Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) leader Bikram Singh Majithia walked out of the New Nabha jail in Patiala on Tuesday, a day after the Supreme Court granted him bail in a disproportionate assets (DA) case.
He was released after spending seven months in judicial custody.
The Punjab Vigilance Bureau had arrested Majithia from his residence in Amritsar on June 25 last year in connection with the DA case, which allegedly involved the laundering of Rs 540 crore of drug money.
Supporters gathered outside the jail to welcome him and slogans were raised in favour of the SAD. As he stepped out of the jail at around 2.15 pm, Majithia twirled his moustache in his signature style, triggering loud sloganeering by his supporters.
They showered flower petals on him and honoured him with sirpaos (robes of honour). Sitting atop a car, Majithia thanked the Almighty and greeted his supporters with folded hands.
“I came out because of your prayers and blessings,” he told the media. Earlier, his wife, Ganieve Kaur Majithia, thanked God and the Supreme Court for the relief. “This is a victory of truth. The government had forgotten that there is a God above,” she said.
Tight security arrangements were put in place outside the jail. Supporters were also seen carrying boxes of sweets. Outside his Amritsar residence, supporters gathered, distributed sweets and danced to the beats of a dhol.
Majithia is the brother-in-law of SAD chief Sukhbir Singh Badal and the brother of former Union minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal. A Supreme Court bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta granted him bail on Monday while hearing his plea against a December 4 order of the Punjab and Haryana High Court that had denied him bail.
The bench noted that Majithia had earlier been granted bail in a separate case registered under the NDPS Act, 1985. It also observed that he had remained in custody in the DA case for the past seven months. “Why do you want to keep him in jail?” the bench asked the counsel representing the state.
On August 22 last year, the Vigilance Bureau filed a chargesheet running into over 40,000 pages in a Mohali court. In its FIR, the bureau claimed that initial probe revealed laundering of more than Rs 540 crore of alleged drug money through multiple channels, allegedly facilitated by Majithia.
The FIR was based on an ongoing probe by a Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Punjab Police into a 2021 drug case. In 2021, Majithia was booked under the NDPS Act following a 2018 anti-drug SIT report. He spent over five months in Patiala jail before being granted bail by the Punjab and Haryana High Court in August 2022.
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