An Incipient New-Age Cinema of Resistance, Justice and Kindness |
In our land – still swept constantly by the poisonous hot winds of hate and grievance – 2025 was one more broken year.
Hateful speeches exhorting the cleansing of the country of its Muslim populace continued to thunder. Bulldozers continued to rumble razing Muslim homes and shrines. Temples continued to be discovered or imagined under medieval mosques. Churches and chapels continued to be vandalised by raging mobs. Crowds continued to thrash and stone men to death claiming they had slaughtered a cow or romanced a Hindu girl. Security forces continued to muzzle dissent and rebellion with bullets. Some of our finest hearts and minds continued to be locked away in prison barracks.
Piercing through the toxic haze of loathing, iniquity and fear that enveloped us all in 2025 were a handful of films of exceptional humanism. Films rose daring to voice difficult and dangerous truths about injustice and suffering and resistance. Films lit up with the audacity to imagine kindness. Films tender with the fortitude of hope.
Heading my list of the most consequential films of the year is a film that most Indians have not been given the chance to watch. This is Panjab 95. Intensely troubling and profoundly stirring, Honey Trehan’s film is a tribute to one of free India’s great heroes Jaswant Singh Khalra, a man sadly little known outside Punjab.
Trehan’s film hurtles us back to one of the darkest, most traumatic chapters in the journey of our republic, but one that most have completely forgotten. This was the decade from the mid-1980s of militancy in Punjab. The film recalls for us a regime in which the police was not just given a free hand but actively incentivised to murder innocent people. Policemen who killed enough numbers of unarmed men and women in cold blood were rewarded with out-of-turn promotions. It was a time of terror, in which no family in Punjab was safe. Young men were disappearing in droves, and their bodies burnt in covert mass cremations or thrown into the canals that dissect the state. Policemen would extort fortunes from parents threatening that their sons would otherwise be murdered. No one knew whose turn was next.
Official poster for Punjab ’95.
In the midst of this regime of blood and terror, a bank officer Jaswant Singh Khalra began to investigate what had happened to some associates who had disappeared. His persistence revealed to his rage and astonishment secret records of the names of around 2000 disappeared people who had been murdered and cremated in just one district Tarn Taran. He estimated that perhaps 25000 people had been unlawfully murdered by the security forces in Punjab. He was fully mindful of the dangers to his life and family, but persisted in exposing these crimes of genocidal proportions. One morning, he was kidnapped from outside his home by policemen in civilian clothes in an unmarked vehicle. His wife and hundreds of family members of other disappeared people fought a long battle for justice for Khalra. Ultimately independent police investigation revealed that he had been eliminated by the Punjab police.
It is Khalra’s story that Trehan recreates in Panjab 95. Diljit Dosanjh charged no money to play Khalra, and he admirably evokes Khalra’s singular stubborn heroism and compassion. Trehan’s script is based entirely on true events and testimonies. His narrative is restrained and unsparing even as it elicits the unspeakable horrors of what happens when the police are given both the power and incentive to kill unarmed innocents. Few have been held accountable for these crimes against humanity, and the police officers who led these operations were feted as national heroes. Years later, I have visited the homes of many Punjabi homes that still waited in unmitigated agony for news of their loved ones who disappeared and were never seen........