Dera Sacha Sauda chief Ram Rahim granted 40-day parole
Ram Rahim left the jail early in the morning and headed to the Sirsa headquarters of the dera in a motorcade. This is his 14th temporary release from the jail since 2020.
'The parole is as per the law and Ram Rahim Singh will stay at his Sirsa-headquartered dera during his parole,' Dera spokesperson and advocate Jitender Khurana said.
The dera head, who will turn 58 on August 15, was convicted in 2017 for raping two of his disciples. He along with three others were also convicted in 2019 for the murder of a journalist more than 16 years ago.
Ram Rahim's parole and furloughs have been a matter of contention and raised by the families of the victims. Following the grant of the 40-day parole, the dera head has exhausted the count of days he is allowed to stay out of the prison in a calendar year by getting temporary release mandated under the law for a convicted prisoner which is 10 weeks of parole and 21 days of furlough.
He was granted a 21-day furlough in April and a 30-day parole in January, ahead of the February 5 Delhi assembly elections. By the time he returns to Sunaria jail at the end of his parole, he would have been out of prison for three months this year.
In all, he has spent 326 days out of jail so far.
He was granted a 20-day parole on October 1 last year, days before the October 5 Haryana assembly polls.
In August last year, he was granted a 21-day furlough. He was granted a three-week furlough from February 7, 2022, barely two weeks before the Punjab assembly elections.
Sikh organisations, such as the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, have criticised the grant of relief to the dera head in the past.
On most of the 13 occasions in the past when he was out of jail, he remained at the dera's ashram in Barnawa in Uttar Pradesh's Baghpat.
In May last year, the Punjab and Haryana high court had acquitted him and four others in the 2002 murder of the sect's former manager Ranjit Singh, citing 'tainted and sketchy investigation'. Earlier, a special CBI court had sentenced them to life imprisonment in the nearly 20-year-old murder case. It held the dera head guilty of hatching a criminal conspiracy with his co-accused.
The Dera Sacha Sauda has a number of followers in Haryana's Sirsa, Fatehabad, Kurukshetra, Kaithal and Hisar districts and adjoining areas of Punjab and Rajasthan besides western UP. (With PTI inputs)
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