Punjab Jail Minister HS Bains has threatened to send legal notices to TV channels that ran news about Navjot Singh Sidhu, currently serving a jail sentence in an old road rage case.
Several media reports had claimed that Sidhu was engaged in a fight with fellow inmates over the use of a canteen card.
Bains denied the claims as he told ANI, “No brawl took place. It was a 4-day-old trivial issue. Every inmate is issued a card.Sidhu says an inmate had drawn ration on his card for himself. Legal notice will be sent to channels that run such news.”
A cricketer-turned-politician, Sidhu was sentenced to one-year jail term by the Supreme Court in an old road rage case.
Charges against Sidhu are that he had hit a 65-year-old man, Gurnam Singh, in Patiala in a road rage incident on 27 December, 1988. One of the blows landed on the left head on the parietal region of the deceased which caused a subdural hemorrhage.
The trial court had acquitted Sidhu, but the Punjab and Haryana High Court quashed the lower court’s order and convicted him under Section 304 Part II, IPC, for culpable homicide not amounting to murder. The High Court had later sentenced him to three years in jail.
Sidhu had appealed the High Court’s verdict in the Supreme Court, which granted him bail while also suspending his jail sentence in 2007. This enabled him to contest Lok Sabha elections from Amritsar. In 2018, the top court exonerated him.