Honey Trehan’s Satluj, inspired by the life and work of human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, has stirred strong reactions in Punjab. Withdrawn from ZEE5 shortly after its release, it is now being screened in gurdwaras. The film records one of the darkest chapters in the state’s recent history — custodial killings and disappearances of the 1980s and 1990s — and performs a vital act of remembrance.

Yet as cinema and as politics, Satluj is deeply flawed. It is not primarily a film about Punjab’s political history, the Indian state, or class contradictions. It is framed as a moral and spiritual story rooted in Sikhism and Sikh values. In making Sikhism the sole interpretive lens, it erases broader history, erases class analysis, and transforms a complex political crisis into a tale of faith, sacrifice, and individual conscience.

1. Gurbaani as Narrative Anchor and the Promotion of Sikh Values

The film opens and closes with scripture, anchoring the entire narrative in Gurbaani. Khalra’s daughter recites a school prayer: “Waheguru ji, let us do good deeds, and never be afraid.” After the assassination of the fictionalised Chief Minister Anant Singh (representing Beant Singh), she says, “Pain cannot touch those who have God’s Name.”

The shabad “Soora so pehchaniye jo lade deen ke het” plays during the assassination sequence. “Purja Purja Kat Mare” underscores the theme of sacrifice. The film ends with Guru Nanak’s verse on the Gurmukh (Ang 25). This use of Gurbaani gives the film emotional and spiritual weight. It presents faith as the source of resistance and moral clarity.

The blue turban with Nishaan Sahib worn by Bibi Gurpej Kaur Bannowal becomes a powerful symbol of dignity after her son Kirpal Singh’s body is found. Key evidence reaches Khalra in a gurdwara, where Constable Satnam Singh tells him: “What you are doing, only a true Sikh can do.” Later, witness SPO Kuljeet Singh appears in court wearing a turban, declaring that he now fears God, not the police.

By placing truth-telling and moral courage in religious spaces and symbols, the film elevates Sikh values as the principal force against institutional violence. This is not incidental aesthetics — it is ideology. Religion, in the Marxist-Leninist understanding, is not a neutral wellspring of moral courage but a form of social consciousness that reflects and mystifies underlying class relations. By locating resistance in Gurbaani rather than in the concrete conditions of agrarian Punjab, the film converts a class and political crisis into a theological one, and in doing so lends legitimacy to the very religious institutions — the SGPC, the gurdwara hierarchy, the Akali landlord-clergy bloc — that have their own material interests in Punjab’s countryside and their own history of accommodation with state power when it suited them.

2. The State as Individual Villains

Repression is embodied by SSP Surjit Singh Sugga: “We will erase you. Then the world will keep searching…” The response comes from the new police chief DGP S.P. Varma, who replaces DGP Inderpal Singh Bitta with the line, “We must win back their trust.” The CBI and Supreme Court are shown securing convictions.

By individualising the crime and offering no deeper context for the origins and class dynamics of the conflict, the film makes the Punjab Police appear as a force of mad men driven by ruthless pleasure and arbitrary violence. A materialist analysis would reveal instead that such repression was the concentrated expression of the Indian bourgeois-landlord state defending class rule amid the agrarian crisis, Green Revolution contradictions, indebtedness, and rural differentiation. The film offers neither this explanation nor any serious engagement with the class forces that shaped both militancy and state terror. It gives us good cops vs bad cops — liberalism, not historical materialism.

The other half of the ledger is equally erased. State terror cannot be explained materially while militant violence is left as a purely spiritual response to it. The Khalistani movement had its own class base: rich peasants and kulaks squeezed by falling profitability and indebtedness after the Green Revolution, landed Jat Sikh proprietors resisting land-ceiling legislation, and an overseas bourgeois diaspora that financed and directed sections of the movement while using “human rights” language instrumentally. Read this way, the conflict was two reactionary class projects — a landlord-kulak-clerical bloc pursuing a theocratic mini-state, and a bourgeois-landlord Indian state defending existing property relations — contending over Punjab’s peasantry, with ordinary Hindus and Sikhs caught between them.

3. Internationalisation Without Contradiction

Jaswant Singh Khalra travels to Canada at the invitation of the World Sikh Organization and addresses the Canadian Parliament, ending with “Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh.” He tells MLA Mahinderpal Singh he went abroad to seek help. The film presents international forums as natural allies and this step as pure moral courage.

It does not examine how this internationalisation was received at the time, when the Indian state viewed it as diplomatic pressure, nor does it examine the Leninist content of that internationalisation. Imperialist states — Canada, the UK, the US — did not host Khalistani lobbying out of sympathy for oppressed peasants. Finance capital headquartered in these states has long used the language of human rights and minority self-determination selectively, as one instrument among others (alongside trade leverage, arms sales, and diplomatic pressure) for maintaining influence over the Indian state and disciplining it within the world imperialist system. The diaspora bourgeoisie that funded Khalistani organisations was itself integrated into these imperialist economies. None of this excuses the Indian state’s crimes, which were real and must be condemned; but it means the film’s implicit frame — sincere Sikh testimony reaching a sympathetic international conscience — obscures rather than illuminates the actual relations of forces at work.

4. The Fatal Flaw: History, Class, and the National Question Erased

Sikhs are not a nationality, and the film’s implicit endpoint — Khalistan — is not a movement of national self-determination. Satluj never names Khalistan, but its entire structure of feeling, built on Gurbaani and Sikh symbol, points toward it as the answer to state terror. Stalin’s four-part test for nationhood — common language, territory, economic life, and culture, all present together — is not met: Sikhs in Punjab share language, territory and economic life with Punjabi Hindus, and religion alone cannot substitute for the missing criteria. What the film treats as an oppressed nation’s aspiration is in fact a religious community’s demand for a confessional state on the Pakistan model, not national liberation — and a Marxist-Leninist party has no obligation to support the “self-determination” of a sect. The moral force the film borrows from Khalra’s death to sanctify this endpoint is therefore borrowed under false pretences: it does not challenge class rule in India, it proposes to replace it with a smaller, more openly theocratic version run by the same landlord-kulak-clerical layers that already dominate Akali politics.

This does not mean the killings of innocent Sikh youth, men and women were justified or should be minimised — they were crimes of a bourgeois-landlord state defending its rule, and Khalra’s documentation of them stands. But the film’s error is to treat the demand these deaths are made to serve — implicitly, Khalistan — as if it carried the moral weight of national liberation, when it does not.

The genesis of the conflict, including the massacre of both Hindus and Sikhs by militants, has been ignored. The killings of writers, intellectuals, poets and communists — who were murdered by Khalistani militants precisely because they refused the communal frame and argued a class position — are also absent, because acknowledging them would undermine the portrayal of Sikhism as inherently just and opposed to all oppression, and would force the film to admit that the militancy’s targets included the very people capable of offering the film’s own materialist critique.

By not showing the unjust socio-economic order in Punjab and India — land concentration, debt, rich-peasant dominance, and bourgeois-landlord rule — the film leaves Sikhism’s superiority as an unexamined axiom. Whatever egalitarian impulse existed at Sikhism’s founding was religious-utopian, not a challenge to production relations, and it was absorbed well before the modern era into landed and clerical power — through Mughal-era land grants to the Guru lineage, the fusion of temporal and spiritual authority under Miri-Piri, and the eighteenth-century misls that culminated in Ranjit Singh’s own feudal, jagirdari empire. No progressive class content survives from that history to be handed down intact to Khalra two centuries later. Rooting his documented, evidentiary struggle — built on RTI applications, exhumation records, and courtroom testimony, none of which required religious warrant — in this inherited moral authority is therefore not homage but mystification: it launders a crime committed by one class-state into a devotional narrative that quietly rehabilitates the SGPC-Akali establishment, the direct institutional heir of that same landed-clerical history, as Punjab’s rightful moral guardian.

A film, even one based on facts, must provide sufficient context to be coherent and complete. Without it, police violence seems motiveless and absurd, and the audience is left to default to familiar communal tropes. Perhaps to make the film acceptable across communities, director Honey Trehan chose simplicity over complexity. In doing so, he has compromised the work’s artistic and political depth.

The validity of an “ism” — here Sikhism, or its political expression as Khalistani ideology — must be demonstrated by showing the invalidity of the opposing system through its concrete class workings, not asserted through scripture and symbol. This the film does not do, and could not do, because Sikhism as a religious ideology has no class content of its own capable of resolving the agrarian question; it can only mobilise a cross-class religious constituency behind whichever faction of the landed and clerical elite currently speaks in its name.

5. Conclusion: Against Spontaneity — The National Democratic Revolution and the Question of the Party

Khalra’s work exposed real crimes. Custodial murder and fake encounters must be condemned; no communist can defend them. But to stop at “human rights” is to stop at bourgeois legality, and to stop at “Sikh values” is to stop at religious ideology. Neither can answer the decisive question: what is the class character of the Indian state, and what stage of revolution does it require?

The film’s implicit alternative to state terror — a purer, faith-anchored Sikh polity — rests on a mistaken theory of what stage India’s revolution is at. India is not, as Maoist and Naxalite currents have argued since the 1960s, a semi-feudal, semi-colonial country requiring an agrarian people’s war. Since 1947 it has been an independent capitalist state in which the bourgeoisie struck a historic compromise with the landlord class rather than expropriating it; feudal remnants survive in the countryside as a prop to bourgeois-landlord rule, not as the dominant relation of production. The correct tasks, then, are those of a National Democratic Revolution — agrarian reform, breaking bourgeois-landlord political monopoly, curbing imperialist economic domination — carried out under working-class leadership in alliance with the peasantry, not by a cross-class religious bloc and not by a peasant army standing in for the proletariat. A landlord-kulak-clerical Khalistan would not resolve Punjab’s agrarian crisis; it would relocate the same property relations behind a new flag and a scripture-sanctioned police.

None of this repression, on either side, is spontaneous or self-organising into justice. Spontaneous peasant anger, spontaneous religious mobilisation, and spontaneous grief — all present and all genuine in Khalra’s story — require the conscious leadership of a proletarian party to be directed toward the actual overthrow of bourgeois-landlord rule, rather than being absorbed, as they were in Punjab, into a communal war that left the underlying class structure untouched. This is the question the film cannot ask, because it has already answered it wrongly: it proposes faith and individual conscience, embodied in Khalra himself, as sufficient. They are necessary but not sufficient. Without organisation, without a party, without a programme rooted in the concrete class analysis of Indian society, moral courage of the kind Khalra showed produces martyrs and memory, but not a resolution of the crisis that produced him.

Satluj deserves credit for restoring Jaswant Singh Khalra and the victims to public memory. That failure of the state must never be forgotten. As history and as politics, however, the film is limited. By foregrounding faith and Sikh values over structure, by individualising violence, by treating a communal-theocratic project as if it carried the legitimacy of national self-determination, and by omitting the wider cycle of killings and the material roots of the 1980s-90s crisis, it leaves the decisive questions unanswered.

Punjab needs both remembrance and rigorous understanding. Satluj delivers the first. The second — a class-based, Marxist-Leninist analysis grounded in the correct characterisation of the Indian state and the correct rejection of communal “self-determination,” leading toward the National Democratic Revolution and beyond it to socialism — remains the task of the communist movement.