It goes without saying, for anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of freedom of speech, that censorship or banning of a docudrama film is authoritarian, cowardly and a symptom of a regime that is drunk with its own power.
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I have long remained an admirer of the late Mr Jaswant Singh Khalra, the human rights activist from Punjab. During the process of his investigation and judicial activism about the state-sponsored killings and cremations of thousands of people in Punjab, he himself was kidnapped, tortured and killed by Punjab Police.
He was a family man, and he was very brave to have taken on against a brutal state machinery. He and his family paid the price for his bravery, and the least we can do is to respect his memory, and to honor his legacy, and to be inspired by his courage and his conscience.
I have also long regarded the Punjab DGP from that era, K P S Gill, as a butcher, a cruel, sadistic and degenerate man, who was given free rein by his political masters to unleash his own brand of terrorism and violence, frequently on the innocent, while his stated mission was to control and eliminate the violence by the radical Sikh separatists, no less criminal, in Punjab. The violence by the state is far more condemn-able than the violence by misguided separatists because the former is to be held to a far higher standard of morality and due process.
It is fitting that Mr Gill was awarded with Padam Shri, and Mr Khalra was never, either during his activism or after his death, honored by the Indian state. Such are the ways of how power is wielded, and one must be thoroughly naive to expect otherwise.
Mr Khalra was born in a family of activists, and that showed itself in how he was roused to action when he saw what was going on. His wife is equally brave, and my salute to her, as well.
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When one evaluates the thuggery, violence and amorality in Punjab or in many parts of India, it is my conclusion that the region and the people are feudal in their world-view, medieval in their mindset, and brutal in their acts.
Parents routinely murder their unborn daughters or their disobedient children who dare to marry of their own choice. Property feuds often escalate into violence and murder. People are petty, and though the Sikh religion is considered liberal, Sikhs are vehemently caste-conscious, superstitious, believers in blasphemy and brutality in response to it, and generally immoral (consider for example their tactics to immigrate to the West). Sikh industrialists are well-known to be thoroughly corrupt, and not a single Sikh politician is known to have some measure of integrity.
People looted and killed and raped each other with impunity during the partition of 1947, and many of the legends of Sikh history, Banda Singh Bahadur or Ranjit Singh, falter miserably when subjected to a scrutiny of their acts and motives.
I consider this to be a lawless, despotic region. If anything, I find that the brutality of the state has become more pervasive at present. At that time (of Mr Khalra's death), the CBI was somewhat effective in prosecuting some police officers for Mr Khalra's murder, but since then, hundreds and thousands of people have been killed by Punjab Police without any real repercussions. Now even human rights activists have given up. Police "encounters" are reported every other day, gangsters in the pay of the state are busy in extortion and kidnappings, and any individual who even hints at becoming a political force to be reckoned with, is killed or imprisoned under draconian laws.
Mr Khalra was valiant, and he tried to turn the tide, but he was too hopeful about this region. Like many previous "revolutionaries", he died an untimely death, a few of his killers were jailed, but nothing really changed in Punjab. Punjab was a region of brutality, and it remains that way. Perhaps more hopeless than at his time. Most sensible people have left this region, and those who are left are busy making money while they can while the future looks bleak and black.
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The film (Punjab 95, Satluj) itself needed to be made, but I feel it is, as produced, a mediocre film. It would have been much better to make an actual documentary on Mr Khalra's life and work. The film repeats some musical tones, the acting except for a couple of actors is atrocious, the scenes of torture and killings are shoddily done, and the screenwriting and the dialog delivery is amateurish.
The people involved in producing this film, however mediocre they may be in terms of execution, deserve accolades for their courage in going for it.
The film is brave in pointing clearly at KPS Gill and the then Chief Minister Beant Singh for the violence indulged in by the police. The film does not go into into Mr Khalra's background, his wife's courage, the reactions of his relatives or children, his association with left-leaning people (his wife is shown in a library where a portrait of Pash the Punjabi poet is behind her desk), and the general context of the violence and extortion.
The film also doesn't consider the general disenfranchisement of a population who has to beg and plead for a modicum of justice. Even the judges shown in the film are unremarkable, and it is only due to a single witness' testimony which almost wasn't there, that there were some convictions.
The film should not have ended in a catharsis, but in rage. The architects of the thousands of those killings that Mr Khalra was investigating remain unpunished. Mr K P S Gill is dead and he was provided with state honors. The riots of 1984 remain unpunished. And the Indian state continues to plot and carry out assassinations of Sikhs in India and abroad.
This film needed to be made, and it is perhaps unrealistic to expect a great film given the restrictions on its message and that it was never going to make any money. But a good director can work with a limited budget and instead of filming shoddy scenes of fake torture, can show things in a hidden manner rather than overtly. But again, that is my quibble as a cinematic critic, and as a social wake-up call, this film deserves to be applauded.
I have very little hope that any lasting change will be triggered by this film. I pray that I am wrong.
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