- Punjabi singer Daler Singh Mehndi was on Thursday arrested and sent to jail after a Patiala court dismissed his appeal against a two-year jail term awarded to him in an immigration fraud case registered in 2003.
Originally sentenced in 2018, he was on bail so far.
In the complaints almost two decades ago, Daler Mehndi and his brother Shamsher Singh were accused of collecting “passage money” to take people abroad, mainly to the US and Canada, via the “troupe” route. While they did take some people, there were others who said they took money but did not keep their promise.
The court of judicial magistrate Nidhi Saini had sentenced Mehndi to two years in jail in March 2018, after holding him guilty under sections 420 (cheating) and 120-B (conspiracy).
Mehndi, who had secured bail, had challenged the order in the court of Additional Sessions Judge H S Grewal.
Advocate Gurpreet Singh Hundal, counsel for the complainant, said: “The sessions court court upheld his sentence. Mehndi filed another application in the court appealing that he should be released on probation of good conduct but that too has been dismissed by the court”.
The case in September 2003 at Patiala was filed by one such man, named Bakshish Singh. He said the brothers took two troupes to the US in 1998 and 1999, including 10 people for illegal migration. “They took 13 lakh from me. Neither did they send me abroad, nor did they return my money.”
The brothers were arrested a month after the FIR, and got bail within days. Both were charged under Indian Penal Code’s sections for human trafficking and conspiracy, and under the Indian Passport Act. After that FIR, 35 other complaints came up too, as per reports.
Shamsher Mehndi died in 2017, when the trial was still on.
In 2018, Daler Mehndi got a two-year jail term from a judicial magistrate’s court, but was released on bail again. He later filed an appeal.
