Does Satluj promote pro-Khalistan narrative? What Diljit Dosanjh film really says

For all the debate around Khalistan, Satluj asks a very different question. Honey Trehan's film refuses to argue ideology, choosing instead to confront the unresolved human cost of Punjab's counter-insurgency years and the accountability they continue to demand.

In Short

• Satluj depicts Punjab militancy through missing persons and silence, not politics
• Diljit Dosanjh plays human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra
• The film highlights the 1995 counter-insurgency as Punjab's darkest chapter

In Honey Trehan's Satluj, the story of Punjab's militancy years is told from a new, largely less-approved and far more intimate angle. It is not told through terrorism, the conversation around Khalistan, the aftermath of Operation Blue Star or the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. It is told and remembered through missing sons, unmarked cremation grounds, unidentified bodies, and a lingering atmosphere of fear and silence. Which is what makes Satluj such a personal watch.

Starring Diljit Dosanjh as the celebrated human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, the film never distracts itself by trying to become anything else. It never concerns itself with being a political weapon or answering the wider questions surrounding Punjab's long history of militancy.

Throughout its two-hour-and-43-minute runtime, Satluj keeps circling back to one question: who will take accountability for the extrajudicial killings in the state? Who will tell the families of those who went missing that they never disappeared, but were killed? Who will distinguish between militants and ordinary citizens whose bodies were illegally cremated?

Satluj doesn't shy away from establishing that the 1995 counter-insurgency period remains one of the darkest chapters in Punjab's history. It also invokes the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and the assassination of Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh. But every time it gives the viewer a glimpse of where it all began, it asks a far bigger question: where it went later?

A scene featuring Arjun Rampal's CBI officer Samudra Singh and Suvinder Vicky's SSP Surjit Singh Sugga best captures the film's position. Confronted with allegations of thousands of abductions and extrajudicial killings carried out during Punjab's counter-insurgency years, Sugga immediately turns the conversation towards the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. He questions Singh about the Sikh killings in Delhi's Trilokpuri, asking whether those deaths were "judicial or extrajudicial", and suggests that the truths of 1984 remain buried.

It is then that Singh quietly cuts through the argument: "Chaurasi (1984) ginane se '95 ke aankde badlege nahi" [Mentioning 1984 won't change the reality of 1995].

The point is not to dismiss 1984 or diminish the trauma of the anti-Sikh riots. Rather, it is a refusal to let one historical tragedy become the justification for avoiding another. Singh is, in effect, telling Sugga that the scale of violence in 1984 cannot explain away, or reduce the accountability for, the thousands of alleged killings and disappearances that followed during the counter-insurgency years.

That scene is crucial in establishing how Satluj never tries to become a Khalistani apologist; its intention lies in painting a bigger picture that risks being diluted if diverted towards other political debates. It does so by not making Khalistan its central subject, referring to militancy only as the setting, and creating an environment in which its characters are forced to confront the weight of the time they live in.

The film is not presented as a dismissal of 1984 or an attempt to minimise the trauma of the anti-Sikh riots. It challenges a pattern commonly visible to anyone who has followed Punjab's political discourse: the tendency for one historical tragedy to be invoked in response to another, often leaving neither fully confronted on its own terms.

As the same scene continues, Samudra Singh bluntly asks Sugga for accountability for the killing of thousands in the name of the counter-insurgency programme - something the film itself repeatedly demands: "Hisaab toh dena padega" [There will have to be accountability].

The scene goes on to show Sugga saying that Punjab has had a complicated history. Referring to the militancy in the state, he says, "Hisaab toh Punjab ka hai hi complicated. Hum unse lad rahe hain jo pakde nahi jate, bas maare jate hain. Ye vo log hain jinhe maarne ke liye army bulani padti hai. Topey kam pad jati hain" [Punjab's accounting is complicated. We're fighting people who are never caught, only killed. These are the kind of people you have to call the Army in to fight. Even cannons aren't enough].

No mention of Khalistan, separatism or the demand for a separate Sikh homeland ever becomes the film's ideological centrepiece. That is Satluj's most conscious narrative decision. The film acknowledges that it is set during Punjab's years of militancy. However, Trehan constantly shifts the camera away from ideology and towards consequence. Politics remains in the background, while the human cost occupies the foreground.

Throughout its runtime, Satluj appears less interested in asking why militancy emerged than in asking what happened when the State responded to it. It is a film about records, affidavits, police registers, cremation logs and families waiting for someone who would never return home. Its emotional vocabulary is built around absence and mourning rather than political conflict.

Popular culture has often approached Punjab's militancy years through binaries: terrorist versus patriot, police versus militant, State versus separatist. Satluj resists this familiar narrative. Instead of attempting a sweeping chronicle, it deliberately narrows its gaze, choosing to stay with one documented human rights investigation rather than trying to become a definitive account of an entire political movement.

Which is also why Khalra's work becomes the perfect lens through which to tell this story.

Khalra was not investigating the politics of Khalistan. He was investigating allegations that thousands of unidentified bodies had been illegally cremated and that countless families had never been told what had happened to their loved ones. The hero in this film does not wield weapons; he carries documents. His fight is not against an ideology but against disappearance itself - the disappearance of bodies, identities and official memory - making Satluj politically compelling in an entirely different way.

Satluj is less a film about insurgency than it is about documentation. It argues that before history can be debated, it must first be recorded.

Democracies often argue that extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary powers. Human rights defenders argue that those powers cannot exist without accountability. Satluj plants itself right within that tension.

Whether every viewer accepts that distinction is another matter entirely. Given Punjab's deeply contested political history, any attempt to revisit the militancy years is almost certain to be viewed through present-day ideological lenses. For some, the film may reopen old wounds. For others, it may represent a long-overdue conversation about justice that never fully arrived.

But what Satluj ultimately leaves behind is not an argument for Khalistan. It leaves behind a persistent reminder that history is remembered not only through battles won or lost, but also through the people who vanished without explanation, and those who spent years asking where they went.

Satluj was streaming on ZEE5. However, the film was taken down within 48 hours of its release.

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Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author.