CHANDIGARH: Punjab and Haryana high court’s exoneration of jailed Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim on March 7 in the 2002 murder of journalist Ram Chander Chhatrapati comes with a scathing indictment of CBI’s investigation – coercion of a key witness, failure to cross-examine the police officer who recorded the victim’s dying declaration and a conspiracy angle built on evidence that couldn’t stand scrutiny.Journalist may have been murdered by some followers of the Dera head: HCThe division bench of Chief Justice Sheel Nagu and Justice Vikram Aggarwal said Chhatrapati may have been murdered by some followers of the Dera head, noting that it wasn’t uncommon for people driven by “excessive and single-minded zeal” to “cross legal boundaries in the name of faith”. “The trial court should have closely examined whether there was overwhelming evidence directly implicating the Dera chief, or whether the crime could have been carried out independently by some of his staunch followers,” states the 113-page order, made public Monday on the court’s website.In its hurry to wrap up the case, CBI forced the witness mentioned in the order — Ram Rahim’s former driver Khatta Singh — into making a statement that compromised the integrity of the probe, the bench said.It also flagged the absence of Haryana Police SI Ram Chander from the witness stand as a glaring example of the prosecution’s questionable “methodology”. The officer had recorded Chhatrapati’s statement at PGI-Rohtak on Oct 26, 2002, before he died of gunshot wounds. “It is extremely strange that this very important witness was given up =by the prosecution as being unnecessary,” the order states. “In the opinion of this court, he was the most important witness… In so far as Ram Rahim is concerned, since the charge is only that of criminal conspiracy, the version of SI Ram Chander would be of extreme importance.”The judges said the intention may have been to implicate the Dera chief in the journalist’s murder, which “was not being fulfilled with the statement recorded by SI Ram Chander”. “In any case, doubt is created in the mind of the court once such an important statement is not brought on record, and such an important witness is not examined. The benefit of the doubt necessarily must go to the accused,” states the acquittal order.Conflicting statements by Khatta Singh, too, cast doubt on Ram Rahim’s involvement in the murder, the bench said. “He (Khatta) chose to remain silent for a number of years and then kept tossing from one side to the other like a ping-pong ball. Even on Dec 26, 2006, when he opened up for the first time, he did not implicate the Dera chief and talked only about the Ranjit Singh murder case,” the order states. “If he was under threat, it is not understood why he was under threat only in this case and not in the Ranjit Singh case, in which he stated that a conspiracy had been hatched by Dera chief.”Overturning the special court’s life sentence against Ram Rahim, the verdict acknowledges that being “a prominent public personality with both supporters and detractors” could influence the narrative surrounding criminal allegations against that person. There is a “greater possibility” that those convicted of “executing” the killing – Krishan Lal, Nirmal and Kuldeep Singh – acted on their own rather than on instructions of the Dera head, it states.
