Navkiran Kaur Khalra

Navkiran Kaur Khalra is the daughter of human rights defender Jaswant Singh Khalra. She was 10 years old when Punjab police abducted and killed her father in late 1995. Jaswant Singh Khalra is survived by his wife Paramjit Kaur, his son Jap Singh, and Navkiran.

We as a family are proud of what our father did. It’s not that we are in deep sorrow or in grief. We feel proud that it was my father who sacrificed his life for the human rights.

My father was often very depressed about the conditions and the situations that were created in Punjab at that time. He was not in favor of extremism, plus the tortures and the disappearances done by the Punjab police. But actually, the practical work that he started was when his very close friend, who was his colleague and was the director of cooperative bank in Amritsar, he was kidnapped by the police and he was murdered. And when my father went to search his remains to the shamshaan ghat of the cremation ground of Amritsar, he found that his friend was not the only one who has been cremated in that way, illegally. So he just found out the evidences in the register that there were thousands of people whose name was given, whose father’s name was given, and the village name was plus given, and in the end it was written “unidentified.” So this was a great technical error which the Punjab police had put it in the registers. So my father got that evidence and he produced it in front of the court and in front of the international community.

Jaswant Singh Khalra discovered that the Punjab police were secretly cremating the bodies of victims of extrajudicial executions, and labeling the remains “unidentified.” He used government crematoria records to expose over 6,000 secret cremations by the police in just one of 13 districts in Punjab.
 
Till now, six people had been convicted in my father’s case. I feel that it was a very late justice and it was a too little justice for us.

In November 2005, two officials were sentenced to life imprisonment for Khalra’s murder, in addition to lesser charges, while four officials received seven years for abduction with intent to murder, in addition to lesser changes. On October 8, 2007, an appellate judge upheld the convictions of five officers, but acquitted one of the officers convicted of murder.

My mother applied for the petition, that was on 9th September 1995, and it took ten years, more than ten years, to convict those 6 people.

We have filed the writ that their imprisonment should be increased, and also my mother has filed the petition for involving KPS Gill in this case.

According to the eyewitness testimony of Special Police Officer Kuldip Singh, former Punjab police chief KPS Gill interrogated Khalra just days prior to his murder. Station House Officer Satnam Singh then told Khalra to accept Gill’s advice and save his life.

The court found SPO Kuldip Singh credible and accepted his testimony. Despite these findings, the  prosecutor has yet to investigate or prosecute Gill for his alleged role in Khalra’s murder.

I think Khalra family has been lucky enough to get so much international support, but there are thousands and thousands of families which are still not heard by the Indian judiciary. I think these families do need international support; the international community should come in Punjab and help them to get justice for their beloved ones whom they have lost.

So they’re still afraid that those times can come back again, those policemen can again torture them, they can again kill their relatives or anyone who will help them out. So this fear in the mind is still there.