Satluj lived for about 48 hours. The film had already survived one of the longest certification sieges in recent memory: four years before the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), a demand for 127 cuts, the rejection of its original title, Ghallughara, then of its replacement, Punjab 95, and at one point a request that the name of its subject, Jaswant Singh Khalra, be removed from a film that is his biopic. When it finally appeared on ZEE5 on July 3, uncut by the director’s account, it seemed the siege had been outlasted. Two days later it was withdrawn “in light of current developments,” then pulled internationally. A committee of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry, convened under the IT Rules – a second gate for streaming content that sits entirely outside the certification process the film had already cleared – reportedly said the restrictions should stay because the film goes against India’s sovereignty and integrity. There is no court order to appeal, no published directive to challenge. A film about an enforced disappearance has itself been disappeared, by a procedure almost as untraceable as the one it depicts. The takedown of Satluj – wordless, orderless, unappealable – announces that the Indian state in 2026 still regards Punjab’s dead as a security problem rather than a historical one. Satluj sketches the brief, final phase of Jaswant Singh Khalra’s life before his own disappearance. The disappearance of a colleague is the event cited as the starting point of Khalra’s investigations. What is documented is the work itself. In the firewood purchase registers of the municipal cremation grounds at Tarn Taran, Patti, Ajnala and Amritsar’s Durgiana, Khalra traced 2,097 bodies that the Punjab Police had cremated as “unclaimed” or “unidentified” between 1984 and 1994, the decade of the counterinsurgency against the Khalistan militancy. His labour became a founding example of documentation from below, an audit. Khalra held no office, no warrant, no power, only simple access to public records and the determination to count. Also read: ‘Satluj’, Now Withdrawn From OTT Platform, Has the Scope of a Novel and the Restraint of a PoemThe film’s disappearance has bared a buried archive. Into the breach now rush old charges and new claims: the militancy’s own record – its communal imagination, its terrorising of Punjab’s Hindus, its involvement in the killing of migrant labourers, its role in driving the state toward a communal fracture long held in balance and its assassinations of left-wing opponents, including activists, poets, writers, and journalists; questions about Khalra’s independence and his association with Liberation Khalistan; and the conduct of politicians, from Beant Singh to Parkash Singh Badal, who rode the tragedy in office and buried its investigation when power no longer required remembrance. Each of these questions warrants attention and each will be argued over. Yet the present argument threatens, once more, to eclipse the central issue, which is state accountability. What took shape in Punjab was not simply a succession of excesses that left a wound to fester in its social and political life, but a structure of impunity, never fully confronted, never dismantled and still coursing through India’s body politic.The architecture of extraordinary lawsBetween 1983 and 1995, Punjab lived under the most extraordinary legal architecture independent India has ever assembled. The Punjab Disturbed Areas Act and the Armed Forces (Punjab and Chandigarh) Special Powers Act, both of 1983, conferred shoot-to-kill powers with statutory good-faith immunity and barred prosecution of the forces without central sanction. The National Security Act (NSA) was amended in 1984, for Punjab alone, to permit two years’ preventive detention with deferred review. The Terrorist Affected Areas (Special Courts) Act of 1984 created secret courts with anonymous witnesses and a reversed burden of proof. Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) followed in 1985, and again, harsher, in 1987, when confessions made to police officers became admissible evidence, bail became nearly unobtainable and guilt could be presumed.Sikh Pogrom of 1984, Photo: Wikimedia Commons.The Religious Institutions (Prevention of Misuse) Act of 1988 policed the gurdwaras. Above it all sat a constitutional layer: President’s rule stretched to five continuous years by successive amendments and the chilling 59th Amendment of 1988, which for Punjab alone recorded “internal disturbance” as a ground for emergency and permitted the suspension of Article 21 – the right to life and personal liberty itself – before being repealed, unused, in 1990. This was not all invented for Punjab. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) was written in 1958 for the Naga Hills. When the Naxalite movement rose after 1967, West Bengal was given its own preventive detention law and then Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA). Andhra Pradesh used a 1948 Act to declare Srikakulam disturbed – and the state’s chosen instrument was “encounter,” a word that entered the Indian political vocabulary in precisely those years, in the killings of West Bengal and the staged deaths of Andhra and also Punjab. Punjab, in other words, did not invent the method. It inherited it and industrialised it, giving it a bureaucracy of bounties, promotions and crematoria registers.Armed with this apparatus, the state in Punjab convicted almost no one. Roughly 76,000 people were detained under TADA nationwide; Punjab recorded a disproportionately high number of arrests, yet its conviction rate was approximately 0.37%.If any legal regime could have tried Punjab’s militants, this one could. Instead, the state eliminated them through an economy of cash rewards and out-of-turn promotions. Even a rigged trial creates a record. Instead, bodies, not convictions, became the metric of counterinsurgency success. Once the exception is written into law, the step from legal exception to extra-legal execution is short. Parliament formally contemplated suspending the right to life in Punjab; the police informally carried out what the Constitution had been amended to permit. The militants’ murders were horrific crimes; the state’s murders were committed by the institution whose monopoly on violence is justified only by submission to law.A state that learns to killThis is why accountability is not about Punjab alone or only about the past. Impunity is not a local arrangement; it is a technology, and once proven, it travels. The template perfected in Punjab – the euphemism, the rewards, the unmarked disposal of the dead, the sanction never granted – moved to Kashmir, where the state’s own human rights commission confirmed thousands of bodies in unmarked graves, hundreds of them local men entered in the record as unidentified foreign militants.It surfaced in Uttar Pradesh, where encounter is no longer denied but advertised, tallied in government press notes as proof of governance. It is at work in Chhattisgarh, where the “neutralisation” of Maoists is scored against ministerial deadlines and the line between combatant and villager is certified by the same forces doing the killing. A state that learns it can kill citizens without consequence does not unlearn it, it finds new citizens. Accountability is not vengeance upon old policemen; it is the only mechanism by which a society remembers that state violence is conditional. Punjab was not where the condition was first waived, but it was where the waiver became a system and it has never been revoked. Also read: ‘Satluj’: When History Becomes Inconvenient, the First Casualty Is Not Just Truth But MemoryThe differences between these theatres deepen the indictment. Punjab’s insurgency was, in large measure, the creation of ruling-class politics itself, the fire fed from Delhi before it was put out and the people of Punjab made to pay for both the arson and the extinguishing. In Kashmir, a historical grievance crushed and in Chhattisgarh, where Adivasis stood against the seizure of their land and forests, the same repression fell on them. And in Uttar Pradesh, there is no insurgency, the encounter now serves the consolidation of Hindutva politics, no rebellion required.That is the arc of unaccounted power: first deployed against an enemy the rulers had themselves conjured, then against people’s movements and finally as a routine instrument of majoritarian governance. A method that no longer needs even the pretext of war has become simply how the state deals with those it rules. What remains of the rule of law, in each new theatre, is whatever the state decides it can afford. That is what is at stake when the counting of the dead is itself banned.On September 6, 1995, police officers abducted Khalra from outside his home. The Central Bureau of Investigation’s (CBI’s) examination established that he was held in illegal custody, tortured, killed and his body dumped in a canal at Harike. Nine officers were charge-sheeted; the prime accused, Tarn Taran senior superintendent of police (SSP) Ajit Singh Sandhu, died by suicide before trial; six others were eventually convicted, their sentences later enhanced to life. The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), to which the Supreme Court referred the crematoria evidence in 1996 after finding “flagrant violation of human rights on a mass scale”, eventually ordered compensation in hundreds of cases with no perpetrator named and no prosecution ordered. The afterlife of convictionsThen follow those nine convictions forward, because their afterlife is its own indictment. By the Punjab government’s own account this month, four of the convicted policemen have died. Of the four survivors, exactly one – Surinder Pal Singh – is in custody. Satnam Singh and Jasbir Singh, both serving life, are out on parole or bail. And Jaspal Singh, the senior-most, a deputy superintendent of police (DSP) sentenced to life imprisonment, walked out of Nabha Open Air Jail on bail on May 26, 2023, and has been untraceable since. The jail has just written to the Hoshiarpur police asking them to find him, he was not at the address in the jail’s own records and he continues to hold his gallantry award. Proposals for the convicts’ premature release moved through official channels in 2017, 2019 and 2023 before the Union Home Ministry rejected them, but parole and bail have quietly delivered what clemency could not. Thirty-one years after the murder, one of Khalra’s killers is in prison and another is a decorated absconder. Even the film’s account of justice done turns out to be too generous to the state.The lessons a ban cannot drownThe film has not been silenced; in being banned, it has escaped the confines of permission and begun to travel more freely than it did under licence. What has been denied is the more precious thing: the common, public, unsparing act of watching together and then arguing honestly over what was seen. But the final word cannot belong to the state, to the parties or even to the film-makers. It belongs to the people of Punjab, upon whose memory this drama is being staged. Those said to have scripted both the ZEE5 release and the takedown continue to turn the moment into an instrument of polarisation and every week spent dragging Punjab back through the 1990s is a week in which the living struggles of ordinary Punjabis, for justice, dignity and a secure future for their children, are pushed into the wings. They are the ones who will be made to inherit the tragedy if this plot succeeds.Members of the Sikh and Hindu communities come together for a screening of Satluj at Gurdwara Bibi Kahan Kaur, Moga, Punjab July 2026. Photo: Damanjeet Kaur.Yet Punjab’s own history offers reason to believe it will not. Punjab has looked into darkness before and it has not always looked away. Even in the hour of crisis, there were writers, poets, playwrights, rights workers and ordinary citizens who stood against the militants’ guns and the state’s guns alike, who refused the convenience of selective grief and who called murder by its name, whichever hand pulled the trigger. Their courage helped hold Punjab back from the abyss, and from the communal fire that so many wished to light.Also read: Satluj Was Taken Down From OTT, But Punjabis Have Brought It to Their Villages And BeyondWhat was needed then was to gather that courage into a public reckoning – perhaps a truth commission with legitimacy, trust, disclosure and the participation of every section of society; a patient public labour through which fear, complicity, prejudice, grief and denial could be named without being weaponised. That work was never done. Civil society asked for it; it should have asked louder. The state was obliged to answer; it chose silence.A society that does not mourn truthfully is condemned to remember falsely and false memory returns weaponised. That is what we are seeing now. The numbers and extrapolations have produced inflated claims which are being challenged. But the arithmetic of atrocity is the gift every perpetrator waits for: disprove the exaggeration and the underlying crime is made to look doubtful by association. Punjab is the land of the Ghadar movement and of a farming people who saw, with uncommon clarity, the social and economic violence concealed within the three farm laws; who anticipated the rupture they would produce and determinedly sat at Delhi’s border for over a year and compelled the state to retreat; the land where, through the darkest nights of the militancy, ordinary people insisted that Hindus and Sikhs would not be turned against each other, that 1947 would not happen again. That refusal is Punjab’s deepest tradition, deeper than the militancy, deeper than the counterinsurgency, deeper than the parties that feed on both. The people who authored it once can author it again: resist polarisation, choose solidarity and wisdom, demand justice and stand the test.Navsharan Singh is an independent researcher and activist.