3 July 2026. Diljit Dosanjh as Khalra and actors are Arjun Rampal, Subhinder Vicky, Kewal Dhaliwal. This is not a Diljit vehicle. No songs. No hero entry. Trehan shoots it like an archive: static frames, long takes, available light. Sound design is sparse — a pen scratching, a register turning, a ceiling fan humming. The grammar matters. Drama is intercut with artifacts: ‘The Tribune’ and Ajit’s clippings, Door Darshan clips from the 1990s, close-ups of cremation ledgers. Khalra is shown hunched over a table. Calculator. Wood bills. Columns that don’t match. The heroism is bureaucratic. It is the heroism of documentation. Vicky’s officer says little. His power is presence — the way a room quiets when he enters. The courtroom in the final act is cold. No score. Only files moving from one table to another, and time. The film fought to exist. First titled ‘Punjab 95’, it faced 127 cuts from CBFC. The makers challenged it. Nearly three years later it was cleared without cuts and released as ‘Satluj’. Two days later it was blocked under the IT Rules, 2021. The stated reason was “public order.” The real reason was political. Why This Story, Why Now To read the ban we must place ‘Satluj’ in three frames: historical, cinematic, and political. 1. The historical record The Punjab crisis of the 1980s-90s was not singular. There was Khalistani militancy that killed civilians, politicians, and police. There were also custodial killings, fake encounters, and disappearances by state forces. Rights groups, journalists, and later the NHRC documented both. But institutional attention was asymmetrical. Militant violence was condemned by the state and most parties. State violence was documented by courts, but rarely entered popular memory. This is the fault line in our human rights politics. We have often spoken, rightly, against state terror while remaining silent on the retaliatory terror of armed groups. That silence is now being debated, and it must be. The poor, the ordinary, the unarmed are crushed between both. Yet the two are not equal in weight. Party terror can be met, however imperfectly, with law. State terror is harder to resist because the state writes law, breaks law, and then names it order. The primary duty-bearer under human rights law is the state. But opposition to group violence is also necessary. To ignore it leaves a gap that the state fills with its favorite line: “They are terrorists, therefore we are the rule of law.” That is a lie. The state commits the deepest disintegration and then lectures on national unity. It gives police a license to kill and calls it policy. Khalra shifted the question. He did not justify militancy. He asked what happens when the state, in the name of restoring order, begins to erase people. That implicates institutions, not just individuals. It is also why we must remember the democrats in Punjab who fought militancy at great risk without state backing. The state killed many of them too, and then folded them into its own narrative. 2. The cinematic precedent Hollywood has a tradition of centering the ordinary citizen in rights stories. In 1993, Jonathan Demme’s ‘Philadelphia’ put Andrew Beckett, an AIDS patient and lawyer played by Tom Hanks, at the center. It was not about medicine. It was about discrimination and dignity. It forced a mainstream audience into discomfort. It won Oscars and shifted conversation. It proved a quiet man with a file could be more radical than an action hero. India has few such films. ‘A Wednesday!’ or ‘Shahid’ touched state excess through thriller frames. ‘Satluj’ tries something rarer: to make paperwork cinematic. To make a bank manager heroic because he counts. That choice is political. It refuses melodrama and insists on evidence. Compare ‘Leila’ (2019), Deepa Mehta’s adaptation of Prayaag Akbar, starring Huma Qureshi. It faced campaigns and criticism for its dystopian vision, but it was not taken down. ‘Satluj’ lasted 48 hours. The difference tells us something: not all controversy is treated alike. Proximity to living institutions and living political figures changes the calculus. 3. The political subtext Here the ban exceeds content moderation. ‘Satluj’ is about Congress-era Punjab. The documented excesses occurred under Congress governments. Yet the takedown in 2026 came from a BJP-led Centre. Why? Follow the personnel. KPS Gill, DGP Punjab at the height of counter-insurgency, was appointed Security Advisor to Gujarat in May 2002. The MoS Home then was Amit Shah. The Chief Minister was Narendra Modi. Later, Gill publicly defended the Gujarat administration’s handling of the 2002 riots, blaming “police failure.” History needs no conspiracy, only continuity. If judicial scrutiny of state action in Punjab is normalized, it becomes harder to claim blanket immunity elsewhere. The fear is not that ‘Satluj’ distorts 1995. The fear is that it establishes a principle for 2002, for Manipur, for Kashmir — for any place where “law and order” is used to suspend law. That is why “balance” is demanded so quickly. Why doesn’t the film show militant killings too? The Question of Balance It is a fair historical question. It is a bad cinematic demand. Cinema is not a commission report. It is a frame, and every frame excludes. ‘Satluj’ excludes militant violence not to deny it, but to focus. To demand that a film about state crime must also stage insurgent crime is to ask art to carry a disclaimer written by the state. That is not neutrality. It is prior restraint. The demand also misunderstands power. The state holds the monopoly on legitimate force. It writes laws, keeps records, runs courts, and can make people disappear with paperwork. A militant group cannot. One violence does not justify another, but they are not equivalent in capacity or consequence. To pretend otherwise is to give impunity a vocabulary. International human rights law recognizes this asymmetry. That is why the primary duty-bearer is the state. At the time, Amnesty and Asia Watch condemned both, but their sharpest reports targeted state actors because that is where accountability can be institutionalized. To erase that distinction in the name of “balance” is what authoritarian politics wants: selective memory. And yet, intellectual honesty demands we say it: opposition to state terror cannot mean silence on group terror. Both broke Punjab. Both left mothers without sons. A complete politics of rights must hold both to account, while recognizing that state violence is the greater danger because it is unanswerable. ‘Memory Against Erasure’ At the end of ‘Satluj’, white text on black: – Before Kuljit Singh could testify in High Court, he was found dead at home. He was under CRPF protection. – His testimony, and others’, helped convict five officers for Khalra’s abduction and extrajudicial killing. – DGP Bitta’s name never appeared in the report. – Thousands disappeared or were killed in extrajudicial executions during Punjab’s worst years. – Thousands of soldiers and police also died in that proxy war. – Paramjit Kaur continues the fight. She is still fighting. – Sikhs in Punjab and Canada commemorate the day of his disappearance. Schools and parks in the US and Canada bear his name. – Jaswant Singh’s body was never found. – “I CHALLENGE THE DARKNESS” — Martyr Jaswant Singh. This is where Ranajit Guha matters. Guha and Subaltern Studies argued that elite history writes out the peasant, the worker, the ordinary. Khalra was that subaltern: not a general, not a minister, a bank manager. Without a film, his archive becomes a footnote. With the film banned, the erasure doubles. Hannah Arendt warned that totalitarianism’s most effective weapon is not violence alone but the destruction of memory. Make people forget the sequence, and you can rewrite the meaning. ‘Satluj’ resists that. It insists memory is a civic act. The River Keeps Moving The Satluj still flows. It crossed the border in 1947. It reflected fire in 1984. It witnessed abduction in 1995. In 2026 it watched a film removed for asking the same questions Khalra asked with a calculator. The state says: forget. The platform says: we must comply. The film says: I will remember. The river says: I already do. In August 2026, students in Ludhiana project it on a bedsheet. In Toronto, a gurdwara screens it after langar. On Telegram, someone adds English and Punjabi subtitles. The file is 1.2 GB. It moves hand to hand. Banned stories survive not through institutions, but through circulation. A democracy does not require every film to be neutral. It requires some films to be courageously partial — partial to the record, partial to the powerless, partial to truth. ‘Satluj’ made that choice. To punish it for what it did not show is to say no story about power can be told until power approves the footnotes. That is not criticism. It is evasion. And evasion, repeated, becomes policy. The last image should have been Khalra closing a register. Instead, we got a takedown notice. The river, at least, kept its page open. Subscribe to Our Newsletter Get the latest CounterCurrents updates delivered straight to your inbox. Uttan Bandyopadhyay is an activist of APDR, a Democratic Rights Movement Group. He is a Public Health Movement activist in West Bengal as well.