Human Trafficking Case: High Court grants relief to Punjabi singer Daler Mehndi in human trafficking case

On 20 July, Mehndi approached the Punjab and Haryana High Court in March 2018 in a 2003 human trafficking case. Patiala District and after the session, the district court upheld the two-year prison sentence. The Additional District Sessions Judge dismissed Mehndi’s appeal on 14 July and thus she was taken into custody and lodged in the Patiala Central Jail. In March 2018, a court in Patiala sentenced Mehndi to two years in prison in a human trafficking case. Mehndi was then released on bail. He was convicted on charges of fraud and conspiracy. In 2018, the trial court had convicted and sentenced him to two years’ imprisonment and imposed a fine of Rs 2,000.

The Patiala police had registered a case on the complaint of one Bakshish Singh, Daler Mehndi and his brother Shamsher Mehndi, who died in 2017, who alleged that the singer had taken money to take him to Canada. Along with this, 35 more complaints against the brothers for cheating also came to the fore later. The complainants had alleged that the brothers had taken ‘passage money’ from them to help them immigrate to the United States illegally, but failed to do so. It was also alleged that the Mehndi brothers took two circles in 1998 and 1999, during which 10 people were taken to the US as members of the group and illegally “abandoned”.