High Court Frees Ram Rahim in Murder Case — But Clears His Name of Nothing
The acquittal framed around three CBI failures — the unreliable witness, the unverified Satsang location, and the unexamined police officer.
The Punjab and Haryana High Court has acquitted the Dera Sacha Sauda chief in the 2002 killing of journalist Ram Chander Chhatrapati — not because it found him innocent, but because the CBI’s case fell apart on three fronts: a star witness who changed his story repeatedly, a key location that was never verified, and a crucial police officer the prosecution chose not to call.
A court can acquit without exonerating. That distinction sits at the centre of the Punjab and Haryana High Court’s March 7 judgment setting aside the life sentence imposed on Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh for the murder of journalist Ram Chander Chhatrapati. The bench did not declare him innocent. It concluded that the CBI had failed — across multiple, compounding failures — to prove his guilt to the standard the law demands.
Three other men convicted alongside Ram Rahim — the shooter, his accomplice, and a Dera manager who allegedly provided the weapon — had their convictions upheld. Against the Dera chief, charged separately with criminal conspiracy, the prosecution’s case was riddled with gaps the court could not overlook.
A Witness the Court Could Not Trust
The prosecution’s entire case against Ram Rahim rested on a single witness: Khatta Singh, described as the Dera chief’s personal driver. His account placed Ram Rahim at the scene of a conspiracy — a moment when the sight of a critical newspaper article, he claimed, provoked his employer into ordering the journalist’s elimination. The murder followed the next evening.
The problem was that Khatta Singh did not tell this story consistently. Even before formally giving his account to the CBI in June 2007 — nearly five years after the shooting — he had been filing applications before courts alleging that CBI officials were threatening to implicate him in murder cases unless he made a false statement against Ram Rahim. He then gave the statement. He then turned hostile at trial, withdrawing it. Years later, following Ram Rahim’s 2017 conviction in a separate rape case, he sought to be recalled as a witness and this time deposed in the CBI’s favour.
The High Court described this arc as a witness who kept switching sides. It also raised a pointed question: if Khatta Singh had stayed silent about Ram Rahim’s involvement in this case because of Dera threats, why had he named the same man in a separate murder case on the very same day?
The court’s conclusion was damning: the pattern pointed less to a man silenced by fear and more to one who had been pressured by the CBI itself — an agency, the bench noted, that appeared to have been under institutional pressure to close the investigation.
The Satsang That Was Never There
Beyond credibility, the factual foundation of Khatta Singh’s account was demonstrably unverified — and on the available evidence, wrong.
His narrative of the alleged conspiracy was anchored to a Satsang that he said Ram Rahim attended in Jalandhar on October 23, 2002 — the evening before the murder. That journey, the return that night, Khatta Singh’s own subsequent movements — none of it was checked by the CBI. The head of the investigation admitted this under cross-examination.
What was on record was the very newspaper Chhatrapati ran. That edition reported that a Satsang had taken place that day — but at Zira, a town roughly 150 kilometres from Jalandhar. The CBI’s star witness had placed the conspiracy at the wrong location. The CBI had never thought to check.
The Officer the CBI Deemed Unnecessary
Two days after Chhatrapati was shot, a police sub-inspector recorded a dying declaration from the journalist at a Rohtak hospital. Whether Ram Rahim’s name appeared in that statement had been contested for years. The journalist’s family said it had, and that the officer suppressed it under pressure. The defence said the name was simply never mentioned.
The CBI listed Sub-Inspector Ram Chander as a witness, then withdrew him, noting only that he was “unnecessary.” The High Court found no satisfactory explanation for this. Medical records showed Chhatrapati had been conscious and oriented across extended periods — yet no further statement was ever sought from him, and no inquiry made about his fitness to give evidence.
The court stopped short of accusing anyone of a cover-up. But it held that leaving such a witness unexamined — a man whose evidence went directly to whether the accused had been named by the dying victim — created a doubt that, in law, had to go to the accused.
What Changes — and What Does Not
Ram Rahim remains in prison. His acquittal in the Chhatrapati murder case has no bearing on the 20-year sentence he is serving following his 2017 rape conviction. He is not walking free.
For Anshul Chhatrapati, who has pursued justice for his father’s killing since 2002, the March 7 judgment leaves a single question: whether to challenge the acquittal before the Supreme Court. That decision now defines what comes next in a case that has already lasted nearly a quarter century.
