Jailed in Same Cell Who Saw Everything–Story of Jaswant Singh Khalra Witness Kulwant Singh
Jaswant Singh Khalra Witness: Kulwant Singh, Prime Witness Number 14 in the case, was jailed on a fabricated NDPS charge two days before Jaswant Singh Khalra’s abduction. And he became a key witness in his murder case. Here’s his story.
Arvind Chhabra
Chandigarh, July 8
One figure in Jaswant Singh Khalra case files has received almost no attention, despite being central to how the case was finally proven: A man named Kulwant Singh, who was already sitting in a Punjab Police lock-up on a fabricated drug charge before Khalra was even taken. And who ended up an eyewitness to Khalra’s detention purely by accident of timing.
Diljit Dosanjh’s film Satluj — about human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, who was abducted and killed by Punjab Police in 1995 for exposing the illegal cremation of thousands of unidentified bodies during Punjab’s insurgency years — was pulled from ZEE5 within 48 hours of its release last weekend, with no explanation given by the streamer beyond a vague reference to “current developments.” Political parties across the spectrum have since criticised the removal, and North Desk has been working through the original documents and case files to separate what the film dramatises from what the courts actually found.
Here’s the story of Kulwant Singh.
[This reporter previously covered the Khalra case for BBC Hindi/Punjabi, recently re-featured amid the Satluj movie controversy]
Who was Jaswant Singh Khalra Witness Kulwant Singh?
According to the case files, Kulwant Singh was arrested on September 4, 1995. That was two days before Khalra’s abduction. Kulwant was held in a case under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, by police officials at Jhabal police station in Tarn Taran district. He was already in custody there, in other words, for a reason entirely unconnected to Khalra, when Khalra was brought into the very same station on September 6.
Khalra disclosed his own identity to him and said he did not know why he had been brought there. (This was revealed in SPO Kulwant Singh’s testimony in the court). That single detail is worth sitting with: even Khalra himself, in his first hours in custody, may not have grasped what was actually happening to him.
The detail that makes this case chilling: they wouldn’t even say his name
Some days later, DSP Jaspal Singh and SHO Satnam Singh — two of the officers eventually convicted for Khalra’s murder — questioned Kulwant Singh about what he knew. But they didn’t ask him about “Jaswant Singh Khalra.”
The case files record that they asked whether he knew anything about “the drunkard man” — a coded phrase, used deliberately in front of a detainee they didn’t yet trust, to refer to a well-known human rights activist they had already decided to eliminate. Officers casually running an active cover-up used a euphemism even talking to a low-level prisoner, rather than name the man they were about to kill.
The charge against him unravels, and the CBI itself doubts it
Jaswant Singh Khalra Witness: Kulwant Singh’s own case took a striking turn as the investigation progressed. The CBI, while probing the Khalra case, came to doubt whether the NDPS charge against Kulwant Singh was genuine at all.
The case records show that the Court directed the Jail Superintendent in Amritsar to file an appeal on Kulwant Singh’s behalf in the High Court. That was an extraordinary intervention, given he wasn’t even a party before the Court in the Khalra case. That appeal succeeded: Kulwant Singh was acquitted of the NDPS charge in 1997, years after his original conviction.
In effect, the same investigative process that was uncovering Khalra’s murder also concluded, separately, that the charge which had put its key eyewitness behind bars in the first place looked engineered.
READ ALSO: The Cop Who Fed Khalra His Last Meals…And Whose Words Convicted His Killers
The significance of Kulwant’s testimony
Jaswant Singh Khalra Witness Kulwant Singh’s account did more than establish that Khalra had been brought to Jhabal police station. It corroborated the testimony of Kuldip Singh, the SPO who witnessed Khalra’s final hours and eventual killing (a story North Desk has covered separately).
Kulwant Singh placed DSP Jaspal Singh and SHO Satnam Singh at the scene of the arrest, tied Khalra’s presence directly to Jhabal, and confirmed the involvement of Ajit Singh Sandhu, the SSP whose office Khalra was later taken to. The Supreme Court, in its final judgment, treated his account — along with Kuldip Singh’s — as central corroborating evidence in convicting the officers involved.
Why this is worth telling on its own
Jaswant Singh Khalra Witness Kulwant Singh: Every other witness in this case — Khalra’s widow Paramjit Kaur, the SPO Kuldip Singh, journalist Rajiv Singh, activist Kirpal Singh Randhawa — became a target of police intimidation after they came forward. Kulwant Singh is the one person in the entire case who was already inside the system, discarded there on a charge that likely wasn’t even real, before he ever saw anything worth silencing him over. He didn’t choose to become a witness.
He was simply in the wrong cell, at the wrong police station, on the wrong two days in September 1995 — and it happened to be the same machinery that had already engineered one false case against him that, months later, needed to hide a killing from him too.
Jaswant Singh Khalra Witness Kulwant Singh: It raises an uncomfortable question the film doesn’t ask, and the coverage of Satluj’s (Kehar Singh has played the role of Kulwant in the movie) removal hasn’t apparently touched: how many people passed through Punjab’s police stations during those years on charges that were never really about drugs, or crime, or anything except making sure the right people were in the right cells when the state needed a witness silenced, or simply out of the way.
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READ ALSO: Jaswant Singh Khalra Had Named His ‘Killer’ To An Ex-Judge Before Abduction
READ ALSO: Cops Disposed Of Jaswant Singh Khalra’s Body. Then They Had Whisky, Dinner
READ ALSO: The Cop Who Fed Khalra His Last Meals…And Whose Words Convicted His Killers
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