High Court calls for case diaries of sacrilege probe

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, December 14

The Punjab and Haryana High Court on Friday verbally asked the CBI to produce case diaries of probe into incidents of sacrilege in Punjab. The diaries relate to the three cases handed over to the CBI by the previous SAD-BJP government.

The directions by Justice Rajan Gupta came during the hearing of petitions against proceedings in pursuance to recommendations made by the Justice Ranjit Singh (retd) Commission set up to probe the sacrilege cases in the state.

As the matter came up for resumed hearing before Justice Gupta’s Bench, CBI counsel Sumeet Goel submitted that the Punjab Government had handed over the probe in three sacrilege cases to the CBI in November 2015.

The cases were still under investigation. Goel also told the Bench that two more cases subsequently handed over by the state had not been probed as these were denotified by the state government.

Responding to a query by the Bench on the circumstances that forced the government to hand over the matter to the CBI, the state counsel said there was no progress in the investigation of the cases in the past three years. The Bench was also told there was no progress in the cases investigated by the CBI and the House resolved to withdraw the investigation from the agency. The state government, on September 6, notified the withdrawal of CBI investigations. The matter will now come up for hearing on December 17.

One of the petitions before Justice Gupta’s Bench is regarding four cases in which the CBI probe was ordered before the decision was reversed. The matter was brought to the High Court’s notice on a petition filed against the Punjab Legislative Assembly and other respondents by police officer Shamsher Singh through counsel Sant Pal Singh Sidhu.

Challenging the impugned resolution dated August 28 passed by the Legislative Assembly, the counsel for the petitioner had submitted that it was unsustainable as reasons were not assigned therein for reviewing the decision taken earlier to hand over the investigation to the CBI.