Cong govt framing followers to get political mileage: Dera committee
Says successive regimes targeting sect for pledging support to their rival parties
CHANDIGARH: The Dera Sacha Sauda’s state committee on Monday said the Punjab Police’s ongoing probe into alleged sacrilege of Guru Granth Sahib was a conspiracy of the Capt Amarinder Singh-led Congress government to defame the sect to get political mileage.
In a first press conference ever since the investigation into the 2015 desecration incidents started, members of the dera’s Punjab committee said the “government of the day” is carrying out a shady probe into the cases for reasons best known to it.
“Maybe it’s the dera’s call to support the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) in the previous elections that the sect followers are being implicated to get even with us,” said Harcharan Singh, a state committee member.
“The successive governments have settled scores with the sect for supporting their rival parties. In 2002 and 2012, we supported the Congress but SAD came to power. At that time too, efforts were made to implicate the dera followers in false cases,” said Harcharan, who was accompanied by fellow member Kewal Brar and dera lawyer Vivek Kumar
The committee members alleged that such was the desperation of the present government to frame the sect followers in the sacrilege cases that it was for the first time in India’s justice system that the police’s special investigation team (SIT) conducted a false and parallel probe when the CBI was already looking into the matter.
“Case files and the FIRs are still with the CBI, which has given a clean chit to the dera followers. But the SIT ignored the probe and arrested our people to file a chargesheet in these cases. The SIT appears to have worked on flimsy grounds just to show the dera’s involvement in these cases,” said the dera lawyer.
The CBI probe has found Mohinder Pal Singh Bittu, who was named as the main accused in the cases by the SIT, and other accused to be innocent, Vivek Kumar said.
Bittu was murdered in a Patiala jail last year.
“The sect followers were tortured in police custody and were compelled to give written statements claiming their involvement in sacrilege. But when the accused offered the CBI to conduct their narco test, the agency found them innocent. How can there be such difference in the probes conducted by the two agencies?” he questioned.
The committee members said even the Ranjit Singh commission constituted by the Amarinder Singh government to look into the sacrilege case did not conduct an independent probe and instead relied upon fabricated theories of SIT.
They claimed that the SIT’s recent move to name sect head Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh in the case was highly condemnable and shows that the government can go to any extent to show the dera in a bad light.
“The government is trying to create a divide among different faiths and it will only spoil communal harmony in Punjab,” they added.