Chandigarh: Popular Punjabi singer Daler Mehndi was sent to jail on Thursday evening after the Patiala district court upheld a lower court’s order of jail term for him in a 2003 case of human trafficking.
The singer was sent to Patiala Central Jail after the additional district and session judge H S Grewal dismissed the singer’s appeal against conviction and upheld the decision of the lower court that had held him guilty of cheating (section 420) and criminal conspiracy (section 120 B) of the Indian penal code (IPC) in 2018 in the 2003 case of human trafficking. The trial court had sentenced him to two years imprisonment and also imposed a fine of Rs 2,000. He was on bail and had appealed against the decision of the trial court.
However, he has an option to go to the Punjab and Haryana High Court against the district court’s decision.
The case dates back to 2003 when Daler Mehndi and his brother Shamsher Mehndi (who died in 2017) and two others were booked by Patiala police on a complaint filed by one Bakshish Singh of Balbera village who alleged that the singer had taken Rs 12 lakh to send him to Canada.
About 35 more complaints, levelling charges of fraud against them also came up subsequent to this complaint and the complainants alleged that the accused had taken money from them to help them migrate to the US illegally, but had failed to do so.
According to allegations the accused had taken their two troupes in 1998 and 1999 during which 10 people were taken to the US as group members and were left there illegally. The Patiala police had also raided the offices of Daler Mehndi at Connaught Place in Delhi and seized documents, including the case file of those who had paid allegedly paid the said money to the accused.
The complainant Bakshish Singh had alleged that he had also faced threats during the 19-year of pendency of the case to get justice and that he would approach the higher court to increase the sentence.
For the record, booked in October 2003, Daler Mehndi was arrested in December that year and taken into its remand by Punjab police. However, after the police remand, he was granted bail. However, he requested for re-investigation in 2005, the police also held that he was innocent though the court in 2006 ruled he be prosecuted. In March 2018, the lower court awarded him two-year imprisonment and Rs 2000 fine, against which he moved the district court which upheld the lower court’s decision Thursday.
The court has punished the Punjabi singer for two years against the appeal.
Notably, in 2003, Daler, his now deceased brother Shamsher Singh, and two others were booked by Patiala police, in a human trafficking case. He was convicted under sections 406, 420, 120B, 465, 468, 471 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Indian Passport Act after an FIR at the Sadar Patiala police station then.
As per reports, some complainants said that he had taken varying amounts of money in the range of around 12 lakh rupees from people in exchange for sending them to foreign countries, mostly Canada and the USA illegally.
