Gurugram: Rape convict and Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh stepped out of Rohtak’s Sunaria jail around 6 am Tuesday on a 21-day furlough. This is the 17th time in 9 years he has secured a temporary release from prison.
A convoy of two Land Cruisers, two Fortuners, two Innovas and two police escort vehicles took him to the Dera headquarters in Sirsa, where he arrived by 8 am.
This marks his third release of the year. He spent 40 days out on parole in January and another 30 days in May, returning to Sunaria on 25 June. Barely two months since, he is out again.
A special CBI court in Panchkula had convicted Ram Rahim on 25 August 2017 for raping two of his disciples. He is serving a 20-year sentence.
Two murder cases against him both ended in acquittal by the Punjab and Haryana High Court after his conviction by the Special CBI Court at Panchkula. One of those verdicts though, the Ramchander Chhatrapati murder case, is now being contested in the Supreme Court.
He was convicted in 2021 of conspiring to kill Dera manager Ranjit Singh, a case in which a CBI court had sentenced him to life. The Punjab and Haryana High Court overturned that conviction in May 2024, calling the underlying investigation weak and inconsistent.
In the murder of journalist Ramchander Chhatrapati, who was shot dead in October 2002, a CBI court had sentenced Ram Rahim to life in January 2019. The editor of the newspaper Poora Sach was killed months after his publication carried an anonymous letter accusing the Dera chief of sexually exploiting a sadhvi.
That conviction too was quashed on 7 March this year by the Punjab & Haryana High Court. Chhatrapati’s son has since approached the Supreme Court challenging the acquittal. This month, the court agreed to hear the appeal.
A separate case, still at the trial stage, accuses Ram Rahim of orchestrating the forced castration of hundreds of his followers. The CBI’s 2018 chargesheet named him along with two doctors and alleged that the procedures were carried out inside the Dera campus and at two hospitals run by the sect. He was granted bail in that case.
Everything changed after a good conduct law
The frequency of these releases traces back to a change in state law by the Haryana government in 2022.
Haryana’s temporary-release framework had rested on a 1988 statute under which Ram Rahim did not qualify for such relief at all. His earliest exceptions, single-day releases in October 2020 and May 2021 to see his ailing mother, were arranged outside that law altogether.
Everything changed when the state replaced it with the Haryana Good Conduct Prisoners (Temporary Release) Act, 2022, which took effect that April.
Chhatrapati’s family and activists have long argued the rewrite was designed with Ram Rahim in mind. However, a Haryana prisons official has told ThePrint the update was meant only to simplify an unwieldy process. That releases still depend on documented good conduct.
Ranjit Singh Chautala, Haryana’s Jail Minister from 2019 to 2024, had told The Print earlier that the 2022 Act caps parole at 70 days a year, split across two spells, and a 21-day furlough, and insisted that none of it breaches any rule.
The pattern has repeatedly drawn judicial scrutiny. Examining a full tally of Ram Rahim’s releases, a Punjab and Haryana High Court bench in February 2024 remarked that the record made for striking reading given the nature of his convictions, and later barred the state from granting him any further parole without its clearance.
However, on 9 August that year, the HC bench disposed of a petition by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) against Ram Rahim’s temporary release, observing that a plea for the same be considered by the competent authority without any “arbitrariness or favouritism”, practically giving a go-ahead to the releases.
An appeal to this order by the committee, alleging misuse of the 2022 Act, was dismissed by the Supreme Court in February 2025.
Several of the releases have coincided closely with election season, a pattern critics have not let go unremarked.
His three-week furlough in February 2022 landed just ahead of the Punjab Assembly polls; his parole that June came before Haryana’s municipal elections; and his release in October 2024 preceded the Haryana Assembly election by days.
Sudesh Kumari, general secretary of the Jan Sangharsh Manch, whose members first brought the allegations against Ram Rahim to light in 2002, has questioned how much weight a good-conduct certificate can carry when it is issued by officials answerable to the state government.
“The BJP government’s record is unmatched in doublespeak. On one hand, it is shouting from the top accusing the Opposition of not supporting its bid to provide reservation to women in the Parliament and State Assembly, though everyone knows nothing stops it from giving reservation and they are trying to do something else under its garb. On the other hand, the BJP government is making every effort to help a convicted rapist remain out of the prison for a major part of the year,” Kumari alleged, speaking to The Print Tuesday.
Taken together, Ram Rahim’s time outside prison has added up considerably—91 of 216 days in 2025 alone, and more than 450 days across the last five years.
(Edited by Niyati Kothiyal)
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