CHANDIGARH: Gurmeet Ram Rahim, a convict in rape and murder cases and the head of Dera Sacha Sauda (DSS) Sirsa, was released by the Haryana government on Wednesday morning on a 21-day parole. Earlier in January, the state government had granted him a 30-day parole.
With this, the controversial preacher has been released for a total of 142 days by the BJP government in the past one year, since January 20, 2024. This amounts to more than four months of release over a one-year period. With Wednesday’s release, he has been granted parole/furlough five times since January 2024, and a total of 13 times — adding up to 326 days — since October 24, 2020, when he first began receiving parole/furlough.
He was released from Sunaria jail in Rohtak on Wednesday and immediately left for his Dera headquarters in Sirsa. This is only the second time since his 2017 conviction in rape cases that he has been permitted to visit the Sirsa Dera. During his previous paroles or furloughs, he was not allowed to stay in Sirsa and was only permitted to reside at the Shah Satnam Ji Ashram of Dera Sacha Sauda in Barnava, Baghpat district, Uttar Pradesh.
Sources added that permission to stay in Sirsa was granted after receiving clearance from the district magistrate of Sirsa.
The Dera chief has been serving his sentence in Rohtak’s Sunaria jail since August 2017. On August 25, 2017, a special CBI court in Panchkula convicted him of raping two sadhvis (female disciples) and sentenced him to two 20-year prison terms. He is also serving a sentence in the murder case of a journalist.
Around 40 people lost their lives in August 2017 following large-scale violence in Panchkula and other parts of Haryana and Punjab after he was convicted in the rape case.