Honey Trehan’s Satluj (formerly Punjab ’95), released uncut on ZEE5 in early July 2026 before its swift removal in India, presents itself as a courageous exposé of state violence through the story of Jaswant Singh Khalra. Starring Diljit Dosanjh, the film has drawn praise for its intense performances and unflinching depiction of police excesses during Punjab’s turbulent years.

Yet beneath its artistic veneer lies a deeply flawed, one-sided portrayal that romanticises a partisan figure while systematically airbrushing the brutal reality of Khalistani terrorism that ravaged the state through the 1980s and 1990s.

Far from bold truth-telling, Satluj operates as subtle propaganda. It risks reviving separatist narratives by stripping away the concrete historical context of an existential threat to India’s unity and the practical necessities of confronting embedded militancy and civilian slaughter.

Historical drama carries a heavy responsibility: it must reflect objective reality, not curate convenient memory.

The True Horror of Khalistani Terrorism

Punjab’s insurgency was never a noble freedom struggle but a vicious terrorist campaign by Sikh extremist groups pursuing Khalistan, frequently backed by external forces including Pakistan and sympathetic diaspora networks.

Militants unleashed targeted killings, massacres, and bombings aimed at Hindus to engineer demographic change, moderate Sikhs who rejected separatism, politicians, intellectuals, and migrant laborers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Bus ambushes, train explosions, and village massacres became commonplace.

Reliable estimates document over 11,000 civilian deaths by militants, with Sikhs themselves forming a significant proportion—killed for refusing extortion, defying diktats, or simply remaining loyal to the Indian state. Security forces lost more than 1,700 personnel. When including militants, total fatalities surpassed 20,000.

These were not abstract numbers. Families were torn apart; entire communities lived in perpetual fear. The movement exploited genuine post-1984 grievances following Operation Blue Star and the anti-Sikh riots, but rapidly degenerated into criminality, extortion rackets, and communal cleansing.

Terrorists established parallel governance in rural areas, enforcing compliance through kinship ties, ideology, or outright coercion. Neutrality became suicidal. Judges delivered verdicts with terrorists’ guns pointed at them; bureaucrats and politicians operated under constant threat. At its peak, Khalistani groups virtually ran a shadow state, undermining the authority of the elected government and the rule of law.

In such material conditions, a clinical, peacetime application of legal norms was objectively impossible. Dialectically, the state confronted not isolated crimes but an organised armed challenge to national sovereignty. Counter-insurgency required dismantling the terrorist infrastructure, disrupting recruitment, and restoring the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence.

KPS Gill’s leadership exemplified the necessary firmness: focused intelligence, local policing, and decisive operations that broke the militants’ momentum. By the mid-1990s, the insurgency was crushed, peace restored, and Punjab enabled to rebuild.

Excesses occurred amid the fog of irregular warfare—fake encounters, detentions, and disappearances—but these must be weighed against the primary reality of a potent terrorist threat that had already claimed thousands of innocent lives. Ignoring this context inverts victim and aggressor.

Khalra: Ideological Partisan, Not Neutral Martyr

Jaswant Singh Khalra, a former bank employee in Amritsar, meticulously documented police cremations using municipal records. His efforts highlighted serious irregularities and contributed to CBI investigations confirming thousands of unclaimed cremations, notably in districts like Tarn Taran. For pursuing these truths, he was abducted and murdered by Punjab Police in September 1995—a crime for which some officers were later held accountable.

No objective analysis denies the tragedy of his death or the need for accountability where abuses occurred.

However, Satluj’s portrayal of Khalra as an apolitical, secular martyr distorts his actual record.

In the early 1990s, Khalra founded and edited the monthly magazine Khalistan Liberation. Through this platform, he articulated positions aligned with the separatist project, critiquing the Indian state’s structures in terms that echoed Khalistani ideology and expressing admiration for militant icons such as Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.

His writings went beyond documenting abuses to framing the conflict in ways that downplayed militant responsibility and intensified focus on state response. Khalistan supporters have consistently elevated him as a symbol to legitimise their cause and whitewash the preceding years of terror.

Khalra’s international engagements further reveal his partisan stance. In 1995, he travelled to Canada at the invitation of the World Sikh Organization (WSO), addressing parliamentarians and diaspora audiences—groups often sympathetic to Khalistan. Such outreach internationalised the issue at the precise moment when the Indian state was nearing victory against the insurgency, generating diplomatic pressure and moral cover for separatists.

While direct foreign intelligence links lack conclusive public proof, these networks undeniably amplified narratives that complicated counter-terror operations.

Khalra’s selectivity is particularly revealing. He compiled exhaustive data on police cremations yet showed limited equivalent public zeal in cataloguing the thousands slaughtered by militants: Hindus massacred in buses and trains, moderate Sikhs assassinated for “anti-panthic” views, or migrant workers targeted as outsiders.

Khalra never raised the human rights violations against murdered communists, intellectuals, writers, poets, and countless other innocent people. This was not neutral human rights monitoring but ideological advocacy that, in the concrete conditions of civil war, objectively hindered the state’s ability to neutralise the threat and protect the broader population.

In a materialist analysis, such one-sidedness served to sustain the separatist momentum rather than contribute to genuine resolution. His underlying motive was to undermine morally and otherwise the fight of the police against terrorists.

Satluj’s Distortions and Omissions

The film centres on Khalra’s personal transformation, his investigations, family suffering, and ultimate fate. It powerfully depicts rogue police elements conducting fake encounters for promotions and systematically disposing of bodies.

Arjun Rampal’s character as an upright officer offers token balance, yet the overarching narrative tilts decisively toward portraying the state as the principal villain. Khalistani terrorism appears largely as vague background noise—mentioned but rarely confronted with the graphic moral weight it demands.

Viewers note the absence of visceral depictions of militant atrocities: the bus massacres, the extortion that bled villages dry, the targeting of civilians, or the atmosphere of pervasive fear that justified extraordinary state measures.

The assassination of a chief minister surfaces, but the broader campaign of communal terror and social disruption remains sidelined.

By humanising Khalra’s selective crusade while softening the barbarity of the militants, Satluj constructs a false moral equivalence and hierarchy. Strong performances and emotional storytelling cannot compensate for this foundational distortion.

The film’s production battle with censors and subsequent removal only underscore legitimate concerns about its potential misuse by anti-national elements.

Socialist Realism and the Duty of Art

True artistic creation, judged by the standards of socialist realism, must provide a truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development.

It rejects bourgeois subjectivism, romantic individualism, and selective distortion in favour of serving the people by illuminating objective social contradictions and the path toward progress.

Art is not neutral entertainment or personal expression unbound by facts; it is a weapon in the struggle for truth. Historical episodes, especially those involving existential threats to the masses and the state, cannot be treated as malleable clay for creative licence.

Facts are stubborn—manipulating them to fit a preferred narrative betrays the essence of realistic art.

Satluj fails these criteria. It prioritises emotional identification with a selective activist over the dialectical totality of the period: the real suffering inflicted by terrorism, the practical imperatives faced by the state, and the ultimate victory that secured peace for millions.

By pushing Khalistani terror into the background and elevating Khalra as an unblemished hero, the film distorts the epoch rather than reflecting it concretely.

Such “art” risks becoming a tool for reactionary revivalism instead of contributing to the people’s understanding of their own history.

Progressive cinema must confront the full complexity—state errors alongside the primary danger of separatism—not curate memory that serves old divisive agendas.

Lessons from a Dirty War and the Path Forward

The fight against Khalistani terrorism—and the harsh realities it imposed, including the circumstances surrounding Khalra’s killing—cannot be evaluated through a purely peacetime moral lens.

The Khalistan movement had become a Frankenstein monster: a vicious, armed separatist campaign that unleashed mass slaughter, extortion, and parallel terror governance. It had to be eradicated at all costs to preserve India’s unity and the lives of its citizens.

The Sikh clergy, particularly through the Akal Takht, stood compromised and abdicated its moral responsibility. It failed to unequivocally indict Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his armed followers despite their desecration of sacred spaces and deviation into terrorism.

With religious institutions faltering and the political class having initially propped up these forces for electoral gains (notably Congress in the early phase), the onus fell squarely and solely on the police and security forces. In such existential conditions, expecting clinical, moral textbook policing was unrealistic and ahistorical.

No honest assessment denies that police excesses, impunity, and human rights violations occurred during Punjab’s counter-insurgency. Torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial actions alienated sections of the population and demand accountability where evidence exists. Families of victims deserve transparency and justice.

Yet context is decisive. The insurgency represented a concrete, armed assault on India’s territorial integrity, fuelled externally and sustained through terror. In such conditions, the state’s decisive response—however imperfect—was historically necessary to defend the unity that underpins any possibility of broader social progress.

Films like Satluj threaten to undermine that hard-won peace by promoting selective memory. Punjab prospers today precisely because Khalistani terrorism was defeated, not accommodated. Revisiting this painful era requires unflinching honesty about both state failures and the far greater evil of organised separatist violence.

Khalra’s legacy, while containing elements of courage in documentation, cannot be divorced from his ideological commitments that aligned with forces seeking India’s fragmentation.

Satluj and the mythologised version of Khalra ultimately fail the test of truth. They claim to light a lamp against darkness while ignoring the fire deliberately set by extremists.

Genuine historical reckoning—and genuine art—must embrace the full, blood-soaked complexity rather than a curated narrative that whitewashes terror and distorts the people’s victory over it. Only such objective truth can prevent the repetition of past tragedies and strengthen the unity essential for India’s future.