Satluj Review: Diljit And Suvinder Vicky Command One of The Year’s Most Essential, Searing Films

The night is dark and full of terrors in Satluj. Honey Trehan’s long-awaited, trenchant political drama casts a deep, wide net into the fear and paranoia Punjab’s police struck in its people in the garb of counter-insurgency operations. It’s a vicious cycle of violence that was inaugurated by the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom. It spilled into the ‘90s as well, the mid-point of which Satluj unclasps in. The memory of the pogrom metabolises into bitter forms, torpedoeing the state into continually greater ruin, a loop of self-destruction. Punjab is consumed by its phantoms wandering and wrecked by unaccounted violence. The nexus of police force and a government condoning and authorising its excesses throws an entire state under the fray. Had there been no Jaswant Singh Khalra, the state might have driven itself to the ground quicker.

A brief run-through of the battles over this film’s release (earlier called Punjab ’95) would double up as an official history of suppression and cover-ups India has mastered in regarding its most horrific lapses. The story is familiar, that of security forces being enabled by higher powers in getting away with anything in the guise of purging terror. Somewhere down the road, lines between instruments of justice and brutality turn blurred. Arjun Rampal’s voiceover underlines that the police “stopped distinguishing between militants and civilians”. Bodies were dumped in rivers, canals, streets, fields. The film’s opening itself reveals the lay of the land. Police superiors tease their juniors with the promise of promotions by flinging them towards extra-judicial murders. Trehan is scathingly ironic enough to cut to a sticker on a police car’s back: “may I never deviate from doing a good deed”.

In the hands of the cops, violence is as arbitrary and whimsical as what a drunken bout stirs. These killings have enshrined themselves in the very fabric of Punjab’s shuddering society. Lobbed from one cop to the other, families of the disappeared are sucked into a cesspool of endless extortion. It finishes entire families, farms, a generation. Channels of justice are shut until it takes someone like Jaswant Khalra to force these conversations and demand answers. In the film, Khalra (Diljit Dosanjh) is introduced as a soft-spoken, genial banker, happy with his wife, Paramjit (a quietly effective Geetika Vidya Ohlyan) and kids. But as he himself insists later, he can’t ignore what he’s seen. When things become personal, with a friend, Kirpal, slain, he’s pulled in. Then, the friend’s mother suddenly disappears.

A simple matter of filing a missing-person report shifts quickly. It opens Khalra’s eyes to something far more systemic and sinister. There’s an entire orchestration around corpses falsely tucked away as unclaimed and ditched in crematoriums. The writing, which Trehan shares with Niren Bhatt and Ustav Maitra, clinches the smallest of details with precision and care. A throwaway exchange between Khalra and a cop gives away their clashing convictions with a choice of term alone; the former mentions whom the cop calls terrorists as rebels. In another scene, someone at the crematorium talks of many nights bringing such high body count there’d be three bodies stacked on a single pyre. Khalra realises he must mobilise the affected families. His switch to an impassioned human rights activism puts him as a target of DSP Bitta (Kanwaljit Singh) and his infamous ‘butcher’ enforcer, Sugga (a chilling, scene-stealing Suvinder Vicky). Bitta has the CM’s blessings. As Khalra goes scouring through cremation records, building a strong case for the families, he makes himself more vulnerable than ever.

Khalra stays dogged and committed in his advocacy. Threats and fears keep mounting. He refuses a layer of security despite the immediate danger. His conscientiousness empowers him to launch forth with the cause in spite of constant warnings. He’s up against the entire carapace of the Punjab police that’s sanctioned a free rein by the state government. Drunk on impunity, the police unleash a reign of terror, using supposed militants as the punching bag. Khalra thinks in terms of his community, what’s just and must be accounted for. The film recognises his tireless, unstinting service as the true Sikh way. Dosanjh lends a gentle steadiness, a moral core that remains intact even as dread escalates. He knows the path he’s forging, the risks yet he ploughs on, undeterred. Someone must step forth, he reiterates. This is a man who brings tea for cops after a night of his house being watched. But the real star here is Suvinder Vicky, formidably terrifying. Watch out for a night-time scene as Sugga drops in by to threaten a family. It’s tense and nightmarish.

As daring as visceral, Satluj transcends being just a chronicle of Punjab’s grimmest episodes. In a latter scene, Rampal’s CBI officer reminds Sugga that solely recounting ’84 won’t account for the horrors of ’95. When Khalra’s passionate espousal of truth ad justice and human rights plea are dismissed as attention-seeking gimmicks, puppets of foreign powers, the rhetoric rings as common as ever. Satluj is a tremendous work of acknowledgement. It remembers and marks all that has been carpeted over. Trehan has fought long and persevered for this film to reach audiences. It’s a devastating, urgent drama, easily one of the year’s finest.