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(RNS) — I found out the way I find out about everything now. My phone buzzed, and I looked at it before I was even fully awake. 

Senator Lindsey Graham had died of a sudden illness, at the age of 71.

I gulped; he was my age. 

Let me say this plainly, and this is hardly the place for a full examination and evaluation of his political career, which is necessary and which will doubtless emerge.

I believed that Graham, a Republican representing South Carolina, was a mixed bag. I will simply say that I disagreed with most of his domestic politics. But he served this country well. 

He was also one of the most steadfast friends Israel had in the United States Senate, through administrations of both parties and through the worst years in Israel’s history. 

That’s not a small thing to me. There’s a Jewish value that names this — “hakarat ha-tov,” the recognition of the good that someone has done.

“Hakarat ha-tov” doesn’t require that you like the person. It only asks that you be honest about the good, specifically, on its own terms, without letting the rest of your feelings erase it.

That is how I can hold “I disliked Lindsey Graham’s politics” and “I am grateful for what he did for Israel” in the same mind and soul. That’s not confusion. That’s just what it means to look at a person as a whole human being, with all their complexities, confusions and contradictions.

That was how I responded, inwardly, to the death of Graham.

And then I opened Facebook. I found gloating. A laughing emoji under the news. “Karma.” “Good riddance.” One post that actually used the word “finally” (“finally” — at the age of 71!).

One person referred to him as “Ms. Lindsey” — an act of wretched homophobia that would have been otherwise unthinkable and worthy of cancellation. 

I have seen the same kind of “schadenfreude” regarding the illness of Senator Mitch McConnell. 

But as we know, the normal rules of etiquette and social discourse don’t apply to one’s political enemies. 

Those messages were coming from my regular, everyday Facebook friends and others. 

Here is what is inexplicable to me. Some of those messages came from my clergy colleagues. 

Those messages were coming from people whose profession requires them to stand at a pulpit and tell other people (often, repeatedly, piously and, at every available opportunity, almost as a mantra) that every human being is made “b’tzelem elohim,” in the image of God.

I expected more. 

There’s a story in the Talmud that I have taught more times than I can count (Megillah 10b). The Sea of Reeds (the Red Sea) has just closed over the Egyptian army, and the angels want to sing. God stops them. “The work of My hands is drowning in the sea, and you want to sing songs before Me?!?” 

I am hardly the only rabbi who has told that story, repeatedly. 

It’s every colleague I know. 

We reenact a version of that same restraint every Passover. As we recite the 10 plagues that fell upon Egypt, we dip our fingers into our cups of wine and spill 10 drops of wine. We deliberately diminish our joy because of the suffering of the Egyptians. 

And in the book of Proverbs, we read: “If your enemies fall, do not exult; if they trip, let your heart not rejoice; lest God see it and be displeased, and avert God’s wrath from them” (Proverbs 24: 17-18).

“Really, Jeff?” you will say. “What about the joy that we have on Purim, as we celebrate the hanging of Haman and his sons?”

That is true, I will say. 

Except, let us admit that Graham was not Haman. 

“Jeff, didn’t you rejoice when Sinwar (the head of Hamas) and Khamenei (the Iranian leader) were killed?”

No, I didn’t rejoice. They were dead. That was enough for me.

So I think of the death of Sen. Graham and how people are reacting, and I ask myself (and hardly for the first time): What happened to our common humanity and compassion? When did we become so vulgar and so coarse?

If you say that Trump caused the decline of our national conversational style, I would ask you to remember what Trump said about the murder of Carl Reiner and his wife, Michele.

We rightly despised that heartless, cynical response. We can blame Trump for polluting our discourse, but we would then need to ask ourselves: Are we powerless to fight it? 

And if you respond that Graham’s politics forfeited his claim on your compassion, I would ask you to sit with this sobering reflection on your own fragility and mortality. It is simply this: When you die at a good, old age, someone who hated your politics will have the exact same logic available to them. They might say equally sour things about you. 

We are better than this.

I have to believe that, or I don’t know what any of it — the angels, the wine, the Proverbs — was ever for.

(RNS) — When the news broke that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo had been shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent as he drove his construction crew to work in Houston last week, a Vatican representative was meeting with immigrant families at a Houston Catholic parish. The families were sharing about the intense levels of fear their community has been experiencing.

“This is completely terrible, and we cannot be silent in front of this,” the Rev. Mattia Ferrari, coordinator of World Meeting of Popular Movements, told RNS about the killing of Salgado Araujo.

On his multi-city tour of the U.S., Ferrari has heard from many immigrants experiencing fear, family separation and even detention. “They are suffering something that is completely unfair, completely unjust,” Ferrari said, calling Salgado Araujo’s death “the top of the sufferings.”

The World Meeting of Popular Movements was first convened at the Vatican with Pope Francis in 2014, and since then the Vatican’s Dicastery for Integral Human Development has “accompanied” the initiative, which emphasizes poor and marginalized people as “protagonists” in the fight for justice.

“ We are here to serve, not to lead,” said Ferrari of the church’s role, highlighting grassroots leadership.

Last fall, Pope Leo XIV told the convening, which has historically called for land, housing and work for poor people, “The Church must be with you: a poor Church for the poor, a Church that reaches out, a Church that takes risks, a Church that is courageous, prophetic and joyful!”

Leo also emphasized that the poor are at the center of the gospel. “Therefore, marginalized communities…must be involved in a collective and united effort aimed at reversing the dehumanizing trend of social injustices and promoting integral human development,” he said. 

Ferrari’s tour was planned after Ferrari expressed “curiosity” at last fall’s convening to see and hear from people on the ground who are confronting the “cost of living and immigration tension” in the U.S., said Cecilia Flores, who coordinated the tour in her volunteer role with a coalition called Catholics in Communion, which was founded late last year to respond to the “pastoral emergency” of mass deportations.

Ferrari is now halfway through a nearly six-week tour to 21 cities and regions across California, Washington state, Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan, Louisiana, Washington, D.C., New Jersey and New York, carrying the Catholic church’s message of support to faith-based community organizing groups throughout the U.S.

He and his fellow delegation members  “sit and listen and ask just such deep questions, but in such a gentle and pastoral and loving way,” said Flores.

Ferrari is traveling with Luca Casarini, the founder of Mediterranea Saving Humans, which has reacted to the deaths of thousands of migrants crossing the Mediterranean by crewing a ship for sea rescues. Ferrari is the group’s chaplain. Leo spent July 4, the 250th anniversary of the U.S. adoption of the Declaration of Independence, at Lampedusa, a common destination for those crossings.

The third member of the delegation for the U.S. tour is César Piscoya, an adviser to the Latin American bishops’ conference’s (CELAM) Center for Pastoral Action Programs and Networks. Piscoya, a lay theologian and longtime friend of Leo’s, was a missionary with the Augustinians, Leo’s order, and then worked with then-Bishop Robert Prevost when he led the Diocese of Chiclayo, Peru.

“ Something they keep saying is, they’ve seen a suffering they didn’t really know existed in the United States,” said Flores, who is the executive director of the Catholic Volunteer Network when she isn’t volunteering with Catholics in Communion. “ A lot of people share that the image that they have learned of the U.S., whether that’s through media or how they were told growing up, they get here and they see it’s really not as easy as people might think it is.”

But the delegation is also seeing “ a church that is uniting to take care of one another and to embody what it means to be the body of Christ, to move in defense of the dignity of each person on this earth and in this country,” said Flores.

Across the U.S., immigration has been a core focus of the trip. “ This is a matter of love, a matter of human dignity, a matter of the gospel. Because what these people are suffering — this pain — is also our pain because we are brothers and sisters,” said Ferrari.

But immigration has not been the only issue raised by the tour. In Houston, the delegation visited a dialysis center for people without insurance that The Metropolitan Organization of Houston advocated for, and in Pittsburgh, Ferrari heard from local labor and environmental leaders about the challenges of abandoned gas wells and the transformation of the energy economy.

In San Diego, the delegation joined diocesan-backed teams to accompany immigrants to court hearings and ICE check-ins. Ferrari said that he was moved by witnessing immigrants’ initial tears of fear and pain become tears of solidarity when they knew they would be joined by the volunteers.

In Monterey Bay, California, the delegation toured rural farm-working communities and attended an event at a Catholic parish to enroll immigrants without legal status in public healthcare, an initiative that the local Industrial Areas Foundation affiliate Communities Organized for Relational Power in Action had fought for.

Liz Hall, who is the supervising organizer for the IAF in Monterey Bay, recalled Ferrari’s comments that the healthcare initiative showed “the miracle of solidarity.”

“ I don’t think he realized how much that meant to the people in the room to hear someone who came from the Vatican to this very rural, kind of forgotten part of the state” say those words, Hall said. 

In Los Angeles, Ferrari’s delegation attended a public hearing hosted by local IAF affiliate One LA where immigrants shared their experiences of the mass deportation campaign, including witnessing violent detentions.

Emily, a 21-year-old college student studying civil engineering who asked to be identified by her first name because she does not have legal immigration status, said if she had not already enrolled in university, fear of sharing her information would have prevented her from studying.

“I fear that I might just be studying in class, and because universities are public spaces, they could just come in and unfortunately just get us,” she told RNS. 

Testifying to that experience publicly for the first time at the parish she has attended since she arrived from Mexico as a baby was “vulnerable” but empowering, she said. “I just felt so much better, so much, for me to know there were more people (experiencing this) and that the church actually cared about us,” she said.

Robert Hoo, the lead organizer for One LA, said that the impact is widespread. “ It’s recognizing that the Vatican is watching, that the world is watching, that their stories are important not just to themselves and their communities, but that everybody is aware about the injustices that are happening.”

Ortencia Ramirez, a One LA leader who co-chaired the hearing, fought to hold back tears at hearing the experiences of her community. But she too felt hope because of the connection to Leo. “We asked them to take what they observed with the IAF back to the pope, and they agreed that they would,” she said.

The delegation also participated in a panel of organizers hosted at Dolores Mission, an organizing base for another interfaith group working on immigration, LA Voice, part of the Faith in Action network. Angel Mortel, a lead organizer for the group, said they shared about their efforts to pass California bills imposing high taxes on private immigration detention companies and remove state financial benefits from companies involved in or investing in detention.

For Mortel, the collaboration between LA Voice, One LA and the archdiocese of LA to plan the trip also brought hope for the future. “ This was the first time in my eight years with LA Voice that we’ve done something together,” she said. “ Without that collaboration, it’s just too big a task to take on — to take on the forces that are coming down on us,” she said.

Flores said that connections, resource-sharing and opportunities for formation will be some of the long-lasting impacts of Ferrari’s tour, especially because of the presence of Piscoya, a representative of the Latin American bishops’ conference.

In the majority of cities, Ferrari also met with the local Catholic bishop, and in the few cities where the bishop was unavailable, a staff member.

In Houston, Elizabeth Valdez, director of the IAF in Texas, said that Ferrari and his team were impressed by the key roles that clergy play in forming lay people to be leaders in organizing. “ They had not seen or experienced that anywhere before, even in the visits that they’ve done in other parts of the country,” she said.

But even visiting 21 different cities and regions, Ferrari regretted the parts of the U.S. that he and his delegation were unable to visit. “ We have so much work to do worldwide, so we will be back surely,” he said.

(The Conversation) — When the Pentagon cut roughly 180 faiths from its religious affiliation codes, shrinking the list from more than 200 categories to 31 in May 2026, it folded “Native American religion” into the broader category of “other religion” – one of many faiths the change pushes out of the military’s view.

As a scholar of Native American and Indigenous Studies, I recognize this kind of change as part of a long-running pattern. Native traditions have repeatedly been acknowledged in principle – named, counted, formally recognized – but weakly protected in practice.

What the codes convey

Religious affiliation codes are short entries in a service member’s record in the Pentagon’s central demographics database. They are separate from dog tags, the metal identification tags worn around the neck, on which service members can still list any religion they choose.

A Pentagon spokesperson said the change was meant to fix a bloated system, noting that 82% of religious service members used only a handful of the codes.

The codes serve a real purpose. They let the military estimate how many service members practice a given faith, assign chaplains trained in that tradition, and plan for religious holidays, dietary restrictions and burial rites. Most service members fall into a few large categories, the various Christian denominations, along with Judaism and Islam, that are numerous enough to have their own trained chaplains.

The service members outside those categories are the least likely to have a chaplain who knows their tradition. For them, a distinct code is often the only thing that makes their needs visible to the institution at all.

Removing the small codes does not consolidate a scattered population. It makes that population harder to see and therefore harder to staff for, plan around and justify spending on.

The Army’s roughly 1,300 active-duty chaplains represent five faith groups — Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist. For a service member whose faith falls outside those categories, distinct code is often the only thing that tells the military they are there at all, and without that count, there is no trigger to train a chaplain or plan for their ceremonies. None serve Native traditions.

A history of restriction

For much of U.S. history, federal policy did not merely misunderstand Native religious life, but suppressed it. The Religious Crimes Code of 1883 restricted ceremonies such as the Sun Dance, a dayslong ritual of prayer, fasting and sacrifice central to communal renewal among tribal nations including the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho. The code criminalized traditional healers, who could be jailed for offering spiritual guidance. That ban held for over 50 years.

A Sun Dance ceremony at Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho.
National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia Commons

Boarding schools pursued the same goal. From the late 19th century, the government sent Native children to schools built to replace Indigenous languages and belief systems with English and Christianity.

The explicit goal, as officials described it, was to dissolve Native nations’ distinct religious identities into a single American, and largely Protestant Christian, mold.

Why US law struggles to see Native religion

That project shaped which traditions U.S. institutions recognize as religion. American law absorbed a Protestant assumption about what religion looks like: individual belief, voluntary worship, clergy, congregations and sacred texts. That framework eventually extended to accommodate other traditions built on similar terms, including Catholicism, Judaism and Islam.

In practice, courts have read the First Amendment to protect what you believe and say far more robustly than where or how you practice, or rights that belong to a group.

For many Native peoples, sacred places are not interchangeable settings for worship, the way a Christian might enter any church of their denomination and find familiar liturgy. They are part of the practice itself. A mountain, river or village site may be central to a ceremony, and if destroyed, the practice tied to it can become impossible.

Congress appeared to recognize this in the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, which made it U.S. policy to protect the right of Native Americans, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians to exercise their traditional religions, including access to sacred sites.

Its limits became clear in the Supreme Court’s 1988 decision in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, a case over a proposed federal road through California’s Six Rivers National Forest, an area used for religious practices by Yurok, Karuk and Tolowa people. A government study found the road would seriously damage that use.

Yet the court held it did not violate the First Amendment’s free exercise clause, which protects the right to practice one’s religion freely, reasoning that the government was not coercing anyone; it was acting on its own land. But for the peoples who worshipped there, that land was the church.

What disappears when a category does

The Pentagon’s coding change is not the same kind of case as Lyng — no bulldozer threatens a sacred site. But it turns on the same question of visibility – whether an institution can identify a religious tradition, understand what its practice requires and plan for those needs well enough to protect it.

Native American and Alaska Native people serve in the military at a higher rate than any other ethnic group. About 19% have served, compared with roughly 14% of the overall population. That pattern has held since the Revolutionary War, from the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II to today’s active-duty ranks, even as Native nations endured broken treaties, dispossession and federal violence at the hands of the government.

Without a distinct code, the institution has no data on how many service members observe Native traditions.

Native religious identity isn’t a matter of one or the other – many practitioners also observe Christianity. A service member counted under a Christian code has the tribal dimension of their practice rendered invisible. The consequences are concrete.

In August 2024, the Army held what it called the first officially sanctioned Native American worship service in its history, a sage-smudging ceremony at Fort Gregg-Adams in Virginia, led not by a chaplain but by a soldier, Sgt. Jacob James, who first had to educate the post’s chaplains himself.

The Chief of Chaplains office then had to create a new accounting line just to fund it. Without a chaplain trained in the tradition, a lay leader can only do so much: No one can formally advise a commander on an accommodation or offer confidential counsel.

The result is a system that does not plan ahead; it responds only when someone is persistent enough to ask.

Restoring the category would not solve the larger problem. Native religious freedom requires more than paperwork. It requires institutions to recognize Indigenous traditions on their own terms, including those tied to land.

(Kerri J. Malloy, Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies, San José State University. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Many Jewish adults feel unsafe in the United States, a new AP-NORC poll finds, with a majority saying they feel less safe than they did before Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

The survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research points to how Jewish adults’ attitudes toward their own personal safety have changed over a relatively short period as more Americans became critical of the United States’ close alliance with Israel. The war in Gaza sparked U.S. protests over Israel’s military actions against the Palestinians in Gaza, and coincided with an increase in violent attacks against U.S. Jewish communities.

The findings highlight the vulnerability that many Jewish adults in the U.S. feel as bipartisan support for Israel erodes and significant divides emerge within the Jewish community about what constitutes antisemitism — particularly when it comes to protesting Israel.

A significant share of Jewish adults, about 3 in 10, say they or someone in their household has experienced physical assault, verbal abuse, online harassment or damaged property because of their Jewish background over the last year, according to the survey.

Hal Guberman, a 30-year-old in New Jersey, wears a kippah with some trepidation ever since a stranger in a passing car yelled a slur at him when he was walking down the street last year.

“That person, they don’t know anything about me. They don’t know my politics. They don’t know my beliefs. They don’t know my viewpoints,” Guberman said. “But they saw me being visibly Jewish, and they made an opinion about me.”

Jewish adults see prejudice against Jews as a serious problem, and many feel unsafe

About 6 in 10 Jewish adults say that prejudice against Jewish people is an “extremely” or “very” serious problem in the United States today, a view that is heightened among Jewish adults who say they are “extremely” or “very” emotionally attached to Israel.

About one-third of Jewish adults say they feel “very” or “somewhat” safe as a Jewish person in the U.S. today, while about one-third feel “very” or “somewhat” unsafe. The remaining roughly 3 in 10 say they feel neither safe nor unsafe. Those with a close connection to Israel or who identify as Jewish by religion — instead of saying they are religiously unaffiliated with a cultural, ethnic or family connection to Judaism — are more likely to feel threatened in the current environment.

About 6 in 10 Jewish adults say they feel “less safe” as a Jewish person in the U.S. than they did before Hamas’ 2023 attack, including about 7 in 10 of those who are religiously Jewish. About one-third of Jewish adults say they feel “about as safe” and very few feel safer.

Erin Baskin, a 36-year-old in Pennsylvania, said the Oct. 7 attacks didn’t change how safe she feels because she had her own experiences with prejudice before then.

“I’ve always grown up with antisemitism,” she said. “Among the rural community I’m in, they conflate Judaism with Zionism all the time. Unfortunately, that’s kind of been my experience. It’s nothing new.”

Some Jewish adults have grown wary of outwardly identifying themselves as Jewish following the Oct. 7 attacks, the survey found.

About 4 in 10 Jewish adults say they are “less likely” to wear, carry or display things that might identify them as a Jewish person than they were before Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. About half say they are “about as likely” and about 1 in 10 say they are “more likely.”

Caitlin Rosendorn, a 24-year-old in Illinois, said they used to wear a Star of David necklace, but now worries that wearing it could give people the incorrect impression that they support Israel’s attacks against the Palestinian people.

“I don’t want to wear a Star of David to work if that’s going to alienate somebody who sees the Star of David as a symbol of Israel as opposed to a symbol of Judaism,” Rosendorn said. “I don’t want people to get the wrong idea about my views.”

Many Jews report physical assault, property damage or harassment

About 1 in 10 Jewish adults say that in the past year, they or someone in their household has been physically assaulted. A similar share had property damaged or destroyed specifically because of their Jewish background.

About 2 in 10 Jewish adults say they or someone in their household has been called a slur, threatened, verbally harassed or verbally abused. Similarly, about 2 in 10 say they experienced online harassment or cyberbullying. Overall, about 3 in 10 of Jewish adults say that they or someone in their household has experienced at least one of these incidents because of their Jewish background.

Jewish adults who attend religious services at least once a month are much likelier than Jewish adults overall to say they or someone in their household has experienced attacks or harassment over their Jewish background — a finding that comes as there have been several targeted attacks on Jewish religious spaces in recent years.

Slightly less than half of Jewish adults who frequently attend religious services say they or someone in their household has faced verbal harassment. A similar share experienced online harassment, and about one-quarter have dealt with physical attacks or property damage.

Jon Kessler, 38, of California, who grew up in the Conservative tradition of Judaism, believes non-Jews might be surprised at the extent to which Jewish adults have to consider security at community events.

“Most people when they go to church don’t have armed security, but every synagogue has an armed security guard,” Kessler said. “My son’s Jewish daycare has an armed security guard.”

Jews are divided over whether protesting Israel is a form of antisemitism

Protests surrounding speakers tied to Israel — whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanahyu’s address to Congress or college speakers seen as either too supportive or too critical of the country — became more common following the backlash over Israel’s war in Gaza.

Jewish adults, in particular, are divided over whether protesting an event related to Israel is an act of prejudice against Jewish people generally. About half of Jewish adults say anti-Israel protests are not a form of antisemitism, but roughly 4 in 10 say they are.

Many anti-Israel protests have been tied to criticism of Israel’s military action in Gaza. More than 73,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza since Israel retaliated against Hamas’ attack in 2023, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between civilian and militant deaths.

About two-thirds of Jewish adults say criticizing Israel for its military actions is not a form of antisemitism, but Jewish adults with a close emotional connection to Israel are more likely to say that criticism of Israel’s military actions is antisemitic. That said, relatively few Jewish adults say it’s antisemitic just to criticize Israel for “any reason.”

Americans overall are less likely to say it’s antisemitic to protest an event that is supportive of Israel, or to criticize Israel’s military actions — but they are also much less likely to have an opinion.

Jewish adults are more unified in deeming some actions as definitively antisemitic. The overwhelming majority say vandalizing synagogues or Jewish-owned businesses because of Israel’s actions is antisemitism. The same goes for denying the reality or scope of the Holocaust, putting responsibility for Israel’s actions on Jewish people in the United States, saying Israel shouldn’t exist as a Jewish state or claiming American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the U.S.

There is less consensus among non-Jewish U.S. adults on whether some of these actions constitute antisemitism, with many saying they’re not sure.

Amanda Goldsmith, 53, who lives in Chicago, believes people have become too comfortable expressing antisemitic views online — something that she previously thought only existed in extremist spaces.

“Now, it seems like there was an undercurrent, and it’s a free-for-all, and everyone is free to say what they want,” she said. “The freedom with which people say horrible things about Jewish people is appalling.”

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This story has been corrected to show that Caitlin Rosendorn uses they/them pronouns.

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Associated Press writers Giovanna Dell’Orto in Minneapolis and Peter Smith in Pittsburgh contributed to this report.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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The AP-NORC poll of 3,040 adults was conducted June 11-17 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The poll included interviews with 1,022 Jewish adults. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 2.8 percentage points and the margin of sampling error for Jewish adults is plus or minus 5.0 percentage points.

GURDASPUR, India (AP) — As dusk settled over Gurdaspur’s fields, villagers gathered in the courtyard of a Sikh temple to watch a movie that has been blocked by Indian officials.

“Satluj” tells the true tale of a human rights activist who investigated thousands of disappearances and extrajudicial killings during a government crackdown on a separatist insurgency in India’s Punjab state in the 1980s and early 1990s.

At the screening in Gurdaspur, elderly survivors of the insurgency sat beside teenagers born years after it ended. When the screen flickered to life and “Satluj” movie began, the crowd fell silent.

Originally titled “Punjab 95,” the movie was stalled for three years after India’s censor board demanded more than 120 cuts. After failing to secure a theatrical release, it debuted on the ZEE5 streaming platform last week, but was removed in India two days later.

The takedown had an unintended consequence.

Across villages in Punjab, Sikh organizations, local activists and residents have begun organizing community screenings using copies that have circulated online. The screenings have transformed Sikh temple compounds and village halls into makeshift cinemas where audiences watch not just a film but a retelling of memories of one of India’s bloodiest internal conflicts.

Spotlight on Punjab’s insurgency

“Satluj” draws on the life of rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, whose investigation into alleged extrajudicial killings exposed one of the darkest episodes of Punjab’s insurgency. The conflict pitted Sikh militant groups seeking an independent Khalistan against Indian security forces and claimed thousands of civilian, militant and police lives.

During the insurgency, rights groups documented allegations of enforced disappearances, custodial killings and secret cremations. Khalra’s investigation alleged that thousands of people who had disappeared were cremated anonymously by police without informing their families or maintaining official records.

Khalra was abducted in 1995 and later killed. Several police officers were convicted in connection with his murder.

Although the insurgency was crushed and support for Khalistan waned within Punjab, the Indian government continues to view separatist sentiment as a national security concern. It has not publicly explained why the film was removed, but officials told local media they ordered it taken down on security grounds.

Local organized screenings

The public screenings take shape through grassroots cooperation. Residents arrange for projectors, audio speakers and power generators, Sikh temples and village community spaces become open-air theaters for an evening, and volunteers spread the word from one household to the next.

Inderjeet Singh Bains, who helps coordinate screenings in Gurdaspur district, said the initiative aimed to create spaces where people can watch together and reflect on a period of Punjab’s history that continues to resonate across generations.

“When we screen the film, we see our elders and mothers, many of them 60 or 70 years old, crying because they have lost their sons. Our people have endured immense suffering,” Bains said.

Gurmukh Singh, who attended a screening, said the film gave voice to stories the young in Punjab had heard only in fragments. For families in his village, he said, the insurgency was not history but lived experience, with many losing loved ones in the violence.

“After watching the movie, there is a feeling of the grief our earlier generations had to bear,” Singh said.

Movie fuels censorship debate

The takedown of “Satluj” has reopened a debate over artistic freedom in India, where films have increasingly run into censorship battles under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government. Critics have said such cases have become more frequent and accuse Modi’s government of promoting films that align with its nationalist narrative.

“Everything happened right before our eyes, so what is there to oppose? The truth is coming to light, and people should be allowed to see it,” said Balwinder Singh, a Sikh religious leader.

The government says movie certification decisions are made independently under the law.

In a statement, ZEE5 said the film would no longer be available for viewing in India “in light of current developments.” It added that it would explore “every appropriate avenue through due process” to restore it.

Audiences revisit painful memories

Diljit Dosanjh, the lead actor who plays Khalra, said he was unconcerned about whether the film remained online because once audiences had seen it, “it cannot be erased.”

That sentiment appears to be playing out in Punjab’s villages.

Inside the temple compound in Gurdaspur, the audience watched scenes of police killings, crackdowns and families searching for answers. Afterwards, many lingered in conversation, comparing the film with the real-life memories they had carried for decades.

Pawan Deep Kaur described the film as a heartbreaking portrayal of the suffering endured by the older generation.

“It made us cry endlessly,” she said.

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Saaliq reported from New Delhi.