Latest On Khalra & Satluj: 5 Panthic Groups to Centre — Release Punjab 95 Uncut, Find The Missing DSP
Panthic Groups to Centre: Five Panthic organisations will submit memorandums to the Union Home Minister on July 14 demanding Punjab 95’s uncut release, action against missing DSP Jaspal Singh, and a Truth Commission, even as rival victims’ groups seek one with a different scope.
Arvind Chhabra
Chandigarh, July 13
Five Panthic organisations will jointly submit memorandums to the Union Home Minister on Tuesday, July 14, routed through Deputy Commissioners’ offices across Punjab, reviving three demands connected to the Jaswant Singh Khalra case that has dominated Punjab’s news cycle for two weeks.
The announcement came in a written statement from Giani Harpreet Singh, president of Shiromani Akali Dal (Punarsurjit), — the breakaway Akali faction formed last year and led by the former acting Jathedar of the Akal Takht, distinct from the SAD led by Sukhbir Singh Badal and from the current Akal Takht leadership under Jathedar Giani Raghbir Singh.
Joining him are the United Akali Dal, International Panthic Dal, Begampura Khalsa Raj Party, and Panthic Azad Group. Tejinder Singh Pannu, the party’s media in-charge, shared the statement with reporters.
Panthic Groups to Centre:
Demand 1: A film fighting censorship for 3 years
Panthic Groups to Centre: The memorandum’s first demand: release of Punjab 95 in cinemas uncut, under its original title. It is really a demand to undo what happened just ten days ago. Punjab 95 and Satluj are the same film: Honey Trehan’s biopic of Khalra starring Diljit Dosanjh, which spent three years and reportedly faced repeated CBFC demands for increasingly damaging cuts before the makers were forced to drop the title Punjab 95 entirely and release it under a new one, Satluj, named for the river.
It finally released, uncut, on ZEE5 on July 3, 2026, only for the platform to pull it after two days. Reports citing the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting say the takedown notice invoked Section 69A of the IT Act, a post-release removal mechanism that, unlike CBFC certification, has no public appeals process.
Neither ZEE5 nor MIB has offered an on-record explanation for the removal. The memorandum’s demand to restore the original title is, in effect, a symbolic rejection of the compromise the filmmakers were forced into.
Demand 2: The manhunt North Desk’s reporting triggered
Panthic Groups to Centre: The second demand — that DSP Jaspal Singh and his associates be traced and returned to custody — lands on ground North Desk has already covered in detail. Jaspal Singh, convicted along with three others for Khalra’s 1995 abduction and murder, was released on interim bail from Nabha Open Jail in May 2023 under a Punjab and Haryana High Court ruling that automatically bails out convicts whose remission applications sit undecided beyond a set period.
His remission bid has bounced between the Punjab government and the Union Home Ministry since 2017 — rejected once in 2018, re-referred in 2019, rejected again in 2023, referred again in October 2023, and still pending.
Last week, Hoshiarpur police confirmed that Jaspal Singh could not be found at the village address listed in his own jail records; villagers told police no one by that name has ever lived there.
AAP’s Punjab media in-charge has denied the state government signed off on any remission file, insisting no application currently exists before it. The memorandum’s demand is: trace him, hold him accountable, and hold accountable whoever recommended remission. It is essentially a political echo of a story that broke through police verification, not political pressure.
Demand 3: A Truth Commission — but whose truth?
Panthic Groups to Centre: The third demand is the one with the least consensus behind it. The organisations want a Punjab Truth, Accountability & Reconciliation Commission covering 1982 (the start of the Dharam Yudh Morcha) through 1995 (Khalra’s disappearance) — framed explicitly around Sikh community grievances and state excesses during that period.
What the memorandum doesn’t mention is that it isn’t the only such demand on the table this week. The All India Terrorist Victims’ Association has separately called for a Truth, Accountability and Reconciliation Commission — but one built around a different history: the experiences of families who lost relatives to militant violence during the same period, which the association says have gone comparatively unacknowledged and unrehabilitated. Both sides are reaching for the same institutional label — a Truth and Reconciliation Commission — to tell opposite halves of Punjab’s militancy-era story.
Panthic Groups to Centre: That overlap, arriving in the same week as Union minister Ravneet Singh Bittu’s public challenge to the Satluj filmmakers to produce documentary proof for the film’s claims, suggests any commission proposal is heading straight into a fight over scope before it even gets a hearing — not just a fight over whether to hold one.
Memorandums through DCs
Panthic Groups to Centre: The memorandums go in through Deputy Commissioners’ offices rather than directly to Delhi: a routing that gets the demand on record locally but leaves the real decisions (on Satluj’s restoration, on locating Jaspal Singh, on any commission) sitting with the MHA and MIB, both of which have stayed silent on the case’s renewed attention so far. What remains to be seen is whether the government’s track record on this file (two rejections and two re-references on Jaspal Singh’s remission alone since 2017) will be different to Tuesday’s submission. Or does it just add another document to that pile?
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