The Punjab and Haryana High Court has acquitted Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh in the 2002 murder case of journalist Ram Chander Chhatrapati, dealing a significant blow to the Central Bureau of Investigation. The ruling was delivered by a division bench comprising Chief Justice Sheel Nagu and Justice Vikram Aggarwal.
The acquittal comes seven years after a special CBI court convicted Ram Rahim in 2019 and sentenced him to life imprisonment along with a fine of ₹50,000.
Journalist Ram Chander Chhatrapati, who ran the newspaper Poora Sach, was shot at point-blank range by two assailants outside his residence on the night of October 24, 2002. The killing took place months after his newspaper published an anonymous letter alleging that Gurmeet Ram Rahim had sexually exploited women who had joined the sect as sadhvis.
Before the court, the Dera chief argued that he had been falsely implicated in the murder. Notably, the first chargesheet in the case had been filed against three other accused Nirmal, Kuldeep, and Krishan Lal and none of them had named Singh as a co-conspirator in the murder plot.
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Despite the acquittal, Ram Rahim will continue to remain behind bars. He is currently serving a 20-year sentence at Sunaria Jail in Rohtak, Haryana, following his 2017 conviction for raping two of his disciples. In May 2024, he was also acquitted in another case the 2002 murder of former Dera manager Ranjit Singh.
Ram Rahim has been granted parole or furlough on 15 separate occasions, accumulating over 250 days outside prison. The sect chief is known to command considerable political influence across party lines, with a strong voter base among OBC and Dalit communities in Punjab and Haryana. He is widely regarded as capable of swaying electoral outcomes in as many as 30 assembly constituencies across the two states.
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