Daler Mehndi, a singer, was sentenced to prison on Thursday after the Patiala district court upheld his two-year sentence in an alleged human trafficking case from 2003.
HS Grewal, an additional district and session judge, dismissed the singer’s appeal against conviction and upheld a lower court’s decision in 2018 that found Mehndi guilty under sections 420 (cheating) and 120B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code. The trial court sentenced him to two years in prison and fined him $2,000.
His bail application was also denied by the Patiala court on Thursday.
Mehndi was released on bail after appealing the trial court’s verdict to the district court in March 2018. However, after the district judge denied his appeal, he was taken into custody by the Patiala police.
Advocate Gurpreet Singh Bhasin, appearing for complainant, said the court held Mehndi guilty for cheating and dismissed his appeal. “Later, Mehndi moved application for releasing on probation, which we opposed and the court dismissed it. He has been sent to the jail,” Bhasin added.
Mehndi is likely to be sent to Patiala jail, which also houses cricketer-turned-politician Navjot Singh Sidhu.
“We will appeal to the Supreme Court,” Mehndi’s lawyer, Brijinder Singh Sodhi, said.
Daler Mehndi and his musician brother Shamsher Singh Mehndi were accused of taking money to illegally send people abroad by posing as members of the former’s troupe in the first information report (FIR) filed by the Patiala police 19 years ago. Shamsher Singh, a member of Daler Mehndi’s troupe, passed away in 2017.
The FIR was filed in response to a complaint filed by Bakshish Singh of Punjab’s Balbera village, who claimed Mehndi stole 12 lakh from him in order to send him to Canada.
Following that, 35 more complaints were filed against the Mehndi brothers, alleging similar fraud. During the investigation, the Patiala police also arrested Dhian Singh and Bulbul Mehta, an employee of the Mehndi firm. Dhian Singh died in court in 2017, and Mehta was acquitted in 2018 due to a lack of evidence.
According to the FIR, the Mehndi brothers took “passage money” from complainants in order to assist them in illegally entering the United States and Canada, but they did not do so. It also claimed that in 1998 and 1999, they took two troupes to the United States, where ten people were taken as group members and illegally “dropped off.”
During the investigation, Patiala police raided the offices of popular singer Daler Mehndi in Delhi’s Connaught Place and seized documents, including the case file of those accused of paying the “passage money” to the Mehndi brothers.
However, in 2006, the Patiala police filed two discharge petitions, claiming that Daler Mehndi was innocent. However, the trial court upheld the singer’s prosecution because there was “enough evidence against him on the judicial file and scope for further investigation.”
Soon after the district court’s decision on Thursday, complainant Bakshish Singh stated that he had received several threats over the previous 19 years while the case was pending.
“It was a long battle, in which I received support of my family and friends. Mehndi was all powerful, when he duped me and others. Even the police did not act on our complainant,” he said. “Later, even the police tried to discharge Mehndi from the case, which I opposed in the court. The court agreed to start the trail and later Mehndi was convicted in 2018.”
“I will approach higher court to increase the sentence,” he added.
