The innocuously titled film “Satluj,” named after a tributary of the River Indus that flows through the Indian state of Punjab before crossing into Pakistan, was quietly released on the OTT video streaming platform Zee5 without much fanfare on July 3. Within two days, it was suddenly pulled by the channel due to a government diktat citing “national security concerns.”
Originally titled “Punjab 95,” the film is set against the backdrop of the Sikh separatist insurgency in Punjab during the 1980s and 1990s, when the movement for an independent Khalistan was at its peak, and when the Congress party was in power.
The scale of violence that Punjab witnessed during those years, both by the separatists as well as by the state, which used all its power to crush the movement, has left deep scars in the Punjabi psyche and population.
“Satluj” is based on the life of human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, who fearlessly exposed police atrocities – thousands of enforced disappearances, secret cremations, and extrajudicial killings – during that period. The film is being hailed as one of the “most powerful films made in India” in recent times.
Directed by Honey Trehan and starring the famous Punjabi actor and singer Diljit Dosanjh, the film had been battling India’s Censor Board for three years to get a theatrical release. Censors demanded 127 cuts in the film. They wanted the names of the film’s protagonists and even places to be changed so that none could be identified as the setting of real events. The director and his team refused to cave in under pressure.
