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Shooting and production on director Honey Trehan’s Punjab ’95 was done and dusted in 2022. The team had filed the film with the Central Board of Film Certification, which certifies films for release in India. Punjab ’95 is a gritty retelling of the lives of the human-rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra and his family, and their fight against state repression during Punjab’s bloody insurgency between the 1980s and 1990s. Khalra was investigating extrajudicial killings by the police, which had led to a spate of hidden cremations—more than two thousand in Amritsar alone, by his investigation—when he was abducted and murdered by the Punjab Police. An investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation and a Supreme Court conviction of six police officials hold this to be true.
The CBFC, over the next two years, repeatedly called Trehan and producer Ronnie Screwvala to make increasingly egregious cuts that damaged the narrative and realism of the movie. The ministry of information and broadcasting was involved in the censorship too. The cuts went so far as to disallow them from mentioning the state of Punjab or even Khalra’s name. An unprecedented number of cuts—about a hundred and thirty—were demanded, and it was barred from an Indian release. The fight then continued in court, and when the producer was pressurised to agree to a settlement outside court, he was asked by officials not to screen it abroad either. Speaking to The Caravan’s staff writer Jatinder Kaur Tur, Trehan described how the actions of the government amounted to political censorship, disallowing Punjab to remember and learn from its scarred history. The unedited film has the support of Khalra’s family and Sikh religious organisations. In a text message shared by Trehan, the film’s lead, Diljit Dosanjh stated, “If there are cuts made to the film, we will remove our names from the credits. That’s the least we can do to stand by our film and our conscience.”
Given the gravity of the subject—state repression, illegal cremations and extrajudicial killings—what sources did you rely on for this film on Jaswant Singh Khalra?