In a startling coincidence, two editorials in newspapers on either side of the border in India and Pakistan took up the same thing on the same day. Divided in blood and gore, both countries are united in perpetuating the colonial hierarchies of institutional injustice that its revolutionaries laid down their lives for.

Two editorials on either side of the border in India and Pakistan on the same day took up the same issue: ‘Police encounters’ and custodial killings on their respective sides of the Punjab.

On February 21, the Indian Express in its editorial warned that a sharp rise in police encounters, including custodial deaths in Punjab - 34 in three months – signals a dangerous erosion of due process and the rule of law, as well as risks deepening disillusionment.

The same day’s editorial in the Dawn noted that at least 924 suspects were killed across Pakistan’s Punjab province in 2025 following the establishment of the Crime Control Department, castigating the state for a deliberate policy of staged police shootouts with suspected criminals or gangsters leading to extrajudicial killings. Both leading national dailies - looked like mirror images of each other.

The scale may vastly vary. But the coincidence is uncanny. Also, ironic. The people that fought against oppression, brutality, and miscarriage of justice a century ago - when there were no borders, when Punjab was one land with its undivided fields, wastelands, and rivers – had almost forgotten the very cause they once fought to defend.

Land of Rebellion and Sacrifices

Punjab was the epicentre of the Indian freedom struggle – producing some of the most defiant revolutionaries for whom the blood that flowed recklessly in Jallianwalla Bagh, where the British forces killed over a 1000 civilians, either became a turning point or an inspiration to raise a banner of revolt. Whether it was Lala Lajpat Rai, who led a non-violent struggle, the Ghaddar Party comprising politically motivated Southasian immigrants turned activists who sailed back from California and Canada to overthrow the British empire, or the firebrand leaders like Bhagat Singh, Punjab gave its blood for freedom from the colonial yoke.

Though their modes of struggle were different, they all shared one binding conviction: that no state had the right to take a human’s life without reason, without law and without trial. They fought for freedom from the British, not to replace one tyranny with another.

When India was partitioned and the territories, waters and assets were split like spoils of war between India and Pakistan, Punjab too was ripped apart – a formidable border creating two entities that were born with a harrowing memory of partition violence, whose ghost will continue to haunt the region.

The joy of freedom receded, supplanted by the horrors of hatred, bloodshed, displacement, deaths, rapes and plunders – which writers like Sadaat Hasan Manto and Amrita Pritam would document for posterity. Pritam’s work on Partition captures the immense suffering, displacement and loss of women with raw emotional honesty. Her iconic poem Aj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu, addressed to the Punjabi Sufi poet Waris Shah, is considered one of the most powerful literary responses to the Partition, while her novel Pinjar further explored the trauma of abducted women caught in the communal violence.

Manto's Partition stories depicted the darkest, most disturbing aspects of human behaviour during the violence and moral collapse. His stories like Toba Tek Singh, Khol Do, and Thanda Gosht remain haunting stories that force readers to confront the senselessness of communal hatred and the devastating cost borne by ordinary people, particularly women.

When two independent nations - India and Pakistan - were born, writers like Manto and Pritam captured the ugly realities that historical narratives avoided, reminding us that though the colonial yoke was over, the mental slavery continued.

Institutional injustice Then and Now

Thousands of custodial killings and enforced disappearances, often shielded by a culture of impunity, were rampant in Indian Punjab during the height of the insurgency between 1984 and 2000s. Only a fraction of these are documented. Today, the similar stories from the two Punjabs rekindle the horrific memory of 1947 when people were divided into religious binaries and killed each other. Unlike that time, those killed in encounters and when in custody on either side may not have been innocent people. They are purportedly accused or suspected of hardcore crimes. But they deserved a fair trial.

The laws on either side of the border do not sanction extrajudicial killings, especially if they happen in the custody of the state.

Nothing seems to have changed in over a hundred years. Blood continues to spill unlawfully with rare juridical remedies. From the British colonial powers to the two Punjabs ruled by the natives of two different states under two different constitutions, the narrative of the state remains the same – ‘necessary’ or ‘defence’, ‘encounters’ used as a euphemism for executions. The colonial habit was never washed out of the uniform – the same colonial habit that revolutionaries spilled their blood to end.

They fought against the institutionalised tyranny and were punished by the colonial institutionalised injustice. Bhagat Singh, the valiant hero of the times, who, along with Sukhdev and Rajguru, was executed at the age of 23, for daring to challenge an inherently unjust and oppressive colonial system, for dreaming of a vision of sovereignty, socialist liberation, and human dignity.

They were convicted of murdering an assistant superintendent of police through a trial, but the process violated basic principles of law and criminal procedure for colonial-political ends. Bhagat Singh and his comrades became victims of the systemic injustice they fought.

Today, both sides of the border claim Bhagat Singh’s legacy. But the spirit of the legacy seems to be forgotten. His blood was spilled for justice but institutional injustice continues to prevail on either side. Activists, politicians and academics on either side recall Bhagat Singh and other freedom fighters with pride. But somewhere, in a police station in Lahore or Amritsar a man in custody will be killed in an ‘encounter’ even as Bhagat Singh is recalled in lip service.

The staggering scale of encounter killings on both sides of the border, performed as a ritual to eliminate criminals and sometimes innocents, is chilling because it comes wrapped in the charade of ‘law and order’, ‘crime control’ and ‘protecting citizens’. But it comes from the barrel of a gun while violating all norms, processes and laws. It is easily normalised. Who would question or mourn the killing of a criminal, a terrorist, or a drug peddler? People are dead. The rot continues.

A Forgotton Legacy

Was this the legacy that the great freedom fighters from Punjab – or extend that logic to rest of India and Pakistan where custodial deaths are common – would have wanted their land and its future generations to inherit? As if the breakdown of the country and its gory partition with a divided Punjab were not enough to torment them in their graves, wouldn’t this thought leave them completely shattered and desolate: this divided land is united in its conviction to perpetuate the very colonial mindset they fought.

In ‘Urdu Ki Aakhri Kitab’, Pakistan’s iconic satirist Ibn-e-Insha asks: if Sindhis live in Pakistan, they also live in India; if Punjabis live in Pakistan, they also live in India; if every community straddles both sides of the border, then why was a separate country made at all?

It ends with an amusing but bitter punch: "Why was a separate country created?”

“A mistake. Please Forgive. It will not happen again.”   The irony cuts to the very heart of the subcontinent’s tragedy.

(The author is the Managing Editor, Kashmir Times, and author of ‘A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir After 370 Abrogation’. By special arrangement with Sapan)