India blocks Punjab human rights film; Sikh temples are screening it anyway

NEW DELHI, India (MNTV) — On the evening of July 8, in the village of Tatley in Punjab’s Gurdaspur district, a projector was carried into a gurdwara compound.

A generator was found. Volunteers went door to door.

By nightfall, villagers were sitting on the ground in front of a bedsheet screen, watching a film their government had decided they were not permitted to see.

The film is Satluj, and three days earlier it had vanished from the Indian catalogue of the streaming platform ZEE5, less than 48 hours after its July 3 premiere.

What has happened since is not quiet acquiescence. It is a distributed, congregation-by-congregation refusal.

Gurdwara committees in Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Delhi and Jammu are now hosting community screenings, coordinated with the backing of bodies affiliated to the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), the elected apex body governing Sikh shrines.

Four gurdwaras in Jammu are screening the film between July 10 and July 13. A public showing was announced for July 11 at the Baba Fateh Singh Auditorium inside the Chandi Ki Taksal Gurdwara in Jaipur.

Harmeet Singh Kalka, president of the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee, has backed the campaign while demanding the film’s restoration online.

“If people cannot watch it on OTT, gurdwaras are opening their doors,” an SGPC source told Mid-Day.

The screenings run on copies that circulated online in the hours before the takedown — a detail the government’s own action guaranteed.

The man Indian state would prefer you forget

Satluj, directed by Honey Trehan and starring Diljit Dosanjh, tells the story of Jaswant Singh Khalra: not a militant, not a politician, but a bank employee who became the human rights secretary of the Shiromani Akali Dal and then something rarer — a citizen who read the paperwork.

In the early 1990s, as young Sikh men disappeared from Punjab’s villages during the state’s counter-insurgency campaign, Khalra went to municipal cremation grounds and read the registers.

He found entries logged as “unidentified” and “unclaimed”: bodies cremated without inquest, without notification to families, without the legal formalities the Indian state owes even to its enemies. The pattern he described was abduction, staged encounter, secret cremation, erasure.

He took his findings abroad. He told international forums what the registers said.

In September 1995, shortly after returning from a foreign trip, Khalra was abducted from outside his home in Amritsar by men his family identified as police. He was tortured and killed in custody. His body was never recovered.

The Supreme Court treated his family’s communications as a habeas corpus petition and directed the Central Bureau of Investigation to investigate. In 2005, four Punjab Police personnel were convicted of his abduction and murder and sentenced to seven years.

In 2007, the Punjab and Haryana High Court enhanced the sentences to life imprisonment. Six officials were ultimately convicted in the case.

This is the crucial fact that the takedown order cannot survive contact with: Satluj is not a film about an allegation. It is a film about a crime that Indian courts have already adjudicated, and Indian policemen have already gone to prison for.

The scale of what Khalra documented remains contested — and the contest itself is instructive. Proceedings before the Supreme Court and the National Human Rights Commission produced a figure of roughly 2,096 unidentified cremations.

Khalra’s own investigation, extrapolated across districts, pointed to a far larger universe of disappearances. Former officials now defending the ban insist the larger number is inflated. That argument may be worth having in public. It is precisely the argument the state has made impossible to have.

Four years in certifier’s waiting room

Satluj was finished nearly four years ago. It has been in some form of administrative custody ever since.

It went to the Central Board of Film Certification in 2022 as Ghallughara — a Punjabi word for massacre, for catastrophe, freighted with Sikh historical memory.

The Board reportedly cleared it with 21 cuts on condition the title be abandoned. It became Punjab ’95, after the year Khalra was killed.

The filmmakers challenged the cuts before the Bombay High Court. The matter went to a CBFC revising committee, which came back not with fewer demands but with 127 — including, according to multiple Indian outlets, a demand that the protagonist be renamed. The Board wanted a film about Jaswant Singh Khalra in which the man was not called Jaswant Singh Khalra.

The filmmakers refused. The film sat.

In 2023, Punjab ’95 was pulled from the line-up of the Toronto International Film Festival days before its scheduled world premiere, with no public explanation from the organizers.

When the film finally surfaced on ZEE5 on July 3, 2026, it carried a third title — Satluj, the name of a river — and almost no publicity.

Dosanjh later explained why: had the release been announced, he said, the film would never have run at all.

Trehan has said plainly that the new title was not a creative decision. Paramjit Kaur Khalra, the activist’s widow, viewed the released version and confirmed it was unchanged in substance.

The machinery

Within 48 hours, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting directed ZEE5 to remove the film in India, invoking Section 69A of the Information Technology Act — the blocking provision, the same instrument used against websites and apps deemed threats to sovereignty and public order. Officials briefed reporters that the concern was “security,” and that the version streamed had not incorporated the changes the CBFC had demanded for a theatrical release.

The following day, the ministry escalated, referring the film to an Inter-Departmental Committee constituted under Rule 14 of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 — the mechanism by which the executive reviews online content and recommends action, without a court.

Note the structure of the argument. The CBFC demanded 127 cuts. The filmmakers, exercising a right the Constitution nominally protects, declined and did not release theatrically.

They then used a channel that, by the government’s own regulatory design, does not require CBFC certification. The government’s response is that the film should have accepted the cuts anyway.

This is not a certification dispute. It is the position that content the Board dislikes may not exist in any medium.

ZEE5, for its part, has not endorsed the reasoning. The platform said it stands by the film and by the vision behind it, and would pursue “every appropriate avenue through due process” to bring it back.

Its Instagram caption was blunter: the film may have paused; the conversation has not. Satluj remains available worldwide on ZEE5 Global — meaning the Indian citizen is now the only viewer on earth the Indian state has judged unfit to watch it.

Selective outrage, measured in titles

The takedown has invited an obvious comparison, and Punjab’s political class has not been shy about making it. The Kashmir Files, The Kerala Story, The Bengal Files — films that dramatize atrocity against Hindus, that have drawn accusations of distortion and communal incitement, that have been championed from public platforms by ruling-party figures — remain streaming, uncut, unremarked.

The distinction offered by defenders of the ban is that those films depict non-state actors, while Satluj depicts the Indian state and its security forces as perpetrators. This is presented as a principled line.

It is more honestly described as the thing it is: a rule that art may indict anyone except the people who write the rules.

Shiromani Akali Dal president Sukhbir Singh Badal called the removal “an assault on our collective memory, truth, and freedom of expression,” and said his party would organize village screenings so younger Punjabis would not forget.

Congress leader Sukhpal Singh Khaira noted that suppressing the film sits awkwardly beside the Supreme Court’s own affirmation of the convictions of the officers who abducted Khalra.

AAP MP Malvinder Singh Kang argued that when a nation begins to fear its own history, censorship becomes its most dangerous weapon. Congress MP Dharamvira Gandhi called it an attack on freedom of expression.

The politics here are not clean, and should not be laundered. The killings depicted occurred under Congress governments in Punjab and at the Centre; Congress leaders condemning the ban are condemning the concealment of their own party’s record. The film shows the assassination of Beant Singh, the Congress chief minister whose grandson is now a BJP union minister.

The Akali Dal, out of power and hunting for its Panthic base before the 2027 assembly election, has every incentive to make martyrs. AAP, governing Punjab, is happy to see both rivals bleed.

That every party has a motive does not make the underlying fact less true. A film about a proven custodial murder was removed from the Indian internet by executive order, and no detailed public justification has been offered.

Barbra Streisand, in Punjabi

The predictable has occurred. The film is being downloaded, shared, projected. Dosanjh, posting a still to Instagram, drew the line himself: what happened to Satluj, he wrote, is what happened to Shaheed Jaswant Singh Khalra.

He has since said the film’s online status no longer matters — once people have seen it, it cannot be taken back.

Balwinder Singh, a Sikh religious leader, put it to the Associated Press more simply: the truth is emerging, and people should be allowed to see it.

Inderjeet Singh Bains, who coordinates screenings in Gurdaspur, describes the purpose as creating spaces where people can watch together and reflect on a period that still shapes the state.

There is an irony sharp enough to draw blood. Khalra’s method was to make suppressed records public. The state disappeared him for it. Thirty-one years later, a film about that disappearance has been disappeared, and Punjabis are once again passing the evidence hand to hand.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has constituted a three-member committee to review the removal, according to Punjab BJP chief Kewal Dhillon, who says he petitioned for it. The party denies acting for political reasons.

Government sources maintain the action was lawful and security-driven.

Meanwhile the projectors are being carried into the courtyards.

Khalra’s insight was that the state’s crimes leave paperwork, and that paperwork can be read aloud.

His killers proved him right by killing him.

Thirty-one years later, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has proved him right again — and, once more, the reading has not stopped.