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Jaswant Singh Khalra, Prominent Human Rights Activist
Shaheed Jaswant Singh Khalra (1952-1995) was a human rights defender who was born in Khalra village of Amritsar district. He was a bank employee in Amritsar during the 1980’s.
After the Sikh Genocide (Operation Blue Star), the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and the November 1984 Anti-Sikh Pogroms in which thousands of innocent Sikhs died at the hands of crazed (and well organized) Hindu mobs, the Punjab police were empowered to detain Sikhs for any reason, ostensibly as suspected terrorists.
Seeing that many of his friends and colleagues had gone missing, he researched information which eventually led him to find files from the municipal corporation of Amritsar which had information containing the names, ages, and addresses of thousands of Sikhs who had been killed and illegally cremated by the Punjab Police.
In 1995, Jaswant Singh was last seen washing his car in front of his house, when he too disappeared. Witnesses gave statements implicating the police and implicated, ‘the butcher of Punjab’ – KP Gill, but the Punjab Police denied that they arrested him, and claimed they knew nothing about his whereabouts.
In 1996, the Central Bureau of Investigation found evidence that he was held at a police station in Tarn Taran and recommended the prosecution of nine Punjab police officials for his murder and kidnapping.
On October 16, 2007 a division bench of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, chaired by Justices Mehtab Singh Gill and A N Jindal, extended the sentence to life imprisonment for four of the accused: Satnam Singh, Surinder Pal Singh, Jasbir Singh (all former Sub Inspectors) and Prithipal Singh (former Head Constable).
He is now referred to as Shaheed Jaswant Singh Khalra having become a Martyr for the Sikh religion. His widow Bibi Paramjit Kaur Khalra is currently carrying on her husband’s fight for justice and now her name has been added to the thousands of Sikhs who do not have any idea of what happened to their loved ones.
Reference: SikhiWiki.com
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