Honey Trehan’s “Satluj” lasted 48 hours online. ZEE5 released the film uncut on July 3 and pulled it two days later, citing only vague current developments as an explanation. The platform still streams the film outside India. The film had already survived a three-year certification fight and 127 requested cuts from the Central Board of Film Certification before it reached an audience. Its removal was not a simple content decision. It marks the latest chapter in a longer pattern of erasure that Sikh communities in Punjab have lived with for three decades. “Satluj” tells the story of Jaswant Singh Khalra, a human rights activist who investigated the mass, unrecorded cremation of thousands of bodies by Punjab Police during the counterinsurgency operations of the 1980s and 1990s. Khalra’s investigation confirmed what victims’ families had long alleged that security forces disappeared young Sikh men, killed them outside any legal process and cremated the bodies as unidentified. Police officers abducted Khalra from outside his Amritsar home in 1995 and he never surfaced again. Courts later convicted several of those officers in connection with his killing. Censors rejected the film’s original title, “Ghallughara, ” a word that recalls historic massacres of the Sikh people. They rejected the replacement, “Punjab ’95, ” too, and asked the filmmakers to remove Khalra’s own name from the script. The filmmakers refused. Trehan later put the demand plainly that the board wanted to delete a martyr’s name from the country’s own history, according to IBTimes UK. The fact that the film reached screens at all is remarkable. Diljit Dosanjh, who plays Khalra, expected the takedown before it happened and urged viewers over the weekend to watch or download the film while they still could. After the removal, he wrote that the same darkness that swallowed Khalra now tries to swallow his story a second time. A country can spend three decades investigating and confirming a set of facts through its own institutions and still treat a film that repeats those facts as too dangerous to stream. The mechanism behind the removal deserves as much scrutiny as the removal itself. The CBFC had already cleared “Satluj” for release. Reports point instead to a Centre referral through the IT Rules committee, a separate review body for streaming content that sits outside the certification process a film already survives. Routing the film through this second gate, after it cleared the first, let authorities act without a court order or a published directive anyone could challenge. ZEE5 called the removal a pause rather than a ban, a distinction that spares the decision from the judicial review a formal ban would invite. Mazhar Abbas: Who’s Silencing Journalists? What’s Really Going On? | Past & Present The politics around the ban cut in an unexpected direction. Akali Dal president Sukhbir Singh Badal has framed the film as a record of the repression that Congress governments of that era unleashed on Khalra and thousands of other young Sikhs killed in staged encounters. Union minister Ravneet Singh Bittu has denied that the BJP or the Centre played any role in the film’s removal, arguing that certification rules for theatrical release do not extend to satellite and cable broadcast. The film indicts a different era’s state. The fight over the ban now runs through the parties in power today. That split matters, because it shows how quickly an argument about a documented history turns into an argument about who currently holds office, even when the crimes on screen predate every party now trading blame. ZEE5 still keeps “The Kashmir Files, ” “The Kerala Story” and other films built around narratives friendly to the current political establishment on its platform, as Forbes reported. None of those films faced a certification battle, years of delay or a sudden removal. A film that holds the state accountable for extrajudicial killings faced all three. The censor board never objected to violence on screen; Indian cinema does not lack for violence. It objected to naming the perpetrator and naming the dead. This distinction outlasts the fate of one film. Khalra’s own investigation, corroborated later by judicial findings, put the number of unidentified cremations in the thousands. Families of the disappeared have spent 30 years trying to move that record into the country’s mainstream memory, largely without success. A generation of Sikhs learned this history from their own communities rather than from textbooks, films or official acknowledgment. “Satluj” tried to close that gap using no invented facts, drawing only on Khalra’s own documented findings. It lasted two days. Sikh institutions answered by taking the film off the platform and putting it back in the community’s own hands. Gurdwaras across five states organized public screenings after the removal, and the Akali Dal has promised to screen “Satluj” in every village across Punjab, turning a streaming deletion into a grassroots campaign no ban can easily reach. Authorities have answered that response with a second petition of their own, this one asking the Punjab and Haryana High Court to stop the gurdwara screenings on the grounds that they threaten public order and communal harmony. The state that would not explain why it pulled the film now argues that watching it in a place of worship endangers the peace. That argument tells its own story about what the ban was always protecting. Who Really Controls Pakistan’s Media? A public interest litigation now sits before the Punjab and Haryana High Court, filed by Sharwan Singh, naming the Central government, the CBFC, the Punjab government and ZEE5 as respondents. The petition argues that “Satluj” draws entirely on material already in the public domain, including findings that the Supreme Court, the CBI and the National Human Rights Commission examined years ago. Nothing in the film discloses a secret. The court will decide whether that argument holds. But the case itself makes a point worth sitting with. A country can spend three decades investigating and confirming a set of facts through its own institutions and still treat a film that repeats those facts as too dangerous to stream. None of this asks India to reopen old wounds for their own sake. Khalra did not compile his records seeking vengeance. He sought acknowledgment through courts, documentation and public knowledge. “Satluj” tried to carry that same project into popular culture. Pulling it does not erase what Khalra found. It only delays, again, the moment Punjab’s Sikh community gets to tell its own history on its own terms, in a country that has otherwise found plenty of room on its streaming platforms for stories about state power at its most forceful. The protests, the gurdwara screenings and the court challenge are not really about one film. They ask whether a community that has waited three decades for its documented history to count as legitimate will have to keep waiting. The censors never won an argument about facts; courts never disputed Khalra’s findings. For now, they have won an argument about whose grief gets a platform and about how quietly a government can arrange for one story to disappear while others stay online.
Why Was Satluj Really Banned?
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