Head of the Dera Sacha Sauda Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, who is currently serving 20 years imprisonment in Sunaria jail of district Rohtak in Haryana, has been granted parole for 40 days.
The Dera chief had earlier come out of prison on month-long parole in June this year. Prior to that, he was granted three weeks’ furlough in February this year, ahead of the Punjab assembly elections.
It may be recalled that the Dera head is serving a 20-year jail term for raping two women disciples at his ashram in Sirsa, the Dera headquarter. He was convicted by a special CBI court in Panchkula in August 2017.
Aside from the case mentioned above, the Dera head was also convicted along with four others last year for hatching a conspiracy to kill Ranjit Singh, a Dera manager, in 2002.
The Dera chief and three others were also convicted in 2019 for the murder of a Sirsa-based journalist Ram Chander Chhatrapati, about 16 years ago.
Even though the Dera is based at Sirsa – adjacent to Hisar district, of which the Adampur segment is a part – it has a vast influence in not only Haryana and Punjab but Rajasthan too, and the Dera has for long tacitly supported different political parties in the region where it has a huge number of its followers.
