Chandigarh, August 30: On the afternoon of May 8, 2002, a postman delivered an envelope at rationalist leader Raja Ram Handiaya’s house at Kalayat in Kaithal district of Haryana. Within a day or two, several human rights activists in Punjab and Haryana received the same letter.
Raja Ram, a teacher and a known face of rationalist movement in Haryana, says he was shocked to read the three-page letter typed with an electronic typewriter and addressed to the Prime Minister. It was an anonymous letter written by a sadhvi, with which began the end of the dera chief’s barbarism against his disciples.Raja Ram says soon he came to know that several rationalist leaders in Haryana like Balwant Singh, who later became a witness in the case, and some in Punjab also got the same letter. Jagwanti Sangwan of the All India Democratic Women’s Association says they had also received the letter, but instead of bringing it in public domain, they first went on to check the facts, which took some time.On May 15, Rabesh Chand, a clerk posted at Secretariat of Punjab and Haryana High Court, too received the letter addressed to the Chief Justice.
The choice of recipients reveals that it was being circulated among Left and progressive-thinking individuals.Most of them remained silent or shared it in their close groups. But what happened to Raja Ram was different. “In good faith, I shared the contents with a friend, who further shared it with his colleagues in the school where several teachers were under the influence of the dera. Some teachers objected to it as the word spread,” says Raja Ram.In the meantime, Sirsa-based journalist Ram Chandra Chhatrpati, in his evening newspaper Poora Sach, had started reporting about the exploitation of women inside the dera in bits and pieces. Some other newspapers even published brief news regarding the letter without naming the dera.Raja Ram was then threatened by dera premis and was asked to come to Naam Charcha Ghar at Kalayat for a compromise on June 1.
“As soon as I reached there, I was attacked by a mob,” he alleges. A few days later, he gained consciousness at the PGIMS, Rohtak.Raja Ram later contacted Punjabi daily Desh Sewak in Chandigarh. He recalls: “I gave Shameel (the then deputy editor of the newspaper) a copy of the letter. He listened to me carefully, but said the dera was a big institution, so we can’t publish an anonymous letter.”Shameel, however, got the matter investigated by their reporters. “We had our limitations as it was an anonymous letter. I was waiting for an opportunity to publish it,” he says.Almost three months later on the evening of September 24, 2002, Shameel was finalising the pages. “I still remember when our court correspondent left a typed news items on my desk without saying anything. During a cursory look, I noticed a brief item about the High Court ordering a CBI probe against the dera chief,” says Shameel, now based in Canada.“I immediately stopped the pages and called up the reporter. I thought since we had the letter, we would publish it and score over other papers,” he says. Desh Sewak thus carried a Punjabi translation of the letter along with the news on its page one.“Interestingly, the next morning no other paper even had the news of the court order. Within an hour, I started getting calls that the paper is not available. I was told that there were instances when even a single photocopy of the newspaper was sold for Rs200,” claims Shameel.After congratulation calls, he says followed numerous threat calls. “At that time, it was simply beyond imagination to speak against Dera Sacha Sauda,” he recalls.
News Source: http://www.tribuneindia.com
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