Thirty years. A lifetime. And still, no real justice. Navkiran Khalra was just a little girl when her father, Jaswant Singh Khalra, was taken. Not by a rival, not by a criminal — but by the state he'd sworn to serve. A police officer who dared to dig into the darkest corners of Punjab's counter-insurgency, and paid for it with his life.
Now, as the world remembers the Sikh activist through a new film, his daughter is doing something far harder than remembering. She's still asking the questions that powerful men in India have spent three decades dodging.
A cop's conscience
Khalra wasn't a revolutionary in the classic sense. He was a deputy superintendent of police in Punjab, a man who wore the uniform and believed in the system. But in the early 1990s, during the brutal crackdown on Sikh militancy, he stumbled onto something that made his skin crawl. Police weren't just killing militants in encounters — they were killing innocent people and staging the scenes. Fake encounters, they called them. Khalra called them murder.
He documented it all. Names, dates, places. Bodies that were burned, buried, or just vanished. He sent his findings to the highest authorities in the land. He filed petitions. He wrote letters. He did everything a good cop should do.
And what did he get for his trouble? A transfer. Then another. Then threats. Then, on September 6, 1996, he left his house in Amritsar and never came back.
His body has never been found. Not a trace. It's a detail that haunts Navkiran even now: "You can't even visit a grave. There's no place to mourn, just a void."
The daughter's crusade
Navkiran was maybe nine or ten when her father disappeared. She remembers the day the police came to the house — not to help, but to question. She remembers the years of silence, the whispers that he'd run off with another woman, the insinuations that he was a traitor. Her family was torn apart, not just by grief, but by a campaign of dirty gossip designed to discredit the man and his files.
She didn't break. She studied law. She became a lawyer. And for the last three decades, she's been using the same tools her father used — petitions, evidence, persistence — to force official accountability. It's a lonely fight. Most people in Punjab have either forgotten Khalra or prefer to. The state has moved on. The police have new scandals. But Navkiran hasn't moved on.
"Thirty years is a long time," she told me, her voice tight. "And still there's no answer. The government has never admitted who killed him. The CBI investigated, but the report is a joke. They've never even declared it a murder. It's just... an unsolved disappearance."
"I'm not looking for revenge. I'm looking for the truth — the real truth, not the official version."
The film that opened old wounds
The new movie, Khalra, has brought her father's story back into the public eye. Navkiran is grateful for the attention, but she's also wary. "It's a film," she says, "not a documentary. It took artistic liberties. Some things in it aren't accurate. But it's made people ask questions again, and that's valuable."
The film's ending is particularly painful for her. In it, a character reads a letter that Khalra wrote to his family, a letter that, according to Navkiran, was never written. "They invented a farewell letter," she says. "It's romantic and tragic, but it's fake. It gives people the comfort of a proper ending. But my father's story doesn't have an ending. It's an open wound."
She's right. The film, for all its good intentions, risks sanitizing a murder that the Indian state has never owned up to. The truth is messier. The truth is that a man was killed for trying to hold power accountable. And the power structure that killed him hasn't changed its ways — it's just gotten better at hiding them.
The files that won't die
What makes Khalra's case so important isn't just the injustice done to him. It's what his files reveal about a dark chapter in India's history. The early 1990s in Punjab were a time of state-sponsored terror. Tens of thousands of Sikh men were killed or disappeared, many of them innocent. Khalra's records are some of the only evidence we have of what happened.
After his disappearance, his family handed over his files to various human rights organizations. The National Human Rights Commission acknowledged receiving them but did little beyond that. The Central Bureau of Investigation eventually filed a closure report, claiming there was no evidence of foul play — despite the fact that Khalra had received death threats and had been openly critical of senior police officials.
In 2015, the Punjab government announced a fresh investigation. It went nowhere. In 2021, the Supreme Court ordered a CBI probe into the fake encounters he documented. That, too, has stalled. Every time the case seems to gain momentum, it hits a bureaucratic wall. Coincidence? Not in India, where the guilty often sit in the very offices tasked with investigating themselves.
"My father believed in the system," Navkiran says. "He thought the law could fix the law. I'm not sure I share that faith anymore."
A legacy beyond the grave
Despite the lack of justice, Khalra's legacy is more alive than ever. Young Sikhs — many of them born after 1996 — are discovering his story through the film. Human rights activists cite his work as a model of courage. And Navkiran herself has become a symbol of persistence, a woman who refused to let her father's death be buried under official lies.
"Sometimes I think the best way to honor him is to keep fighting," she says. "Not just for him, but for all the other families who never got answers. There are so many of us. We're still out there, searching."
It's a bitter irony that the man who gave so much to the nation was abandoned by it. But that's often the way with truth-tellers. They're praised in retrospect, ignored in the moment, and punished for their courage while the state that punished them continues to write the history books.
Navkiran knows this. She's not naive. After thirty years, she's seen too much to believe in easy resolutions. But she's also not willing to give up. She plans to file yet another petition, this time demanding that the government declare her father dead and confirm that he was murdered. It's a small victory, but it would be an official acknowledgment. It would be a crack in the wall of silence.
"I know it's unlikely," she admits. "But I have to try. For my father. For myself. For my children. They need to know that their grandfather wasn't just a footnote in history. He was a man who stood up for what was right."
She pauses, and I can hear the weight of three decades in her voice. "I'm still searching for truth," she says. "That's all I've ever done. And I'll keep doing it until I'm gone."
That's the thing about truth. It's patient. It outlasts governments, cover-ups, and even the people who chase it. Navkiran has already outlasted three decades of silence. She's not going to stop now.
