Diljit Dosanjh's film on Jaswant Singh Khalra just got pulled off ZEE5 in India,and its director says it feels like history repeating itself.Honey Trehan,who made Satluj, told The Indian Express that watching Khalra's story get cut apart by censors felt personal. Khalra was part of his childhood, he said,the story of his own land growing up in Punjab, and now, watching the censorship play out,he feels like Khalra has been abducted all over again. Not by police this time.
The film had already survived a three year fight with the Central Board of Film Certification, which asked for something like 120 cuts before dropping it altogether from a theatrical release. It finally landed on ZEE5 on July 3, quietly,with no big marketing push.Some viewers say it vanished mid watch.Less than 48 hours later it was gone from the platform in India.ZEE5 said only that it remained unavailable "until further notice."Trehan has since said, in a separate interview,that the platform told him directly the pressure came from the government,though officials haven't confirmed that on record.
Khalra was a bank employee in Amritsar who started digging into unclaimed bodies, at local crematoriums back in the early 1990s.What he found was staggering.Records pointing to roughly 25,000 people,allegedly killed by Punjab Police during the militancy years and cremated without so much as telling their families.He was abducted outside his own home in September 1995. He never came home.Six police officers were eventually convicted for his abduction and murder,and that part of the story,at least,ended in a courtroom.Trehan says he's still hoping the same happens with his film. He's asked the central government directly for help getting Satluj back in front of Indian audiences, the way it once helped bring Khalra's killers to justice.
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