SIT files chargesheet against six Dera followers in 2015 sacrilege case

Balwant Garg
Tribune News Service
Faridkot, July 9

A new Special Investigation Team (SIT) investigating three sacrilege cases of 2015 filed its first chargesheet naming six people on Friday.

The chargesheet was filed before a magistrate’s court, which will hear the case on July 20.

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This new chargesheet pertains to the incident of October 12, 2015, when some torn pages of the Guru Granth Sahib was found strewn near a gurdwara at Faridkot’s Bargari village. The pages were supposedly part of a “Bir” that was stolen from a gurdwara at Burj Jawahar Singh Wala village on June 1, 2015. The chargesheet names Sukhjinder Singh alias Sunny, Shakti Singh, Ranjit Singh alias Bhola, Baljit Singh, Nishan Singh, and Pardeep Singh, all followers of the Dera Sacha Sauda, a Sirsa-based sect. All six were arrested on May 16 this year.

Three other suspects in the case remain at large.

Punjab Police had registered a case in the incident under Sections 295 (Defiling place of worship), Section 295-A (Act intended to outrage religious feelings), 153-A (promoting enmity between groups), 201 (disappearance of evidence), and 120-B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code.  The state government, then ruled by SAD-BJP with Akali veteran Parkash Badal at the helm, had handed investigations into the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation on November 2, 2015. Chief Minister Amarinder Singh’s government however took back the investigation through a notification on September 6, 2018—over a year after it won the state with a resounding mandate.

Reluctant to part with the case, the CBI had opposed the notification and, on July 4, 2019, submitted a closure report to a CBI court at Mohali even while Punjab Police’s SIT—the one instituted before the current team—continued to make parallel inquires into the cases.

As opposing investigations continued, suspects in the case approached the Punjab and Haryana High Court challenging SIT’s mandate. After the high court ordered to the case to be transferred to a new SIT on January 4, 2021, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh instituted the current team under SPSS Parmar, IGP Border Range.