Gurugram: Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh was Tuesday acquitted in his dera manager Ranjit Singh’s murder case by the Punjab and Haryana High Court, which cited a “tainted and sketchy investigation into the crime event by the investigating officer” while pronouncing its judgment. Four other convicts were also acquitted.
A division bench of Justice Sureshwar Thakur and Justice Lalit Batra Tuesday allowed an appeal filed by Ram Rahim against the order of a special CBI judge, Sushil Kumar Garg, who, in October 2021, convicted the five accused under sections 120-B (criminal conspiracy), 302 (murder) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code and sentenced them to life imprisonment.
In its 163-page detailed order, the HC bench alluded to media trials affecting the investigation, observing, “The intellectual strength of the investigating officer appears to become staticised by media publicity whereunder came the crime event besides also they collected evidence which is unworthy of credence (sic).”
The HC bench also said that the “case is a stark portrayal of the necessity of courts of law making an incisive and objective analyses, of the evidence as exist on record, rather than the said objective analyses becoming attempted to become stultified, through a pro active media trial becoming made of the purported incriminatory role of the accused vis-a-vis the crime event (sic)”.
Ram Rahim, however, will remain in jail since he is currently serving a 20-year jail term after his convictions in the rape of two of his disciples and the murder of journalist Ram Chander Chhatrapati, for which he received a life sentence, which will run after the end of the 20-year term. He is currently lodged in Sunaria jail in Rohtak, Haryana.
While acquitting Ram Rahim and Dera Sacha Sauda functionaries Jasbir Singh, Avtar Singh, Krishan Lal and Subdil Singh in Ranjit Singh’s murder case, the HC bench noted multiple lapses in the investigation, which made it faulty.
The car, allegedly used in the commission of the crime, was never seized; three of the witnesses said in their respective statements that four assailants carried firearms, but the CBI didn’t seize any of those weapons; also, the CBI didn’t prepare a site plan of the place where the accused allegedly hatched the murder conspiracy, did not collect any evidence about Kashish restaurant where a witness, Khattar Singh, allegedly saw two of the accused celebrating the murder, and failed to examine the owners or workers in the restaurant.
A witness said that his and another the clothes of another became smeared with blood stains while transporting the deceased to the hospital in a car, yet the investigating officer did not collect their clothes, the HC bench further said.
The HC bench also said that there was no identification parade of the accused despite two key witnesses saying they had previously not seen them; the postmortem report revealed four metallic pieces in the deceased’s brain, but the CBI still didn’t recover any of the bullets; and the polygraph tests on three of the accused lost their evidentiary potency because of the lack of clinching corroboration.
After the acquittals, the Dera Sacha Sauda, in a post on X, hailed the court’s judgment, saying the Dera has always believed in the judiciary, and the judiciary has given the Dera justice.
According to an FIR registered by the CBI in December 2003, following high court directions to the agency to investigate rape allegations against the dera chief, Ranjit Singh was shot dead on 10 July 2002 in Haryana’s Kurukshetra. Ram Rahim supposedly suspected that the deceased was behind the circulation of an anonymous letter highlighting the sexual exploitation of his female followers.
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Cases against Ram Rahim
In its order in October 2021, the special CBI court held that it’s proved beyond reasonable doubt that Ram Rahim, aggrieved by the circulation of the letter, conspired to murder Ranjit Singh with the other accused.
After the murder of Ranjit Singh, a Kurukshetra resident and a manager in Sirsa-based Dera Sacha Sauda, the police had given the dera a clean chit in the murder investigation. However, the victim’s son, Jagsir Singh, moved a petition in the Punjab and Haryana High Court in January 2003 seeking an investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation.
In its initial FIR, the CBI did not name Ram Rahim. However, his name was included in the FIR in 2006, based on the statement of Khattar Singh, a former driver of Ram Rahim. The special CBI court framed charges against Ram Rahim and four others in 2007 and sentenced the five to life imprisonment in October 2021.
While Ranjit Singh was a manager in Ram Rahim’s dera, his family members were the dera chief’s disciples. Things went topsy-turvy for the family when the anonymous letter, levelling allegations of sexual exploitation of dera sadhvis and addressed to the Prime Minister, the Chief Justice of India and other prominent functionaries, was circulated in 2002. Soon afterwards, Ranjit Singh resigned from his managerial post and left the dera with his family members.
According to the CBI chargesheet, Ram Rahim suspected that Ranjit Singh, whose sister was also a dera sadhvi, was behind making the anonymous letter public. The chargesheet said Ranjit Singh was summoned to the dera and threatened with dire consequences though he denied such a role.
Later, Poora Sach, an evening daily published in Sirsa, carried the anonymous letter. On 24 October 2002, Poora Sach editor Ram Chander Chhatrapati was shot at by two followers of the dera outside his Sirsa residence. Chhatrapati succumbed to his gunshot injuries 21 November 2002.
Ram Rahim’s conviction on two counts of rape came in August 2017, and his conviction in the murder of journalist Ram Chander Chhatrapati came in January 2019. The Dera chief then filed appeals in the high court against both convictions.
In another case, Ram Rahim stands accused of forcing over 400 male followers to castrate themselves by fooling them with a religious belief that it would lead to the realisation of God. In July 2012, Hans Raj Chauhan, a dera disciple, filed a petition in the high court alleging that he, along with over 400 others, were forced to undergo surgical removal of their testicles by Ram Rahim Singh from 1999-2000.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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