Selective Memory

The decision by censors to withhold the Diljit Dosanjh-starrer Satluj from Indian audiences scarcely forty-eight hours after its release has elevated the film into a political cause. The controversy is now about how India chooses to remember one of the bloodiest chapters in its post-Independence history, and whether memory can survive when it becomes selective.

The film chronicles the work of Jaswant Singh Khalra (played by Indian-American singer Dosanjh), the activist who investigated allegations of thousands of unlawful killings and secret cremations during Punjab’s counter-insurgency campaign. Drawing upon municipal cremation records from Amritsar, Majitha and Tarn Taran, Khalra had claimed that large numbers of unidentified bodies had been cremated without due process. His own abduction and murder by policemen in 1995 remain among the darkest stains on the state’s record. That state excesses occurred is beyond dispute.

Yet, neither should the opposite distortion become acceptable. Punjab’s tragedy did not begin with police excesses. It began with an insurgency that sought to replace constitutional politics with the gun. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, militants transformed Punjab into a landscape governed by fear. The Hindu community was a particular target of the separatists. Civilians, journalists, teachers, public servants and political leaders became targets. Music, cultural expression and even the national anthem were denounced. The campaign was profoundly totalitarian in instinct. More than 11,000 civilians lost their lives.

The men who ultimately defeated the insurgency were hardly outsiders; Chief Minister Beant Singh, assassinated in a suicide bombing, was a Sikh. So was K.P.S. Gill, the police chief whose methods remain deeply contested but whose campaign broke the back of militancy. Their legacy, like Khalra's, belongs to Punjab's history. To elevate one while erasing the other is historical reduction.

That is why Satluj has generated such polarised reactions. Its defenders see a necessary reckoning with abuses committed by the state. Its critics argue that it presents an incomplete account by marginalising the terror that created the extraordinary circumstances in which those abuses occurred. History is rarely served well by narratives that divide participants neatly into heroes and villains.

There is an added political irony. The Congress presided over much of the period in question, while the Bharatiya Janata Party had little role in the conduct of Punjab’s counter-insurgency. Yet contemporary politics has inverted those associations, turning historical memory into another battlefield of partisan identity.

Punjab deserves better than competing mythologies. A mature democracy must possess the confidence to acknowledge both the crimes of terrorists and the excesses of the state that defeated them. Justice demands accountability for unlawful killings. It equally demands remembrance of the thousands murdered by those who sought to carve Khalistan out of blood and intimidation. Memory that honours only one set of victims is not remembrance but politics masquerading as history.