Darkness Defied: The Life & Legacy of Jaswant Singh Khalra by Ajmer Singh Book Review

This book is the first full-length biography of Jaswant Singh Khalra to be made available in English and it is the work of one of the most widely read contemporary Sikh historians writing in Punjabi today.

Ajmer Singh originally published it as Shaheed Jaswant Singh Khalra: Soch, Sangharsh Te Shahadat in October 2020, and the Punjabi edition has since sold over twenty thousand copies. The English translation was released at Bhai Gurdas Hall on Heritage Street, Amritsar, in June 2025.

The book sets out to do something that the existing literature on Khalra has only ever done in fragments: bring the history of Khalra together in a single, structured account. There are documentary films, news reports, court records, eulogies and a growing body of academic writing on the enforced disappearances in Punjab in the 1980s and 1990s, but until now there has not been a sustained, book length English biography of the individual who did more than anyone else to expose them. Ajmer Singh's work fills that gap.

It is also worth noting from the outset that this is not a neutral study. Ajmer Singh writes openly as someone who shares the broad political tradition Khalra came to occupy and the book is unambiguous about treating Khalra as a shaheed in the full Sikh sense of the word.

For readers more used to the cautious, equivocal tone of Indian mainstream coverage of this period, that may initially feel surprising. However, given that the Supreme Court of India and the National Human Rights Commission of India have both certified the underlying data that Khalra brought into the public domain, the book's framing rests on facts that have already been judicially recognised.

Who was Jaswant Singh Khalra?

For readers who have not come across him before here is a brief introduction.

Jaswant Singh Khalra (1952–1995) was a director at a co-operative bank in Amritsar and the General Secretary of the Human Rights Wing of the Shiromani Akali Dal. Whilst searching for colleagues who had disappeared in the early 1990s, he began to piece together records from the municipal corporations of Amritsar, Tarn Taran and Patti, and discovered that the Punjab Police had been quietly cremating thousands of people whose families had reported them missing, frequently without any FIR, post-mortem or formal identification. His investigation eventually documented more than 6,000 illegal cremations in three crematoria of Amritsar district alone and pointed to a wider pattern across Punjab numbering in the tens of thousands.

In September 1995, after travelling to Canada to present his findings internationally, he was abducted from outside his home in Amritsar by officers of the Punjab Police. He was held in unlawful detention, tortured and killed. His body was never returned to his family.

In 2005, six police officials were convicted of his abduction and murder following an investigation conducted by the Central Bureau of Investigation. His widow, Paramjit Kaur Khalra, has continued the work he started and is herself a noted human rights figure.

Breakdown

The book is structured across ten chapters and although it is comparatively short at 217 pages, it covers a considerable amount of ground. Broadly speaking, the chapters trace four phases: family background and early years, the political journey from communist activism to Sikh self-awareness, the human rights investigation itself and the abduction, martyrdom and legacy of Khalra.

The opening chapters set out Khalra's family and the social context he came from. He grew up in a Sikh family with deep roots in the village of Khalra in Tarn Taran district, and the book is careful to draw the connections between that inheritance and the political instincts Khalra later developed.

This is important because Khalra is too often presented in mainstream accounts as a "human rights activist" in the generic, NGO sense of the term. Ajmer Singh's framing is that he was something more specific, a man shaped by a Sikh political and ethical tradition that had been continuously active in resisting state injustice for generations.

The next phase of the book deals with Khalra's involvement in the communist and Naxalite-influenced left of the early 1970s. This is one of the more interesting threads in the book, and one that Ajmer Singh is unusually well placed to write about, having himself come out of the Naxalite movement before moving towards Sikh-centred political thought after 1984.

Furthermore, the book traces Khalra's gradual disillusionment with the secular left and his reorientation towards a Sikh political analysis grounded in the events of June 1984 and the years that followed. This is treated not as a religious conversion in the simplistic sense, but as a political and intellectual reorientation, the recognition that the framework he had been working within was not capable of accounting for what was actually happening to Sikhs in Punjab. For anyone interested in the intellectual history of post-1984 Sikh thought, these chapters alone are worth the price of the book.

The central chapters deal with the investigation itself. This is the material most readers will come to the book for, and Ajmer Singh handles it carefully. He walks through how the inquiry began, initially as an attempt to trace specific missing individuals and how it expanded as Khalra began cross-referencing municipal cremation records, police logs and family testimony.

The book describes the meticulous documentary method that gave the findings their force. Khalra was not asserting that thousands had been killed, he was producing the paperwork that the state itself had generated and asking it to explain. Amongst other things, these chapters cover the role of the Committee for Information and Initiative on Punjab, the specific districts in which the investigation was conducted, and the political and legal circles Khalra was working within during this period.

The book also covers the international dimension of his work in some detail. In April 1995, only months before his abduction, Khalra travelled to Canada to address Sikh and human rights audiences and to present his evidence on what he had begun calling the "hidden genocide" in Punjab. The address he gave on that tour is one of the most important documents to have come out of the period, and the book draws on it extensively. For readers who have only ever encountered the famous "lamp" speech in clipped, captioned form on social media, the wider context provided here is invaluable.

The closing chapters deal with the abduction in September 1995 and its aftermath. Ajmer Singh handles this material soberly. He sets out the sequence of events as established by the courts, the role of the CBI investigation, and the eventual conviction of six police officials a decade later. However, he does not allow the legal narrative to do all the work.

The book is equally concerned with how Khalra's work has been remembered, ignored, distorted and reclaimed in the three decades since his death, and the final chapter in particular reads as a reflection on what his legacy actually demands of those who claim it.

In addition to the main chapters, the book includes documentary material, extracts from speeches, references to court records and contemporary reporting, that gives the text its evidentiary backbone. I would have welcomed a fuller appendix collecting more of Khalra's own writings and addresses in translation, particularly given that this is the first English edition, but that may be a project for a future volume.

Conclusion and Rating

This is a book that fills a genuine gap in the English-language literature on this period. There is now a reasonable amount of academic writing on the enforced disappearances in Punjab.

However, until now, there has not been a structured biography of Khalra himself in English. Ajmer Singh's work, already widely read in Punjabi for half a decade before this translation, is the most authoritative single account that we have.

It is thoroughly researched and well documented, written by an author whose own political and intellectual journey gives him a particular sensitivity to the questions Khalra was working through.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Punjab in the late 20th century, in the human rights history of South Asia or in the moral question of what it actually costs to tell truth to power.

It is also, I would say, essential reading for anyone working on or thinking about contemporary Sikh political thought. The questions Khalra was asking in 1995 have not gone away, and the answers Ajmer Singh's book lays out are as relevant now as they were when the original Punjabi edition was published in 2020.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

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