Some silences are louder the second time. On July 4, Honey Trehan’s Satluj, a film about Jaswant Singh Khalra, the human rights worker who exposed the secret cremation of Punjab’s disappeared, finally reached Indian audiences after nearly half a decade of cuts and renamings. Two days later, it was taken down. A film about the silencing of a man who counted the dead had itself been silenced, thirty years after his murder.Most of the commentary called it a censorship story. For those of us who practise at the Punjab and Haryana High Court, it should be an even more uncomfortable saga, because Satluj is not only about the Punjab Police. It is about the constitutional court that sat in Chandigarh through the worst of the militancy, holding the one writ that exists for precisely such moments – habeas corpus, the command to produce a missing person – and seldom used it.Investigating on the Supreme Court’s orders, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) confirmed that 2,097 bodies had been illegally cremated in Amritsar district alone, most never identified. Khalra himself, it found, was killed in custody and his body thrown into a canal. In Paramjit Kaur v. State of Punjab (1995), the Supreme Court called this “a flagrant violation of human rights on a mass scale.” Against 17,529 TADA cases registered in Punjab between 1985 and 1995, the state secured a single conviction.Any honest reckoning with the courts, though, has to begin with parliament. In March 1988, the Fifty-ninth Amendment created Article 359A for Punjab alone, so that on a proclamation of Emergency the right to enforce Article 21, life and liberty, could be suspended in the state. For the first time since the post-Emergency settlement had placed that right beyond suspension for the whole country, habeas corpus could be switched off in one state by executive fiat.No proclamation was ever issued and the provision lapsed in 1990, but for 21 months, the constitution itself said that the lives of Punjabis were negotiable. The police understood the message. The question is whether the judges did too.The blackoutThe most careful answer we have is Jaskaran Kaur’s A Judicial Blackout: Judicial Impunity for Disappearances in Punjab, India, published in the Harvard Human Rights Journal in 2002. Kaur drew ninety habeas files for the disappeared from the high court’s own record room and interviewed the families and lawyers behind them. The interviews cited in this article are hers, and their arithmetic is damning: of the ninety petitions, 42 were dismissed, 14 withdrawn under pressure, 21 simply left pending for years. The whole process produced criminal charges five times.Nine petitions were thrown out for “delay,” as though a limitation period could run against a demand to produce a living person. Others were pushed back to the very police the families had fled. And these are only the refusals that survive on paper. An in limine dismissal, a one-line unreasoned “no” is never reported, which is why the record had to be rebuilt from docket numbers rather than judgments.The petitions that were filed understated the silence. Of the families Kaur interviewed who never went to court at all, some feared for surviving relatives, some could not produce witnesses the police had frightened off and some had simply concluded it was futile to try. A few did not know the high court existed! Even the lawyers had given up on the forum.The advocate R.S. Bains told Kaur that human rights lawyers had begun advising people not to file habeas petitions because the writ had become “a remedy that gave more pain to people than relief” (p. 283).The pattern holds for the docket as a whole. Queried case by case for the Criminal Writ Petition register, the category under which these habeas cases were filed, the high court’s case-status portal returns this for 1990 to 1996:YearRecordsDismissedDisposedAllowedAllowed %1990558234293315.6%1991920445463121.3%1992779414343222.8%1993672426233131.9%1994933567337293.1%19951,386759588392.8%19961,752832852683.9%Total7,0003,6773,1092143.1%(Analysis based on records available on the Punjab and Haryana High Court portal.)Across those seven years from 1990 to 1996, the court allowed just 214 of the 7,000 criminal writ petitions the portal holds, a shade over 3% and never more than six in any year. The oldest records are only partly digitised and the register carries non-habeas matters too. Hence, the totals above are indicative.When the Supreme Court had to step in, it did so with rare anger. After the Ropar advocate Kulwant Singh vanished with his wife and two-year-old son in 1993 and a full bench of the high court still refused an inquiry, in Punjab and Haryana High Court Bar Association v. State of Punjab, (1994) the Supreme Court held the high court “wholly unjustified in shutting its eyes and ears” and found it had “failed to perform the duty entrusted to it under the constitution”.The CBI later confirmed the police had killed the family.Filed in Delhi, not in ChandigarhThe clearest indication of what the high court had become is where the strongest cases went: past Chandigarh, to Delhi. Families who could afford it moved the Supreme Court directly. In Inder Singh v. State of Punjab (1994), where a police party had abducted seven members of one family aged 14 to about 85, a bench under then Chief Justice of India M.N. Venkatachaliah called it “a very disturbing matter,” sent the CBI director to investigate in person and, once the abductions were proven, said the force “would appear to have forgotten that it was a police force”.Every instrument the top court deployed, from distrust of the police affidavit and search for an independent probe to damages in public law had been available all along to the high court under Article 226. Khalra’s own petition had gone to the high court first, which dismissed it as vague. The Supreme Court took nine weeks to order the CBI to step in.In their own wordsWhy the high court held back is best answered by the men who staffed it, again preserved in Kaur’s interviews. The state’s advocate general of the day, who held the office for eleven years, waved away the reporting of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch as “all nonsense” and described the dead as innocents “killed in the crossfire” (p. 284).A former advocate general translated the police vocabulary without embarrassment: when an affidavit said a detainee had “escaped”, he explained that it meant he had “escaped from this world” (p. 286). The bench spoke in the same register. Asked about the judiciary’s failure to protect Article 21 rights, the second senior-most judge of the court, later elevated to the Supreme Court, replied, “What about the life and liberty of those killed by the militants and terrorists?” (p. 284). Another judge described the method more plainly still, as sweeping the matter under the carpet (p. 287).None of this is to pretend the era was ordinary. The danger was real and it reached the courtroom itself: four of the advocates who filed these petitions were abducted or killed and the Supreme Court had to order protection for 17 more. Judges, too, worked under threat. But that is exactly why the record matters. A court may be forgiven its fear; what it must then explain is why the same Article 21 it found unenforceable while the danger lasted became fully enforceable the moment it passed.The turn and its limitFrom about 1994, as the insurgency was declared defeated and it grew safe to look, the reported orders changed. Judges began referring disappearances to sessions inquiries and to the CBI and awarding damages. In Hardeep Kaur v. State of Punjab (1995), Justice H.S. Bedi, finding that police had murdered a man in custody, held that even “a shady character” had “a right to be treated as innocent” and that the fiction of the police as investigator, prosecutor and judge “must be dispelled and sooner the better.”In Karnail Singh v. State of Punjab (1998), Justice K.K. Srivastava went further and set aside a sessions report that had cleared the police by demanding proof “as is required at the criminal trial”, a standard, he held, that “is not to be adopted” where “the life and liberty of a citizen” is at stake. That the court could do all this only once the danger had passed is the strongest possible proof that the earlier silence had been a choice.The turn was late and it was also partial. As late as 1998, in Nishan Singh v. State of Punjab, a judge could brush aside a proven three-day illegal detention as “not so serious a matter as to call for the invoking of the writ jurisdiction”. And its signature remedy, as Amnesty found when it examined the matter in 2003, was to compensate “the victims of police torture while failing to prosecute the officers responsible” – a settlement that turned a crime into a tariff paid by the taxpayer while the officer was quietly transferred and remained in service.Term after term, the state was defended by its law officers, a number of whom were later raised to the very court before which they had appeared, some rising to chief justiceships and to the Supreme Court itself. These were a matter of public record and no reflection on their judgments. The advocates who argued for the families were not, on the whole, rewarded; several were not even safe, and none, whatever their standing, became a high court judge or an advocate general.Set beside Amnesty’s finding that deference to the police was understood to ease the path to the bench, the asymmetry is hard to unsee.The last act fits the restWhen a people’s commission of retired judges began, in 1998, to record the testimony the courts had refused to hear, the high court restrained it: an institution that would not hear the disappeared through its own process now stopped others from hearing them at all.Khalra’s own case shows both what engagement could achieve and how late it came. Six officials were convicted of his murder in 2005 and the Supreme Court affirmed in Prithipal Singh v. State of Punjab (2012) that the same institution that had once called his petition vague finally sentencing his killers, but only after twelve years, a monitored investigation and his death later, to reach what a working habeas court might have begun in January 1995.That is the whole story in miniature: not a simple villain but a court took the executive’s fear as its own standard of proof, found its courage a decade too late and, by then, could offer the families money for the dead rather than return the living to them.Satluj ends where the archive begins. Its removal in 2026 shows that the discomfort Khalra caused is still alive, but the real record is not on any streaming service. It sits in the high court’s own record room in Chandigarh, and it carries a warning worth keeping: habeas corpus is not suspended by amendment alone. It can be suspended by attitude and also restored by it. In Punjab, both happened, but the restoration came too late for most.The writer practises at the Punjab and Haryana High Court.