Congress leader and former minister Navjot Singh Sidhu has started a nine-day “Maun Vrat” on the occasion of Navratri–inside Patiala Central Jail, where he is undergoing imprisonment in a 1988 road rage case.
“My husband will observe silence during the Navaratri and will meet visitors after 5th of October,” Sidhu’s wife, Dr Navjot Kaur, wrote on the cricketer-turned-politician’s Twitter handle on Monday.
Sidhu was sent to the Patiala jail on May 20, after the Supreme Court awarded him one-year rigorous imprisonment in the case where a 65-year-old man, Gurnam Singh, died after the politician dealt him a fist blow during a parking altercation.
Ever since, several Congress politicians including Punjab leader of the Opposition Partap Singh Bajwa, Anandpur Sahib MP Manish Terwai have visited him in jail. Visitors meet Sidhu every Friday, according to Sidhu’s counsel, H P S Verma.
An insider close to the Sidhu family said that he used to observe silence for a few days every Navratri. This time, however, the maun vrat will continue for all the nine days of the festival.
Sidhu has remained in the limelight for one reason or another in the four months he has spent in jail.
Soon after he landed in the jail, a medical board constituted on a Patiala court’s direction recommended rosemary and chamomile tea, juices, fruit, lactose-free milk and one roti in the seven-meal diet chart for the politician after he sought a special diet given his health complications.
The panel of doctors then observed that the 58-year-old Sidhu had a “history of pulmonary embolism in 2009 requiring hospitalisation (no record available) and history of lower-limb deep vein thrombosis in 2016 while on warfarin (poor compliance)”. The report also noted that he was asymptomatic. The panel diagnosed “pulmonary embolism and left-leg DVT (old); hyperhomocysteinemia (a condition where there is greater than 15 micromol/L of homocysteine—a type of amino acid the human body uses to make proteins in the blood); non-alcoholic steato-hepatitis; and obesity”. It also observed that the doppler of his left leg showed evidence of recanalised thrombus.
In July, less than a month after he started serving the jail term, Sidhu alleged that his canteen card had been misused after he gave it to two fellow inmates to get fruit for him. The inmates of his cell were reshuffled then.
Sidhu has a history of sulking and going into a shell and long hibernations. He has been a staunch believer in astrology and vastu. At his house in Amritsar in 2014, he organised a massive yagya where around two dozen havan kunds were set up and scores of priests chanted mantras.
In 2007, when he was BJP MP for Amritsar, Sidhu went to lead a 44-day ascetic life for “the wellbeing of the family and general peace of mind”.
