On Sunday evening, viewers across India who had settled in to stream Diljit Dosanjh’s new film, Satluj, found the screen frozen mid-scene. When they refreshed the ZEE5 app, the title had vanished entirely. The platform soon confirmed that the film, which had premiered without cuts just two days earlier, was “unavailable in India until further notice” due to unspecified “current developments.” For a project that had already spent more than three years battling India’s film certification board, the abrupt removal felt less like a technical glitch than the latest turn in a long-running contest over which stories can be told, and in what form.

Directed by Honey Trehan, Satluj—originally titled Punjab 95—draws on the life of Jaswant Singh Khalra, a bank manager turned human rights activist who documented thousands of illegal cremations and enforced disappearances in Punjab during the 1990s. Khalra was abducted by police in 1995 and never seen alive again; a handful of officers were later convicted for his murder. The film’s journey to the screen was itself a chronicle of obstruction. After it was completed in 2022, the Central Board of Film Certification demanded 127 cuts, including the removal of Khalra’s name, references to the Punjab police, and the phrases “extra-judicial killings” and “human rights.” A scheduled premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023 was withdrawn without official explanation. When the film finally surfaced on ZEE5 on 3 July, it did so under a new title—Satluj, the river that runs through Punjab—but with its original edit intact, a version that Khalra’s widow, Paramjit Kaur Khalra, publicly confirmed the family had approved.

The removal, announced on 5 July, split the film’s audience along geographical lines. While Indian subscribers lost access, ZEE5 Global continued to stream the title internationally, creating a curious asymmetry: a story rooted in Punjab’s soil could be watched in London or Toronto but not in Ludhiana or Amritsar. The platform’s statement thanked viewers for an “overwhelming” response and insisted it stood “firmly by Satluj and the creative vision behind it,” adding that it was exploring “every appropriate avenue through due process” to restore the film. No further details were given, leaving commentators in Delhi and Mumbai to speculate about the nature of the pressure that had intervened.

Dosanjh, who plays Khalra, responded hours later with a post on Instagram: a clip from the film overlaid with the words “I challenge the darkness,” and a caption in Punjabi that drew a direct parallel between the film’s fate and Khalra’s own disappearance. The actor had earlier described the role as the most emotionally draining of his career, one that required a week of recuperation after the shoot. His message was amplified by former cricketer and parliamentarian Harbhajan Singh, who called the film a “must-watch” and wrote that Khalra’s courage had exposed “the abuse of state power.” The conversation, as ZEE5’s social media team noted, had not paused.

For now, Satluj exists as a kind of phantom presence: a film that briefly flickered onto Indian screens before receding, its uncut frames still flowing beyond the country’s digital borders. The river after which it was renamed continues to run, indifferent to the eddies of certification and takedowns. On Instagram, Dosanjh’s post remained, a single frame of a man staring into the lens, daring the darkness to answer.