More than seven years after being convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, the chief of the Dera Sacha Sauda sect, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh has been acquitted by the Punjab and Haryana High Court in the murder case of journalist Ram Chander Chhatrapati.
The order has been passed on Saturday, 7th March by a Division Bench headed by Chief Justice Sheel Nagu and Justice Vikram Aggarwal while hearing appeals against the 2019 conviction.
The High Court set aside Ram Rahim’s conviction in the case but upheld the conviction of three other accused. The detailed judgment is yet to be released, though the operative part of the order was pronounced in open court.
The case dates back to October 2002, when Chhatrapati, who ran the newspaper Poora Sach, was shot outside his residence. He had earlier published an anonymous letter describing the sexual exploitation of women followers at the Dera Sacha Sauda headquarters in Sirsa. The killing later triggered a major investigation and eventually brought Ram Rahim under the scanner.
Initially, the case was handled by the state police, which filed a chargesheet in 2002 against the other accused but did not name the Dera chief. Later, the probe was handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation, which filed charges against Ram Rahim as well. In January 2019, a special CBI court in Panchkula convicted Ram Rahim and three others, sentencing them to life imprisonment and imposing a fine of ₹50,000.
During the appeal before the High Court, Ram Rahim argued that he had been wrongly implicated by the CBI. His lawyers claimed that the first chargesheet did not name him and that the later allegations of conspiracy were created through statements attributed to a witness, Khatta Singh. They also argued that one of the accused, Krishan Lal, had been tortured by investigators.
A major point of debate during the hearings was the bullet recovered from Chhatrapati’s body. The court closely examined a fired “Lapua” soft-lead bullet which carried markings said to be made by a forensic expert. The judges physically inspected the bullet to check whether it could have been accessed earlier despite being kept in a plastic container sealed with intact AIIMS seals.
The defence argued that since both seals on the container were intact, no one could have opened it before it was produced in court. This raised questions about how the Forensic Science Laboratory expert could have examined the bullet earlier. The prosecution said the expert had clearly stated in court that he had opened the container and carried out the examination, including test firing of the weapon.
Senior advocates R. Basant, RS Rai, Amit Jhanji, Ashwani Kumar and Gautam Dutt assisted the court during the hearings. Senior advocate RS Bains represented the complainant’s side, while special public prosecutors Ravi Kamal Gupta and Akashdeep Singh appeared for the CBI.
The High Court had reserved its verdict in September last year after hearing all parties involved in the case..
Despite the acquittal, Ram Rahim will remain in jail. Since August 2017, he has been lodged in Sunaria jail in Rohtak after being convicted and sentenced to 20 years of imprisonment for raping two women followers.
