{"id":28098,"date":"2017-09-25T18:03:47","date_gmt":"2017-09-25T12:33:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/?p=28098"},"modified":"2017-09-25T18:06:46","modified_gmt":"2017-09-25T12:36:46","slug":"gurmeet-ram-rahim-singh-moves-punjab-haryana-hc-rape-conviction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/india-news\/gurmeet-ram-rahim-singh-moves-punjab-haryana-hc-rape-conviction\/","title":{"rendered":"Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh moves Punjab &#038; Haryana HC against rape conviction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The Dera chief was sentenced to 20 years in jail by a special CBI court in Panchkula last month for raping two of his female followers in 2002<\/p>\n<p>Rapist godman, Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, moved the Punjab and Haryana high court,\u00a0<span data-term=\"goog_1618816322\">on Monday<\/span>, against the Panchkula special CBI court\u2019s verdict which had on\u00a0<span data-term=\"goog_1618816323\">August 25<\/span>\u00a0held him guilty of raping two of his female followers in 2002.<\/p>\n<p>The Dera chief, who is currently lodged in Rohtak\u2019s Sunaria Jail, has held that the allegations made against him by the two rape survivors are false. Recently dubbed as a \u201csex addict\u201d by a team of doctors who attended to him in the Sunaria Jail, Gurmeet Ram Rahim has appealed against his conviction on the ground that he is \u201cimpotent and thus not capable of\u201d engaging in physical relations \u2013 a claim that he had also made before the special CBI court.<\/p>\n<p>The Dera chief\u2019s appeal, filed in the <a href=\"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/topic\/Punjab\"><strong>Punjab<\/strong><\/a> and Haryana HC by his counsel SK Narvana, has not yet been listed for hearing.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe have filed an appeal challenging the conviction in the high court,\u201d said SK Narwana, adding: \u201cThere are number of material issues on which the appeal has been filed. One of them is that medical examination of the girls (the two rape survivors) was never conducted and also there was no FIR lodged by them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The case against the rapist godman had been initiated in 2002 at the behest of the Punjab and Haryana high court which had taken suo motu cognizance of a letter written by one of the two rape survivors to then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in which the woman \u2013 a sadhvi at the Dera headquarters in Sirsa, had given a detailed account of how she and other women had been sexually exploited by Gurmeet Ram Rahim.<\/p>\n<p>The Punjab and Haryana high court had directed the CBI to register a case of sexual exploitation against the Dera chief based on allegations made out in this letter, following which the second rape survivor had also filed a complaint citing similar charges against <a href=\"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/topic\/gurmeet-ram-rahim-singh\"><strong>Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh<\/strong><\/a>. The trial against the Dera chief had begun in 2008, and he was charged under Section 376 (rape) and Section 506 (criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code.<\/p>\n<p>The time gap between the registration of case against the rapist godman and the purported rapes is another ground that the Dera chief\u2019s counsels seek to use in his favour during proceedings in the appeal filed by them.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe victims, after more than six years had got their statements recorded before the CBI. These were never placed on record,\u201d Narvana said\u00a0<span data-term=\"goog_1618816324\">on Monday<\/span>.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The Dera chief was sentenced to 20 years in jail by a special CBI court in Panchkula last month for raping two of his female followers in 2002 Rapist godman, Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, moved the Punjab and Haryana high court,\u00a0on Monday, against the Panchkula special CBI court\u2019s verdict which had [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":28101,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1497],"tags":[22130,18241,19333],"yst_prominent_words":[22115,5480,17594,22116,22113,22114,17590,17586,17587,17691,4030,17595,17593,17597,17589,17588,18277,17927,6363,17925],"ppma_author":[140543],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/d2r2ijn7njrktv.cloudfront.net\/apnlive\/uploads\/2017\/09\/Gurmeet-Ram-RAhim-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"authors":[{"term_id":140543,"user_id":4,"is_guest":0,"slug":"apnnewsdesk","display_name":"APN Live","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/478eacb893eda88aa6ed8d99b005bf58?s=96&r=g"}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28098"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28098"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=28098"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=28098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<!-- html is corrupted -->