4 Stars (out of 4)
Perhaps no film better exemplifies the dysfunction in India’s Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) than Satluj, formerly known as Punjab 95, and before that known as Ghallughara. After years spent in release limbo and in defiance of the Board’s demands for over 100 cuts, Satluj released on the streaming service Zee5. It was pulled from the streamer in India two days later and taken down internationally days after that. Whether or not it will ever be available again or in what edited state remains to be seen.
I was able to watch Satluj before it was pulled from Zee5, and it’s a fantastic film. It’s shameful for the CBFC to withhold this from the viewing public.
Satluj tells the story of state-sponsored crimes uncovered by the human rights activist Jaswant “Jassi” Singh Khalra (Diljit Dosanjh) in Punjab in the mid 1990s. After a decade of local insurgency, police across Punjab have carte blanche to do whatever they want in the name of fighting terrorism.
The film opens with a group of people executed in a field by the police. Two are specifically shot to pad the murder tally of one of the junior officers — the gruesome metric by which promotions are earned. Some of the bodies are thrown into the river Satluj to drift toward Rajasthan, but not all of them.
Bank loan officer Jassi learns what happened to the others by accident. The mother of his friend — who himself was murdered by the cops — goes missing. After fruitless queries at police stations and hospitals, Jassi finds the woman’s name in a book at the local crematorium. The police never informed her family that she died, but they did submit her name and hometown when they handed over her body for cremation, along with the name of the officer who killed her. The government only pays the crematorium for the wood to burn a body when there is a name and address attached, hence the paper trail.
Jassi finds himself with a goldmine of evidence in the crematorium log book: a record of six hundred people who were killed by police and whose families were never informed of their deaths. In many cases, the police refused to file missing persons reports on behalf of the family. In others, the cops demanded money for information on the whereabouts of the abducted person, only to kill them later. If all of the crematoriums across all of Punjab have similar numbers, that would mean about 25,000 people were killed by the cops in the state.
This isn’t what Jassi expected to find when he went looking for his friend’s mother. As the numbers climb and the evidence mounts, he finds it impossible to look away. His wife Pammi (Geetika Vidya Ohlyan) is understandably alarmed by the danger to their family once Jassi makes his findings public and demands legal action. He acknowledges her concerns but can’t risk the justice movement dying if he steps aside.
As he’s depicted in Satluj, Jassi is the best kind of hero. He isn’t a firebrand or a politician. Dosanjh presents him as an utterly normal guy asking for answers and accountability for the harms done to his neighbors. Even in the face of danger, he makes fighting for justice look doable, no special skills required. The doing is the important part.
The scale of the crimes is horrifying, but the ease with with they are committed and condoned is particularly terrible. Director Honey Trehan includes plenty of scenes in which bureaucrats talk about mass murder as a public relations problem. The loathsome Director General of Police, Inderpal Singh Bitta (Kanwaljit Singh), tells reporters that the missing people are probably driving taxis in Canada. When officials from Rajasthan complain about their water supply being contaminated with dead bodies from Punjab, he says that people fall into canals all the time.
Though Satluj is about a particular place at a particular time, it lays out the problems with policing as an institution. When the state has a monopoly on violence, people who want to cause harm without facing consequences have an incentive to join the force. SSP Surjit Singh Sugga (Suvinder Vicky) is a great example — the rare cop so dangerous that he was actually sent to jail for violence committed while in uniform. When DGP Bitta wants to put an end to public complaints without having to change tactics, he gets Sugga out of jail and puts him in charge of Jassi’s local police station, ratcheting up instances of brutality.
The institution itself is incentivized to protect the power it has, which means protecting those who work within it. That also prevents any reform from taking place from within the institution. As Constable Satnam Singh, Saurabh Sachdeva wears an expression of utter defeat throughout the movie. He doesn’t want to participate in violence, but he lacks the authority to stop it and knows too much to be left alive were he to resign. The power of the police force can be turned inward as easily as it is projected outward.
Trehan’s direction of a screenplay he wrote with Niren Bhatt and Utsav Maitra isn’t heavy-handed or preachy. He trusts the facts of the story to stand on their own merits and the humanity of Jassi’s cause to connect with the audience emotionally. Every performance in Satluj is superb, something that doesn’t happen by accident. The film is an incredible achievement by everyone involved. It’s a fitting tribute to a true hero, and a testament that those who were lost have not been forgotten.
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