Formal weapons surrender ceremony, Amritsar district, 1992–1996. Right: KPS Gill, Director General of Police, Punjab. Left (assisting surrender): officer identified as Ajit Singh Sandhu, SSP Tarn Taran — named in the CBI chargesheet as the principal officer responsible for the abduction and killing of Jaswant Singh Khalra. Civilian executive in dark suit, identified as KBS Sidhu, DC/DM Amritsar, observing at immediate proximity. For extended analysis of this photograph, see the companion essay "The Man He Stood Beside."

THE OVERSIGHT HE DID NOT EXERCISE

KBS Sidhu's 2026 Theory of Democratic Accountability and the Public Record of Amritsar, 1992–1996

A Direct Rebuttal  ·  kpsgill.com Punjab '95 Forensic Archive  ·  April 2026

Responding to: "More Political Oversight of the Police, Not Less" — The KBS Chronicle, 10 April 2026

Evidentiary classification: [PF] Proved Finding — established in court record, NHRC report, CBI chargesheet, or Supreme Court judgment. [DA] Documented Allegation — formally raised in legal proceedings or commission records. [AI] Analytical Inference — logical conclusion drawn from proved findings, stated as inference, not as fact. [PM] Panthic Memory — community testimony, cited as such. No claim in this article exceeds its classification. Where the classification is [AI], the inference is open to contest. The underlying proved findings are not.

On 10 April 2026, KBS Sidhu — retired IAS officer, former District Collector and District Magistrate of Amritsar from 1992 to 1996, and now a prolific daily writer on governance and accountability — published an essay arguing that India's police reform consensus has been wrong for seventy years. His argument is not without merit. His central claim — that insulating the police from the Home Secretary and the District Magistrate has not saved the citizen at the thana gate — is historically defensible. This archive concedes it, fully and without hedging.

The concession is what makes what follows unavoidable.

The same writer who now argues, in 2026, that the District Magistrate ought to be a serious accountability node over police power is the same man who held that office, with its full statutory weight, in Amritsar district from 1992 to 1996 — the years in which that district entered the public judicial and human rights record through 2,097 confirmed illegal cremations, the abduction and murder of Jaswant Singh Khalra, and the documented failure of mandatory civilian oversight. On the public record reviewed by this archive, the office he held produced no documented magisterial inquiry, no Section 176 CrPC proceeding, and no recorded intervention in response to any of those events.

The contradiction is not this archive's construction. It is Sidhu's. His own 2026 theory provides the frame through which his own 1992–1996 record must now be read. The article below holds him to that frame.

I. What He Argued: The 2026 Theory

Sidhu's essay engages a real problem. The statutory Police Complaints Authorities mandated by the Supreme Court's Prakash Singh directions of 2006 have, as he correctly observes, become institutional fig leaves — understaffed, unpublicised, operating without coercive powers worth the name, unable to help the citizen who has been roughed up, extorted, or falsely arrested. His diagnosis of that failure is accurate.

His prescription follows from it. The reform consensus, he argues, has produced a police force insulated from everyone, including the elected representative who is, in a democracy, the legitimate voice of the citizen. The alternative he proposes is accountability that is immediate, local, and electoral — a District Superintendent of Police answerable to the MP or MLA who is in turn answerable at the ballot box. He summarises it as more political oversight, not less.

The pivot sentence — the sentence this article is written to answer — appears in his discussion of the Police Commissionerate system. He writes that when circumstances turn more serious, when the spectre of police firing arises, the instinct even within the Commissionerate model is often to secure the presence of an Executive Magistrate. His explanation: those who exercise coercive state power tend, in moments of genuine gravity, to seek the cover of democratic and executive legitimacy.

"Those who exercise coercive state power tend, in moments of genuine gravity, to seek the cover of democratic and executive legitimacy." — KBS Sidhu, The KBS Chronicle, 10 April 2026

This is not a minor rhetorical aside. It is the theoretical core of his argument — the reason he believes the District Magistrate belongs inside the conversation about police accountability rather than outside it. This archive agrees with the principle entirely. The article that follows applies that principle, with the same directness Sidhu applies to present-day reform, to the period in which he was the civilian executive authority of Amritsar district.

II. What the Law Attached to the Office He Held

The office of District Magistrate is not an honorific. Section 4 of the Punjab Police Act placed the administration of the district police under the general control and direction of the Magistrate of the district. This was operative statutory language during Sidhu's tenure, not a legacy provision of theoretical interest. The District Magistrate of Amritsar held general control and direction over the district police apparatus. That is what the statute said. That is what the office meant.

[PF]  Section 4, Punjab Police Act: the administration of the police throughout a district shall, under the orders of the District Magistrate, be vested in a District Superintendent of Police. The District Magistrate is not a bystander to district policing. He is its superintending civilian authority.

[PF]  Section 176, Code of Criminal Procedure (as operative 1992–1996): empowers — and in specified circumstances requires — a Magistrate to hold inquiry into deaths occurring in circumstances connected to state custody or police action. This provision does not require a petition. It may be initiated by the Magistrate on his own motion.

Sidhu's 2026 article restores theoretical weight to exactly these powers. He argues that the civilian executive's presence at moments of coercive gravity is not ceremonial — it is the institutional mechanism through which democratic legitimacy is extended to police action. He is describing, in normative terms, the office he held. He is saying it should be a real accountability node. Section 4 of the Punjab Police Act said so too. In 1992. In 1993. In 1994. In 1995. In 1996.

The accountability question is therefore not theoretical. It is operational. Given the statutory architecture of the office and given what occurred in Amritsar district during those years, what the District Magistrate did — or on the available public record, did not do — with those powers is a matter of historical consequence, not biographical discretion.

III. What the District Record Shows

The scale of what occurred in Amritsar district during the counterinsurgency period is not a matter of allegation alone. The proved findings are in the judicial record.

[PF]  The Central Bureau of Investigation, reporting to the Supreme Court of India, confirmed 2,097 illegal cremations at three sites in Amritsar district: Patti, Tarn Taran, and Durgiana Mandir. The Supreme Court described these findings as disclosing a flagrant violation of human rights on a mass scale.

[PF]  These were not civilian deaths processed through ordinary mortuary procedure. The CBI established that bodies were delivered by police, entered into cremation registers as unidentified or unclaimed, and cremated without FIR-linked legal closure, without family notification, and without the documentary chain that law requires when the state handles the dead of persons it has detained.

[PF]  Tarn Taran — one of the three cremation jurisdictions — fell within the operational command of SSP Ajit Singh Sandhu. The CBI later named Sandhu as the principal officer responsible for the abduction, illegal detention, torture, and killing of Jaswant Singh Khalra. Five of his co-accused were tried, convicted, and their convictions upheld by the Supreme Court.

Khalra's abduction on 6 September 1995 was not a random act of police violence against an obscure private citizen. Khalra was the human rights secretary of the Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar). He had personally reviewed the cremation registers at the three district sites, publicly documented the 2,097 entries, and testified about his findings before international human rights bodies. He had, in the most literal sense, read the district's records and told the world what was in them. For that act — constitutionally protected in its entirety — he was abducted from outside his home, held in illegal custody within the district's police system, tortured, and killed.

[PF]  Jaswant Singh Khalra was abducted from outside his residence in Amritsar on 6 September 1995. The abduction was carried out by Punjab Police personnel. The CBI investigation established that he was held in illegal custody and killed. The Supreme Court upheld convictions of five officers for their role in his murder.

[PF]  Khalra's wife, Paramjit Kaur Khalra, filed a habeas corpus petition before the Punjab and Haryana High Court immediately following the abduction. This placed the disappearance formally before the judicial record while KBS Sidhu remained DC/DM Amritsar.

IV. What the Public Record Does Not Presently Show

This is the section the archive formulates with the greatest care, because the formulation matters legally and analytically.

On the public record reviewed by this archive — the Supreme Court proceedings, the CBI chargesheet, the habeas corpus record before the Punjab and Haryana High Court, the NHRC findings, and the published outputs of the relevant commissions and inquiries — this archive has not identified a single documented instance of the DC Amritsar's office initiating a magisterial inquiry, exercising its Section 176 CrPC authority, or producing any formal office-level response to the following events, all of which occurred within the district's administrative boundaries during KBS Sidhu's tenure:

— the disposal of 2,097 human bodies at Patti, Tarn Taran, and Durgiana Mandir without lawful documentation;

— the abduction of Jaswant Singh Khalra from within the district on 6 September 1995;

— the subsequent illegal detention of Khalra within the district police apparatus;

— the filing of the habeas corpus petition before the Punjab and Haryana High Court.

The archive states this as an evidentiary description of the currently reviewed public record, not as an absolute claim that no such documentation exists anywhere. Records are incomplete. RTI applications may yet surface material. The archive remains open to correction on production of evidence. What it will not do is assume, in the absence of evidence, that the oversight Sidhu's own statute required was exercised. The absence of documentation in the reviewed record is itself a historically significant fact.

[AI]  An office that held general control and direction over the district police under Section 4 of the Punjab Police Act, and that held magisterial inquiry authority under Section 176 CrPC, and that presided over the district in which these events occurred, and that left no identified trace in the public litigation record of those events — that office's documented silence is not a neutral administrative fact. It is the evidentiary gap at the centre of the accountability question Sidhu's own 2026 theory has reopened.

V. The Photograph — Administrative Proximity

This photograph (above) is not cited here as proof of personal criminal liability. It is cited as a document of proximity — as evidence that the civilian district executive and the officer later named by the CBI as Khalra's killer participated in the same formal ceremonies of state power within Amritsar district. It closes one specific line of argument: that the District Magistrate was sealed from the operational reality of the district police apparatus at some remove that would explain the absence of documented magisterial response.

[PF]  A contemporaneous photograph exists depicting the civilian district executive identified as KBS Sidhu standing in immediate proximity to KPS Gill (DGP Punjab) and an officer identified as Ajit Singh Sandhu (SSP Tarn Taran) at a formal weapons surrender ceremony within Amritsar district during the relevant tenure period.

[AI]  Administrative proximity at formal district ceremonies does not prove knowledge of subsequent criminal acts by co-present officers. It does foreclose the claim of civilian-magisterial distance as a historical description of how Amritsar district administration functioned. The District Magistrate was not at an administrative remove from the district police that would make his office's documented silence unremarkable.

The extended analysis of the photograph — including the question of what Sandhu's presence at such ceremonies means in light of the CBI chargesheet and his death in May 1997 before he could be cross-examined — is developed in the companion essay "The Man He Stood Beside," to which this article directs the reader.

VI. The Asymmetry at the Heart of the 2026 Essay

Sidhu's 10 April 2026 article contains a passage that this archive finds particularly instructive. Arguing for officer-specific accountability, he writes that when an unlawful arrest is declared, the officer who made it faces no built-in mechanism of personal liability — that the state pays any compensation while the officer is transferred — and that the state must cease to be the sole absorber of the costs of police misconduct. He calls for a statutory regime under which officer-specific liability, recoverable from salary and pension, follows from unlawful arrest and custodial mistreatment. The officer who makes an unlawful arrest must have personal skin in the game.

This archive endorses the principle without reservation. It then applies it with the same logic to the civilian supervisory dimension.

If officer-specific accountability is the correct institutional principle, supervisory accountability is its necessary corollary. A framework that imposes personal liability on the constable who makes an unlawful arrest while leaving the civilian oversight authority — the office statutorily charged with general control and direction over that constable — outside any corresponding accountability architecture is not a complete accountability framework. It is a selective one. And selective accountability tends to protect those who sit above the apparatus it disciplines.

[AI]  Sidhu's own argument for officer-specific liability, applied with the consistency his logic requires, extends to the question of what accountability attaches to the civilian supervisory office that held general control and direction over the district police during a period of 2,097 illegal cremations and the murder of Jaswant Singh Khalra. The archive does not determine what that accountability should look like in Sidhu's specific case. It notes that his own principle forecloses the argument that the question is illegitimate.

There is a further asymmetry. Sidhu's article correctly criticises the distant, slow-moving judicial machinery that fails the citizen who needs a remedy in days. But the citizen who needed a remedy in days in Amritsar district in September 1995 was Jaswant Singh Khalra's family — specifically his wife, Paramjit Kaur Khalra, who filed a habeas corpus petition before the Punjab and Haryana High Court and received no response from the district's civilian executive in the public record this archive has reviewed. The thana gate Sidhu writes about in 2026 is not an abstraction. It is a location with a history. And the history belongs to the record of the office he held.

VII. The Pattern of Public Writing — One Note

This article is a rebuttal to a single essay, not a survey of Sidhu's public output. The detailed analysis of the selective deployment of his Amritsar credential across more than a thousand published pieces — the pattern this archive has characterised as retrospective constitutionalism, invoking the values of accountability without submitting his own record to those values — is developed at length in the companion essay "The Manchester Exit and the Amritsar Silence." That analysis is incorporated here by reference rather than repeated.

The single observation this rebuttal requires is this: a writer who publishes extensively on Article 21, custodial dignity, the rights of the detained, and the obligations of the powerful to answer to the powerless — without, in that same body of work, addressing the 2,097 cremations, the Khalra abduction, or the conduct of the DC Amritsar's office during 1992–1996 — has made a structural choice. The 10 April 2026 essay on political oversight has sharpened the analytical consequences of that choice. The archive documents them.

VIII. Four Questions This Article Places on the Public Record

This rebuttal does not close with a verdict. It closes with four questions that Sidhu's own 2026 theory has made unavoidable. They are addressed to him directly and placed on the public record. They are answerable through documentary method: through RTI application, through public statement, or through the kind of direct published engagement that his daily output demonstrates he is entirely capable of.

First: On the public record of the DC Amritsar's office during 1992–1996 — does any documentation exist, in state government files, district collectorate records, or materials accessible through the Right to Information Act, of a Section 176 CrPC inquiry, a magisterial inquiry order, or any formal office-level response to the disposal of human bodies at the Patti, Tarn Taran, or Durgiana Mandir cremation grounds? If such documentation exists, it should be produced. If it does not exist, that non-existence belongs to the public record and should be acknowledged.

Second: Does any documentation exist, in the same records or through RTI, of a DC Amritsar office-level response — inquiry, correspondence, directive, or formal communication — to the abduction of Jaswant Singh Khalra from within the district on 6 September 1995, or to the habeas corpus petition filed by Paramjit Kaur Khalra before the Punjab and Haryana High Court?

Third: Sidhu argues in 2026 that those who exercise coercive state power tend, in moments of genuine gravity, to seek the cover of democratic and executive legitimacy. Does he apply that principle to the moments of genuine gravity that occurred within his own district during his own tenure? If so, does he now account for the absence of documented civilian-magisterial response to those moments in the public record?

Fourth: Will Sidhu support — or personally file — RTI applications seeking disclosure of DC Amritsar office records from 1992–1996 that might speak to any of the above? If those records have been destroyed, transferred, or are otherwise unavailable, that fact too belongs to the public record.

These questions are not rhetorical. They arise directly from the statutory architecture of the office Sidhu held and from the principles he now publicly advocates. They are the minimum threshold of accountability that his own 2026 theory demands.

IX. The Theory and the Record

KBS Sidhu is right that the District Magistrate belongs inside the conversation about police accountability. He is right that the insulation-from-politics model has failed the citizen at the thana gate. He is right that officer-specific accountability must become real.

The archive does not dispute any of that. It insists only that the principles be applied without asymmetry — that the District Magistrate who is serious enough to be theorized in 2026 as a meaningful accountability node was equally serious in 1992 to 1996, when the office was populated and active and statutorily empowered, and when the district it governed was generating a human rights record that the Supreme Court would eventually describe as a mass violation.

The office cannot be morally thick in theory and administratively weightless in retrospect. The years cannot be cited when they establish authority and left unexamined when they invite scrutiny. The archive will not perform that surgery on Sidhu's behalf. The record is the record. It does not arrive cleaned.

SOURCE NOTE

Primary source cluster for the 2,097 cremations: CBI investigation reports placed before the Supreme Court of India in Paramjit Kaur Khalra v. State of Punjab and related proceedings; NHRC findings on illegal cremations in Punjab; Supreme Court observations describing the findings as a mass violation of human rights. [PF]

Khalra case record: CBI chargesheet in the Khalra abduction and killing; Sessions Court conviction of five accused officers; Supreme Court judgment upholding those convictions; habeas corpus petition filed by Paramjit Kaur Khalra before the Punjab and Haryana High Court. [PF]

Statutory provisions: Section 4, Punjab Police Act (general control of district police vested in District Magistrate); Section 176, Code of Criminal Procedure (magisterial inquiry into custodial and suspicious deaths), as operative during 1992–1996. [PF]

Article under rebuttal: KBS Sidhu, "More Political Oversight of the Police, Not Less," The KBS Chronicle (kbssidhu.substack.com), published 10 April 2026. All quotations from Sidhu in this article are drawn from that essay and are identified as such.

Companion essays: "The Man He Stood Beside" (photograph, administrative proximity, Sandhu chargesheet); "The Manchester Exit and the Amritsar Silence" (selective memory, credential deployment, authorial pattern). Both published on kpsgill.com as part of the Punjab '95 Forensic Accountability Archive.

— kpsgill.com  ·  Punjab '95 Forensic Accountability Archive  ·  April 2026 —

All claims classified under the four-tier evidentiary framework. No claim exceeds its classification. The archive remains open to correction on production of evidence.