Jaswant Singh Khalra Had Named His ‘Killer’ To An Ex-Judge Before Abduction
Four days before his abduction, Jaswant Singh Khalra named his killer to a retired judge. The court records and the judge’s testimony reveal he knew exactly what was coming.
Arvind Chhabra
Chandigarh, July 7
Four days before he was abducted, Jaswant Singh Khalra sat in the home of a retired Punjab and Haryana High Court judge, and told him exactly who was going to kill him.
This is not dramatic reconstruction. It is sworn testimony, recorded in the court documents; the Punjab and Harayna High Court had upheld the convictions in Khalra’s murder.
Satluj movie is gone from Indian screens in about 48 hours after its streaming began on ZEE5. But it has triggered a huge controversy. North Desk has been working through the documents and other available record since the movie was taken off. And more chilling details are emerging than anything in the movie itself.
READ ALSO: The Cop Who Fed Khalra His Last Meals…And Whose Words Convicted His Killers
On August 31, 1995, Khalra went to the house of Justice Ajit Singh Bains (retired). He was then chairman of the Punjab Human Rights Commission.
Khalra told him that Ajit Singh Sandhu, the SSP of Tarn Taran, had personally called him on the phone and threatened him. The words Khalra repeated to Bains, as recorded in the court records: he would “meet the same fate as happened in the case of 25,000 unclaimed dead bodies” — the very cremations Khalra had spent years documenting.
He wasn’t imagining a threat in the abstract. He named the man. He named the method. Justice Bains advised him to file a writ petition before the Punjab and Haryana High Court.
Six days later, on September 6, Khalra was abducted from outside his own home in Kabir Park, Amritsar, in broad daylight, at around 9 a.m., in front of a journalist waiting to interview him.
Jaswant Singh Khalra: A threat repeated, to multiple people
Bains was not the only person Jaswant Singh Khalra confided in. The court documents record that Satnam Singh (a witness, not the accused SHO of the same name) and Satwinderpal Singh both testified that Khalra had told them separately that his life was in danger and that he expected to be eliminated.
Jaspal Singh Dhillon and Surinderpal Singh, an advocate, gave similar accounts. The court found their testimony, taken together, “cogent and convincing” — not the recollection of one anxious man, but a pattern of a man methodically telling people close to him what he believed was coming, so that if it did, there would be witnesses to explain why.
That detail matters. Khalra wasn’t naive about the risk. He built a paper trail of his own fear, in real time, through the people he trusted — almost as if he understood that his own testimony, after his death, would need other voices to carry it.
What the record shows happened next
The threat wasn’t idle. Ajit Singh Sandhu, the SSP named in Khalra’s warning, was later identified by the courts as having personally led the party that picked up Khalra on September 6, and as having visited him during his detention at Jhabal police station to warn him again in person to stop his work — this time backed by a beating.
The Court’s judgment describes Sandhu, DSP Jaspal Singh and others arriving at the police station on more than one occasion, taking Khalra into a room, and assaulting him. Days later, Khalra was killed inside that same station.
Sandhu died in 1997, in a death recorded as suicide, before he could ever be formally charged for a threat he made on the phone and then carried out with his own hands.
Why this matters now
Khalra’s case is remembered, correctly, as a triumph of investigative persistence — the CBI probe, the cremation records, the eventual convictions. But the Bains testimony reframes something important: this was not a man blindsided by a system he didn’t understand.
He named his killer to a retired judge four days before it happened, and the system moved at its own pace anyway — first refusing to act, then reluctantly investigating only after the Supreme Court intervened, and finally convicting the men involved sixteen years after the fact.
The most damning part of Khalra’s story may not be that he was killed. It’s that he told people it was coming, gave them a name, and it still took a courtroom sixteen years, and two more courts after that, to say what he already knew on August 31, 1995.
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