Long before Jaswant Singh Khalra exposed the staged police killings of Punjab’s militancy years, his family had already spent two generations fighting power, first against the British, then against the state and religious leaders.
A book, Reduced to Ashes, by human rights activist Ram Narayan Kumar, along with Amrik Singh, Ashok Agrwaal and Jaskaran Kaur, traces this family history. Kumar had guided Khalra in his early investigation into the disposal of unclaimed bodies by the Punjab Police. He later settled in Vienna and died in 2009.
Khalra village, in Tarn Taran district on the India-Pakistan border, traces its origins to 1714, when Sikh settlers established it as part of the peasant militia raised by Banda Singh Bahadur, the general who broke Mughal dominance in Punjab. The Khalra family’s own ancestor, Sardar Surat Singh, led that founding group. A monument to him still stands in the village.
Jaswant’s grandfather, Harnam Singh, left for Shanghai before World War I in search of work. There, he joined Indian revolutionaries led by Gurdit Singh, who later led the Ghadar movement against British rule.
The British arrested Harnam Singh in 1915 and tried him with other Ghadarites. He was acquitted, but the government interned him in his own village until 1922. During this period of house arrest, in 1917, his son Kartar Singh, Jaswant’s father, was born.
After his release, Harnam Singh went back to Shanghai and never returned to India. Kartar Singh grew up without a father. The family had four acres of land, and saline groundwater made farming difficult. His mother sustained the household by selling milk from two buffaloes.
Kartar Singh’s own struggle took a different shape. He studied at an Arya Samaj school in Patti but left after finding its environment hostile to Sikh faith and practices. He completed his education at a Khalsa school in Sarhali in 1936. His grandfather had been a leading figure in the Singh Sabha reform movement and had donated land for a Khalsa school in the village. Those links brought Kartar Singh close to Akali Dal leader Master Tara Singh, who helped him get work at the Shiromani Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) headquarters and later at the village school.
However, Kartar Singh eventually grew unhappy with the Akali Dal, especially what he saw as its anti-Muslim positions. He joined the Congress and became secretary of its local committee, believing communal tensions stemmed less from faith and more from leaders using grievance to build followings.
Khalra village had a Muslim majority before Partition. Kartar Singh recalled that communities had lived peacefully until the final months before 1947, when stories of violence turned neighbours into enemies. He watched Muslim families he had known all his life being forced to flee or killed.
He came to believe that India’s freedom had, in some ways, become Punjab’s loss, since the border and the wars that followed undid the very freedom his father had sacrificed for. He later grew disillusioned with the Congress too, especially after the government took over his school in 1961, and eventually stopped voting altogether.
Jaswant was born in 1952 in the same village where his grandfather had once been confined. He was the youngest of four brothers and five sisters. His father insisted all his children get an education, though the family lived on a modest teacher’s salary.
Prominent visitors, including a future Vice-President of India, came to their home for advice on local matters. Vinoba Bhave, the Gandhian land-reform leader, once stayed with the family during a visit to the village.
By the time Jaswant joined Bir Baba Buddha College in Jhabaal, he called himself a “scientific socialist.” He led protests against black marketeering of fertilisers, campaigned against abusive police officials and in 1972, led a statewide student agitation against a hike in cinema ticket prices. The protest led to his first arrest.
In 1975, when the Punjab government offered pensions and honours to families of freedom fighters, Jaswant opposed accepting any recognition for his grandfather's role in the Ghadar movement. He argued that accepting government benefits would diminish Harnam Singh’s unfulfilled struggle. His father agreed and declined both the pension and the honour.
Kartar Singh had hoped his son would join the civil services or enter mainstream politics. Instead, years later, Jaswant chose a different path. He challenged the Punjab Police over allegations of fake encounters for promotion and cremation of victims as "unclaimed" bodies, the book says.