AMRITSAR, India — On a muggy monsoon evening, farmers in the northern Indian village of Bandala finished tending to their rice and sugarcane crop and flocked to the local Sikh temple. They settled in plastic chairs, women to the front, men to the back, as volunteers served strawberry juice in plastic cups and kids bustled around, happy to have an excuse to stay up late.
They were gathered for an unlikely event: the screening of a film that was never granted a theatrical release certificate by Indian censors, and pulled from a streaming platform a day after its release online. The Indian government has not revealed their reasons for the blocking. India's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting did not reply to NPR's interview requests.
There was little sign of the film's contraband nature in the promotional posters plastered all over the village shopfronts and playground walls. They advertised the movie, titled "Satluj," as based on real-life events that addressed the history and identity of Sikhs, a religious minority within India numbering more than 20 million people and forming a majority in the northern state of Punjab.
"Satluj" is a biopic of Jaswant Singh Khalra, an activist who was killed after uncovering extra-judicial killings carried out by security forces, primarily the Punjab police. This occurred after the separatist movement turned violent in 1984, when the Indian army stormed and damaged the Golden Temple, one of the holiest shrines for Sikhs, during a gunfight with militants that had sought refuge there. The following decade witnessed several killings of civilians, militants and state-officials, including the assassination of former prime minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguard.
Ordinarily, "Satluj" would have joined the long list of films that the Indian government has blocked, or forced directors to tone down in recent years. But the ostensible banning of "Satluj" triggered something else: rare defiance against the Hindu nationalist government of prime minister Narendra Modi.
In cities and villages across Punjab, Sikh leaders urged their community to watch it. In its spiritual capital Amritsar, activists and political parties staged rallies opposing the ban. Many organized screenings in Sikh temple courtyards and public streets. Others downloaded bootleg copies and shared them on WhatsApp and YouTube.
Such pushback against the state's diktats is quite unusual, says Sanjay Srivastava, a sociologist at SOAS University of London. "It does reflect a genuine feeling on the ground that the issues covered in the film have not been entirely resolved," he says.
The militant movement for a Sikh state
"Satluj" is set during the '90s, a few years after a Sikh separatist movement had turned militant. Thousands of Sikhs died in clashes and gunfights with Indian security forces. Many fled to countries like the U.S. and Canada and sought asylum.
Sarabjit Singh Verka, a lawyer with the nonprofit Punjab Human Rights Organisation in Amritsar, has represented many victims of the violence. He says Indian authorities back then were desperate to end the violence. "Some police officers on trial confessed to me in private that they were allowed to kill militants who had killed two or more people," says Verka. "The police called the policy 'bullet for bullet'."
This carte blanche, Verka says, started because civilians were often too scared to testify against militants in the court, which allowed many to go free. "But some officers turned this into an extortion racket. They would kidnap young men and demand ransom from their families. Some also staged shootouts and cremated bodies to cover up the evidence."
Amid this violence in the 1990s, Amritsar resident Jaswant Singh Khalra quit his job at a local bank to document such killings. In "Satluj," one of India's top stars, Diljit Dosanjh, plays his role.
Using municipal and crematorium records, Khalra compiled a list of around 2,000 youths that he claimed the police had killed in his home district of Amritsar. He then approached the Punjab High Court and the Supreme Court, claiming the toll across the state of Punjab could be up to 25,000.
Human rights lawyer Verka says that number is likely an exaggeration. "The government should've nevertheless set up a truth and reconciliation commission to ascertain the truth. They didn't."
In 1995, a few months after he made the allegations, Khalra disappeared from his home. His body was never found. A decade later, an Indian trial court convicted six police officers for his abduction and murder. "And while the government compensated some victims, most perpetrators got away," adds Verka.
He says Indian authorities didn't want to answer for state excesses then - and they don't appear to want it now.
The pushback against censorship
The filmmakers of "Satluj" say they were ready to release it in cinema halls by December 2022. In an interview with NPR, director Honey Trehan recalled officials on India's film certification board stalled them for nearly four years. Trehan recalled arguing with a board official that the film was based on news reports and court testimonies: "He looked at me and said, 'Who speaks the truth so loudly in today's times?'"
Filmmakers don't need an official certificate to put up their works online. But two days after releasing the film in July, the streaming platform Zee5 took it down with a cryptic Instagram post blaming "current developments." As people started screening bootleg copies, the service said it was "doing everything" to bring the film back. The film remains unavailable on the platform.
Jagmohan Singh Raju, general secretary of the ruling BJP in Punjab, says authorities were concerned that the film's portrayal of police violence could revive sentiments of Sikh separatism, a threat New Delhi views with heightened urgency following escalating tensions with overseas Sikh diaspora communities.
In recent years, India's Hindu nationalist government has repeatedly criticized countries like Canada and the United Kingdom for harboring Sikh separatists. In 2024, the United States charged an Indian intelligence agent for conspiring to kill one such separatist, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, in New York. Canadian authorities also charged four Indian nationals linked to jailed Indian gangster Lawrence Bishnoi's network with the 2023 murder of separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
Analysts say fearing that international activism could reignite unrest at home, Indian authorities treat historical narratives like "Satluj" not just as movies, but as potential security risks.
Still, the BJP official Raju acknowledged one film wouldn't immediately radicalize an audience. "It doesn't happen overnight that a crowd will gather and they become separatists," he said. But it would trigger that kind of thinking. "This first seeps into your mind, gets into your psychology, then someone plays on that psychology. It's a long game."
Film journalist Anna M.M. Vetticad says the way the Hindu nationalist government reacted to "Satluj" follows their understanding of the power of cinema. "This government clearly considers cinema as a way of influencing mindsets, as a means of propaganda," she says. "You can see that from the spate of Hindi cinema that is completely Islamophobic, pro-BJP and doing PR for this government."
She adds that the idea that the movie would trigger separatist feelings missed the point of "Satluj." "It is focusing on human rights violations by those in authority. And when an individual investigated it, he was murdered for doing so."
Preserving memory
For the audience who watched "Satluj" at Bandala and other villages, the public screenings were about something else.
In 1990, Ranjit Singh Babbar was three years old when police from Punjab's Kapurthala district detained his farmer father, Sardar Atma Singh. Babbar claims his father had no association with the militants, yet the police demanded an equivalent of $12,000 to release him. "My family sold land, gold and put it together. But when they returned with the ransom, the police said it was too late."
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Babbar shows a passport-sized photo he carries in his wallet: of a young man with a lush beard, wearing a grey turban. "That's the only memory of my father today," he says. "The government never issued his death certificate. We couldn't even do his funeral rites. Police killed him and threw his body into a river."
Babbar says Jaswant Singh Khalra's fight for justice represented hope in India's democracy. "The blocking of his biopic sends the opposite signal," he says. "It makes us Sikhs feel like second-class citizens."
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