Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence in Haryana’s Sunaria jail, has been granted parole for 40 days, the police said on Friday. Rohtak Superintendent of Police Udai Singh Meena said though parole has been granted, Singh is yet to be released from jail.
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Dera spokesperson Jitender Khurana, however, said the sect has not received any information on the release of “guruji”. “An application was moved for 40 days’ parole. The terms and conditions for the parole and the place of his stay during this period will be known only after he is released,” he said.
Singh’s release comes ahead of the Adampur Assembly bypoll on November 3. The Dera chief was earlier granted furlough for 21 days to meet his family in Gurugram in February, which coincided with the Punjab Assembly election. In June, he again came out of prison on a month-long parole and stayed at an ashram in Uttar Pradesh’s Baghpat.
Singh has been lodged in Sunaria jail since 2017 when a special CBI court in Panchkula convicted him for raping two women disciples at his ashram in Sirsa, where the sect is headquartered. Last October, a special CBI court sentenced the Dera chief and four others to life imprisonment 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 journalist more than 16 years ago.