‘Still searching for truth’: Daughter of Sikh activist killed 30 years ago

On the morning of September 6, 1995, human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra was washing his car outside his home in Amritsar city, India’s Punjab state.

His wife, Paramjit Kaur Khalra, a librarian, was getting ready to leave for work; their son, Janmeet, and daughter, Navkiran, were getting ready for school.

Nothing about the morning suggested that, within hours, their lives would be changed forever.

Minutes after Paramjit and the children left home, Khalra was picked up by the police, secretly tortured for days in custody, and later murdered. His body was never found.

Khalra was killed because of his investigation into thousands of disappearances and extrajudicial killings by the Indian security forces during a separatist movement launched by Punjab’s Sikh community in the 1980s to establish a homeland, called Khalistan .

In June 1984, the government sent troops inside Amritsar’s Golden Temple, Sikhism’s holiest site, where hundreds of rebels were believed to be hiding. Hundreds of people, including Sikh religious leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, were killed in Operation Blue Star.

The military operation led to the assassination of the then-Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards in October that year. Gandhi’s assassination triggered anti-Sikh riots across the country, killing thousands.

In Punjab, a brutal crackdown on the Khalistan movement started, with security forces given special powers to torture, forcibly disappear and even kill thousands of rebels and suspects.